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This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place.
Title: In Clarissa's Day, an electronic edition
Author: Keddie, Henrietta, 1827-1914
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Place published: London
Date:  1903
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 Advert included in the front of Tyler's  In Clarissa's Day.In Clarissa's Day In Clarissa's Day BY SARAH TYLER
AUTHOR OF 'CITOYENNE JACQUELINE,' 'SAINT MUNGO'S CITY,' 'THREE MEN OF MARK,' ETC.LONDON:CHATTO "& WINDUS1903 Table of Contents for Tyler's  In Clarissa's Day. Table of Contents for Tyler's In Clarissa's Day.IN CLARISSA'S DAY
CHAPTER ICLARY AND BELLIN a gray old college in Oxford, two girls sat perched on a window-seat in the deep embrasure of a mullioned window lighting up the dark oak of a long corridor.The girls were somewhat odd figures in an ancient building devoted to the education of men—from the days when the college had been one of a group of monastic houses set down, by the benefaction of a pious founder, on a river in the sylvan retirement of a forest stretching far and wide.Neither did the girls belong entirely to the place, though Clary Hill had been imported from a household struggling with genteel poverty in London, and adopted at an early period of 

her life by Madam Masham, the wife of Dr. Masham, the head of the college, in order that the child might grow up to serve as a companion for a generous, but flighty and childless, lady.Bell Annesley, the other girl, was simply a visitor, permitted from childhood to come in and play with Clary, and share her desultory lessons from this or that tutor who happened to be in favour with Madam for the time, in order to relieve the loneliness of both girls. For Bell, too, was lonely in a grown-up household. She was the only child of an elderly couple not too well supplied with this world's goods. Her father had been one of Marlborough's Captains in the great campaigns in the Low Countries. Captain Annesley was now an invalid, requiring all his wife's time and attention. The small house in Ship Street had to be kept quiet for his solace, so that it was a boon to have Bell told off to learn her lessons and to play in safety and cheerfulness in company with little Clary Hill at Dr. Masham's college.But the girls were ceasing to be little; they were both of them turned thirteen, inclined to be rebellious at their children's mob-caps and plain frocks reaching to their heels. Yet Clary and Bell were both too young to feel any dis-crepancy or awkwardness in their position on sufferance in a college for men, though the girls were somewhat in the way often, as on the present occasion, when they had taken refuge in the window-seat in the corridor. Madam was in her parlour playing cards with other Doctors' ladies, her special friends and associates; Dr. Masham had engaged in a game of bowls with the gentlemen of the college while the May daylight lasted till supper-time; so that the bowling-green, with its sheltering privet hedges and its turf close shaven till it resembled velvet, where the girls could stroll up and down, telling each other their tales, and the clematis bower beyond, which they could convert into a palace, or a castle or a dungeon, according to their will and fancy, were alike shut out from them. Even the housekeeper's room was not available, for the presiding genius of the place was looking over the shelves of linen in her linen-closet, and did not care to have a juvenile audience to her counting and calculating, her spreading out on her table for closer contemplation the articles which needed mending, and her casting aside the worn table-cloths and the torn sheets which were beyond repair.The girls were reduced to the corridor window-seat, if they would not consent to be banished to Clary's small, dark bed-closet, where there was scarcely space for the bureautopped small chest of drawers which held all her belongings.Eager as they were to be regarded as—at least—growing-up young ladies, Clary and Bell were not above consoling themselves each with her tow-headed doll, or, as she preferred to call it, her 'china baby,' clutched in her bare, sunbrowned arms. There was a curious mixture of precocity and laggardness in the young people of the generation. Unless in great houses, they were not confined to nurseries and schoolrooms. Nobody would have dreamt of reserving a public room in the limited space of the Doctor's lodgings in a college for a waif like Clary. Accordingly, the sons and daughters of professional men and small gentry were in the habit of roaming at their own sweet will from garret to cellar of their homes, mixing freely with all the dependents of the establishment, seeing and hearing all that was going on, and acquiring in their progress an amount of knowledge of the world with which their more fettered and restricted brothers and sisters of later days remain utterly unacquainted.On the other hand, education, which had flourished both among men and women in the upper classes in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, took regrettable steps backwards—stopped as it had been in its triumphant career by the adversity of the Civil War—till, in the course of a century and a half, any pretension to learning had nearly entirely disappeared where women were concerned, under the sovereignty of the Steuart Queens, Mary and Anne, and of the first German Georges. In place of reading the New Testament in the original Greek, studying the philosophy of Plato and treading the Mantuan plains with Virgil, if a girl could stammer through one of the more difficult chapters of the Old Testament, in which strange Eastern names of people and places bristled; if she could scrawl a letter in which the grammar was mysterious and nine-tenths of the words were fearfully and wonderfully misspelled; if she could add up a simple account without more than one or two conspicuous blunders; if she could collect, copy, and paste into a book some scores of home recipes for family dishes and dishes on high days and holidays, with prescriptions for burns and bruises, coughs and quinsies, for distemper among the dogs and glanders among the horses, for a bewitched cow which would not yield her milk, etc., etc.; if she possessed a song-book as well as a prayer-book, the owner of these accomplishments and bounties was considered quite creditably equipped for the business of life.In the consequent dearth of intellectual resources, not only did bip girls cleave to their china babies: there are tales told alike of young wives who convened parties of their former companions, and entertained them in privacy, so far as men were in question, by handing from one to the other, for admiring inspection, the last fondly-cherished, elaborately-dressed doll; and of elderly spinsters who indulged, with closed doors, in the same entertainment.Clary and Bell, sitting each at her end of the window-seat, with her shoulders resting against the heavy panels of the shutters and her feet stretched out till they met the other feet in the middle of the seat, were not unlike the dolls in their respective arms. Both girls had flaxen hair under their caps, and rosy cheeks. Clary's eyes were the nearer violet colour in their deep blue, and her mouth was the sweeter, while Bell's square chin was the firmer, and her fine little nose had the delicate tip-tilt which signifies sauciness, and sometimes a tolerably overweening sense of self-importance.The pair had a great deal to say to each other, in spite, or because, of the fact that they met every day, and, except for the night which saw Bell at home, were seldom many hours apart. Their prattle dealt at first with topics they had better have let alone, but such scarcely seemly discussions mattered less because of the innocence of the speakers. Bell gleefully challenged Clary to guess the number of glasses of wine her father had drunk for the purpose of doing honour to the visit of an old comrade who had come to see him. Clary, in her turn, sought to call forth Bell's wonder by recounting the full tale of Madam's winnings at the card-table the previous evening. She had been vastly pleased, but she could not let well alone; she must play again, and with higher stakes, till she lost more than she had gained. Then she had been nigh to swooning at the card-table—not for the money she had spent; Madam was no niggard—but for her mortification, since she had been boasting high and low of her success.Gradually the chatter took a more harmless turn; it expended itself on visions of the future, on what kind of parlours and card-tables the aspirants would have when they were grown up. From the parlours the maids diverged, by the most natural divergence in the world, to the marriages which would procure for them the parlours. Weddings could not exist without wedding clothes, and here the material for expatiation was so abundant and enticing that it threatened to usurp place and time, and to leave no opening for other subjects of conversation. Bell described her wedding dress, from her clocked stockings to her pearl necklace, and Clary kept up the ball by dwelling on the silver lace of the petticoat, the sweep of the brocaded train and the height of the plume of feathers in the hat, the items which were to compose her travelling dress.If a wedding implied wedding clothes, the necessity for a bridegroom to figure in the performance was still more imperative; but the ideas of the future brides were far more vague in relation to their bridegrooms than to the dress which the newly-made wives were to wear when they surrendered their independence. Clary only suggested that her husband should have a cauliflower wig like Dr. Masham's, and Bell did no more than stipulate that hers should be six feet three—a whole inch taller than her father before he had grown bent with the sickness which had come on the back of his wounds.The wagging tongues were guilty of a little childish boasting, in view of the present and the time to come. Clary made reference to her aunt Abigail, who had been no richer or better endowed than her niece. She had even begun life on a lower plane, for, though her father had been a Turkey merchant, his ships had been wrecked, the cargoes had gone to the bottom of the sea, and the family had been in such dreadfully reduced circumstances that, instead of having to go to Oxford to be reared by a Doctor's lady, to read to her and walk with her and carry her fan and her smelling-bottle, Clary's poor aunt Abigail had been forced to descend to the rank of a waiting-maid pure and simple. But see what high fortunes had been in store for her! She had been transported by the influence of a powerful kinswoman to dwell in a palace, to take that kinswoman's place as the friend and confidante of a Queen—of good Queen Anne herself—only lately laid to rest; while Abigail Hill was married to a lord—my Lord Masham—and was able to live as my lady should live—on her savings. What might she not do yet for her niece?Bell, not to be outdone, talked big of an uncle of hers—a brother of her father's—who had gone early in life to the Indies and made a great fortune. He had sent home a couple of Hindoo idols to stand on the buffet and keep his kindred in mind of him. He was not over-free in parting with his money, seeing that his only brother was invalided and on half-pay; but, as he had no other relations, some day all his money would come to the Annesleys, in Ship Street, when, in place of being poor, they would be about as rich as Her Grace.The word brought the conversation to a sudden stop, for it recalled to the girls' minds an adventure near at hand, to which, in their rambling tête-à-tête, they had not referred, because, in truth, there was as much of dread as of delight in the prospect. The girls were invited to spend a day in the country at a palace—no less than the palace of Blenheim, which a grateful country had presented to the greatest General of his age, as an acknowledgment of the victories which had made England glorious. Clary was related by blood to the Duchess. It was not a relationship on which Clary could depend for favours—on the contrary, the mere thought of it made her quake; for, as everybody knew, her aunt Abigail, Lady Masham, had supplanted her cousin, the great Duchess, in the good graces of their mistress, Queen Anne, and thence had followed the Duke's degradation from his high office as head of the army, his impeachment for abuse of his power, and the banishment of him and his Duchess from Court. Bitter had been the strife and the recrimination between the two ladies, especially on the part of the Duchess, when she reminded Abigail Masham that she—a poor relation, and hanger-on to the Jennings—had owed everything to her illustrious kinswoman, who had got her the post of Bedchamber Woman to the Queen, and been rewarded by the basest treachery. But years had passed since then. Good, soft, mulish Anne, over whom the combatants had struggled, was at rest in her grave; the great Duke, prematurely infirm in mind and body, was no longer fit to plot or to fight, and was barely able to take his seat in Parliament, in defiance of the charges brought against him. The volcano had cooled. Her Grace, Sarah of Marlborough, was not distinguished by a forgiving disposition, and undeniably she had received huge provocation, so that even in the eyes of a much more placable person Abigail Hill's offence might well have been regarded as unforgivable. But what of these sheep, the remaining Hills—the Turkey merchant's descendants—in the second and third generation?In the height of the altercation they had snivelled and declined, or pretended to decline, to back their aspiring sister, from whose grasping clutch not many benefits were likely to revert to her family. They preferred to pin their faith to the beautiful vixen who had thwarted a Queen, and ruled the mighty Captain who had defeated King Lewis and his armies. She did not share her husband's avarice; at least, she was capable of fits of splendid munificence—witness her costly purchases of pictures by her favourite painter, Rubens. She relaxed a little to the contrite, beseeching attitude of those other Hills who had not wronged her, who had suffered themselves by forfeiting her patronage on account of the grievous misdoings of the culprit in the family. Duchess Sarah was not so magnanimous as to refrain from bearing the whole race of Hill a grudge, but she condescended to recognise that they were blood relations of her own, and that they were comparatively innocent, so that they might receive her notice—administered with a pinch of salt. After all, the miserable Abigail had not robbed her cousin of everything—not of the country's princely gift to its hero, the palace which the Duchess loved to embellish, not of the immense wealth which her Duke had accumulated by fair means or foul, not of her coronet bearing the coveted strawberry leaves in wrought gold.Possibly an additional inducement might be supplied to the Duchess to pay some fitful, careless attention to young Clary Hill by the fact that in doing so she propitiated Madam Masham, whose learned Doctor was remotely connected with that Lord Masham who had sunk with his wife into absolute obscurity from the date of the death of Queen Anne. It might seem that the Duchess did not need to propitiate any woman, great or small, but there are wheels within wheels. If Her Grace was a ruling power in the county, Madam was somebody in the most loyal city of Oxford, where the Heads of Houses and Fellows of colleges had already arrogated to themselves an exclusive supremacy which the King himself could hardly infringe. The dignities of Blenheim were dull in the depth of winter, when the park was obscured by mist, and the trees were white with hoar-frost, and the roads were too bad for a painted coach to be risked upon them. Accordingly, Her Grace had elected to have a town-house in Oxford, and had stormed over Sir John Vanbrugh till he had furnished plans for its long French windows, spacious hall and fine reception-room, as well as for the double courts and the range of state-rooms at Blenheim. But a town-house in Oxford was not likely to be more lively than Blenheim unless Her Grace had got free and full admittance into the cream of University society. That not even her rank and wealth could command unless she were franked and forwarded by one of the habituées of the place, such as Madam Masham, whose set was the first of the University sets. Thus only could the Duchess surmount the difficulty of not being to the manner born, and of her and her Duke having figured publicly as stanch Whigs (however he might have tampered privately with the Court of St. Germains), while Oxford was then as ever high Tory, praying in certain college chapels, at chosen secret moments, for King James, while King George sat somewhat totteringly on the throne of the kingdom.The Duchess wanted the countenance of Madam Masham—not only that she might be in the way to hear all the gossip regarding the odious Lord and Lady Masham, and retail for the hundredth time with resounding abuse the baseness of her cousin Abigail, but that there might be open doors for her in any college she fancied.Accordingly, in making a call for Madam and catching a glimpse somewhere in the background of the ubiquitous school and play mates, Clary and Bell, the great lady dropped the invitation, or, rather, the command.'Cousin Hill's daughter had better come out and spend a day with me; and she may bring that other young person, that chit of a companion, with whom she is always roving behind backs, whispering and sniggering. It is time they learnt manners. I will send in for them when I am disengaged.''She cannot take a bite of us,' Bell plucked up spirit to say when the couple on the window-seat were discussing with bated breath the formidable undertaking, 'in especial when we are going at her bidding.''Ah! do you know what I heard her say in the same breath?' announced Clary, opening her blue eyes wide and hanging her head disconsolately.' "But I ought to warn you. Take care, Madam, that you do not warm a viper to life in your bosom." I know she meant Aunt Abigail and me.''Never mind, Clary,' Bell reassured her more timid companion; 'if she is so ill-bred and horrid as to fall out with us in her own house, where she has asked us to come and where we will be her guests, we'll have something to say to her in return. Why, though she dwells in a palace and is a real live Duchess to-day, she was not so much better than us when she was just Mistress Sarah Jennings, a young country madam, before she went to Court or set eyes on the dead Queen. I have heard tell, besides, that her own sister, as is another Duchess across the water—only she has been on the wrong side in politics this side of the Channel—has been in hiding in London and in such straits that she put on a white gown and a white mask, which got her the name of the White Milliner, for she sat with the other milliners and sold her work in one of the street booths. What would my Lady Marlborough say to that?''Hush! and hark!' cried Clary, holding up a finger. 'The balls have ceased to roll—I like the sound, don't you, Bell? The gentlemen will be coming in to join the ladies, and the ladies will be putting down their cards to greet the gentlemen before tying on their calashes and sallying out to their chairs. We will be in everybody's way. Come, let us run up to Mistress Turner's room and see if she has any groats for our supper.''I don't want to run out of people's way,' said Bell, discontentedly thrusting up one plump white shoulder above the bodice of her frock; 'and I don't care for groats—I am always getting them for supper. When I am grown up I will make all the other grown-ups stand about, and I will have cherry tart, or sops and cowslip wine for supper.''I dare say you will,' acquiesced Clary submissively. 'But come along now; I don't care to meet all the ladies and gentlemen, and be told by the ladies I'm bobbing my curtsey like any milkmaid, and be chucked under my chin or patted on the head by the gentlemen. And I'm right-down hungry—hungry enough for groats.'CHAPTER IIBLENHEIM AND DUCHESS SARAH'AT least, we'll ride in the Blenheim coach.''And we'll see the darling little spaniels.'The rueful guests sought to console themselves. But whether or not they were to see the famous little dogs, the girls certainly did not ride in the imposing family coach with the great glass sides and the panels painted in a gorgeously elaborate version of the Duke's arms, behind the coal-black, long-tailed horses brought by the Duke from Flanders. The magnificent cumbrous conveyance was fit for the Duchess, and, as she quickly came to the conclusion, was altogether unfit for the bankrupt Turkey merchant's grand-daughter—the niece of the traitress Abigail Hill—and her chit of a gossip, the half-pay Captain's daughter. Less might serve them; therefore no better carriage was sent for their service than the ordinary Woodstock waggon which a waggoner drove in twice a week from Woodstock to Oxford, and back again, mainly for the convenience of the inhabitants of the little town, in whose manor, as in that of Wootton, the Duke, by order of the Crown, was infeft in order to pay a small part of the debt which his country owed to him. Woodstock had become a dependency of Blenheim. The Duchess had only to appoint the waggoner to call at Dr. Masham's college, and offer to the young madams, by Her Grace's order, a 'cast' in his waggon, to be obeyed to the letter.Clary mounted without protest into the gloom of the big, gray, cavernous interior; but Bell, even while she was climbing up, asserted roundly that when they were started, and had got into the country, she would make the waggoner stop, while she would jump out and run back.'You will do nothing of the kind,' insisted Clary. 'It would be silly, and it would be leaving me to face her alone.'Clary not only spoke angrily, she spoke with keen reproach in her tones; and Bell, who, though she was not guiltless of conceit and arrogance, was loyal to the core, gave in.The girls had no fellow-travellers, the waggoner, by Her Grace's imperious mandate, having reversed his usual times of coming and going. In place of plodding into Oxford in the course of the morning, and returning to Woodstock at night, he had been forced to start by sunrise, and was coming back to Woodstock at the hour when he was wont to be leaving it. And in this reversal of his usual course of procedure, together with the distinction bestowed on him of conveying company—were it only of two young maids—to the palace, the waggon was free from its common consignment of elderly women in duffel cloaks—market baskets over their arms—old men in smock-frocks, and children in rude editions of men and women's dress, like uncouth dwarf goblins or clumsy fairies.Clary and Bell could have danced from end to end of the empty, clean-swept waggon had they been so inclined. As it was, they had more respect for their best clothes—their silk petticoats, their muslin frocks (the skirts opening in front and falling back in miniature trains), their muslin caps with broad frills shading the blooming faces, and broad ribbons—cowslip yellow and grass green—binding the curly heads, finishing in big bows and hanging down in streamers as far as the clocked stockings and buckled shoes. For, as in the case of their humbler brothers and sisters, the dress of young boys and girls, and even of smaller children, nearly two centuries ago, was merely a reduced version of the style of costume worn by grown-up people; hence the air of old-fashioned quaintness which attends on all the juvenile figures of the period.The absence of windows to admit light into the waggon was compensated so far by the great oval end, through which, as through a framed vista, the passengers looked past the waggoner in his frock and his rough-coated horse to the green country beyond. It was a pleasant country, and a pleasant season—the sweet freshness of the early summer, when the orchard trees still retained the last of their pink-and-white blossoms. The two girls were used to be cooped up in the town, with only the green bowling-greens of the college gardens, and the tree-bordered walks through the meadows, by the twin rivers, to tell that spring had come and gone and summer was at and. They looked eagerly out, and gave little cries of delight when they spied branches of white-budded hawthorn in the hedge, and a yellow iris nodding by a wayside pool.The red and gray roofs of Woodstock came in view at last. Its ancient palace, getting ruinous when it served as a prison for Princess Elizabeth, was clean gone, but a faint flavour of royalty as well as of ducality still lingered about the homely little town, where curfew was still rung. It summoned many a cottage mother, stitching gloves in the failing light by her cottage door, in accordance with the trade of her town, in which she was able to join, to store away the limp kid fingers which helped to earn the children's bread, in order to put the sturdy urchins and the handy girls to bed. This was a process which, though their eyes were winking and blinking with sleep, the aspiring owners of the eyes would fain defer to a later hour, so struggled out of their keeper's grasp, and ran chasing each other into dusky holes and corners. But there was no going to bed when Clary and Bell were riding into the town before noon, and the nightly rebels stood in demure rows, bobbing curtseys to something fine of which they had a glimpse in Joe the waggoner's waggon, or else hiding in fits of bashfulness behind their mother's back, with their faces buried in her linsey-woolsey petticoat.Clary's tutor had a pretty taste for history, and had instilled a picturesque fragment or two into the more attentive of his two girl pupils, so that she had a wistful thought to spare for Fair Rosamond's Bower, and for the casement pane on which Elizabeth Tudor had written 'Elizabeth P.' with a diamond. But Clary had been at Blenheim before, and knew that every bough of the bower, every stone of the palace, had long ago vanished. It was another palace, widespread and low-walled, with a foreign air and a stateliness all its own in its quadrangles and terraces.The waggon stopped in the main street of Woodstock at a respectful distance from the great gateway in wrought-iron which was standing open to visitors.When the girls entered and advanced into the park, with a little of the timidity befitting an intrusion into an ogre's castle, they looked fragile, belated figures among the spreading trees. But they were not daring intruders, they were invited guests, and Clary's composure was further restored by the duty incumbent upon her of acting as cicerone to Bell, to whom the scene was altogether new. Therefore she pulled herself together to point out everything.'Yonder Is the palace, Bell. Mr. Soames says it resembles, with warrant, a succession of pavilions, since a pavilion is like a tent and has something to do with war, and Blenheim, with its battle name, is a prize of war. The young trees over there have been planted in squares and lines as the Duke's soldiers stood in one of his famous battles—Blenheim, or Ramillies, or one of the others, I forget which. Farther down is the lake and the bridge over the river—I don't know if they were in any of his battles.''Oh, never mind the battles!' said Bell impatiently. 'Hurry up, lest we should not be in time for my Lord Duke and my Lady Duchess's dinner.''In time for my Lord Duke and my Lady Duchess's dinner!' echoed Clary, so aghast that she stood still in the middle of the road. 'What are you thinking of, Bell Annesley? What has got into your head? When my Lord Duke was well and with the army he dined alone like a Prince, his gentlemen and chief officers standing behind him. Now that he is old and ailing, do you think that he would have two chits like us staring at him while he supped his invalid's broth? And the Duchess, who was wont to dine with a Queen—do you suppose she would preside over a family meal like a notary's wife, or even like the lady of the Head of a House such as my Madam is? We may think ourselves favoured if we get our dinner in the housekeeper's room—that is, if Mrs. Bellamy will receive us. The housekeeper at Blenheim is no common person, I would tell you. She is not like our Mrs. Turner at the college, who was just cook till Madam promoted her to be housekeeper. Mrs. Bellamy is an Archdeacon's daughter, I have heard Madam say. She dines with Madam when she comes in to Oxford, and the Doctor takes her in on his arm to the dining-room and seats her on his right hand. Madam never saw her without mittens on her fingers, rings up to the second joint, and a solitaire which has not its equal in Oxford.'Bell did not propose to run away again; indeed, she was too far out of town to scamper back to her father's house. But she looked glum and discomfited till the girls reached the house, and a lackey crossing the great hall proceeded to usher them to the Duchess's private parlour.'Stay, stay!' cried Clary as they were about to pass two stands of colours flanking the entrance to the corridor. In her character of cicerone she could not leave them without notice. 'Look, Bell, look! these are the very flags His Grace won from the enemy; see how this one is half torn from its staff, and that one is rent till it is nigh to tatters, and yon has a terrible stain. Only think how many brave men have struggled around them, and died beneath their folds.''What! for these soiled rags?' protested Bell in half-affected disdain as she pranced past in her high-heeled shoes.A richly-inlaid cabinet in the corridor next recalled Clary to her self-imposed task. She caught Bell's sleeve and whispered:'I will tell you about that cabinet some other time.'For they were now approaching the Duchess's room, where she looked up from the escritoire at which she sat writing, to receive her visitors' curtseys, and to bid them sit down and wait till she was done. Her Grace had not paid the young people the compliment of dressing for them. Who dresses for poor relations and chits of girls unless for the purpose of dazzling and daunting them? And Duchess Sarah did not need the aid of dress to keep her inferiors and dependents in their proper place. Indeed, in the retirement of Blenheim, unless she expected special company, the Duchess showed an inclination to emulate the Duke's penurious habits by not troubling to change her dress. But in her case the negligence was the result of arrogant indifference, and not of thriftiness. She wore what in those days was called, to accentuate the simplicity of the gown, a 'night-gown,' a cambric wrapper falling in long, straight, tight folds, not overclean, and on her head a composite structure, between cap and turban, of purple gauze. She was literally unindebted to dress, and she was considerably past her prime; but she remained a fine woman without question, with a commanding presence, a distinguished air, bright, fiery hazel eyes, a profusion still of warm chestnut hair, and a skin as creamy white, a complexion as brilliant and yet delicate, as in her first youth. The whole superb contour of her face and pose of her figure dress might enhance, but could never mar. They were those of a woman born to prevail and to rule.Looking at her from under Clary's modestly drooped eyelids, and contrasting her mentally with Clary's aunt Abigail, meagre in person and full, it was said, of mean, middle-class mediocrity in mind, it was a marvel to the youthful judge why and how the star of the first had paled and waned before that of the second. Clary could very well imagine for herself that last decisive interview between the Duchess of Marlborough and her late royal mistress, when Anne, the mild, dull victim of many an outrage, like the fabled worm, at last turned upon her assailant and declined to be further bullied and browbeaten, even by the companion of her girlhood, the friend of her womanhood, when the two had been happy young wives and mothers in closest communion. Clary had heard the scene discussed many a time in Madam Masham's coterie, and the very words quoted of the famous sentence, doggedly repeated, with which Queen Anne, by an exercise of wit and authority to which she was little prone, managed to ensnare and dismiss from her audience-chamber her tormentor, in accordance with the tormentor's own pledge. The Duchess had written to the Queen asking only for an interview in which she might clear herself from the accusations brought against her. If she were 

only granted a hearing, her own burning speech would suffice; she would require no speech in answer. So poor, furious Sarah pled, and raged and stormed for the first time without effect. It was as if she were beating against a dead wall, where the Queen sat, an awful blank on her round, comely face, and at each brief pause let fall from stony lips the freezing reminder:'You have required no answer, and you shall have none.'While Her Grace wrote on, unmoved by the scrutiny of the two simple critics she had brought out to gaze and speculate upon her, and Clary pondered over the tales she had heard, Bell's eyes kept roaming round the scantly furnished room, returning fascinated to two points of interest and mystery. The one was the great picture of 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' where the lions were so terrific that the sense of the faith and courage of the heaven-protected prey of the wild beasts was acutely intensified. The other was a strange portrait of a girl in evening dress. The slender figure, the round white neck and arms, the very jewels on the bosom were carefully preserved; but the features of the face were undistinguishable, because it had been smeared over with black paint till it resembled ebony.At length the Duchess signed her name, folded, sealed, and addressed the letter she had written with bold, emphatic action."There!' she cried, with the reckless propensity to take the whole world into her confidence which was characteristic of her, 'that business is settled. The rogue Vanbrugh will send me no farther accounts; if he do, I vow I will not pay him another shilling. Now, misses '—she changed the conversation abruptly—'what have you to say for yourselves?'The inquiry was not overgracious, and it was a trifle embarrassing. If the speaker had been 'Mrs. Freeman' to her gentle Princess's 'Mrs. Morley' in the far-back days of their youth, she was Madame Hauton to her poor cousins and their friends. Though it was Bell Annesley who was bold and self-asserting, it was Clary who, in her quiet, retiring way, found the fit words with which to answer.'It is for your Grace to speak; it is for us to answer,' she said simply, and the formidable Duchess could make no objection to the innocently respectful observation. She inquired after the health of Madam Masham; then, with a toss of her head, put, without disguise, certain searching, pungent questions in reference to other Mashams—Clary's aunt, Abigail, Lady Masham, and her husband. With what state did they live? What company did they keep? And the examiner manifested open satisfaction and grim glee when she learnt that the offenders maintained no farther state than could be supported by a couple of maids and a couple of men, and that they rarely entered the gay world, since their diminished fortunes did not admit of their mixing freely in the society of the great.'Serve them right! serve her right, the demure minx, the serpent which concealed its fangs till it could bite to the bone the hand that fostered it! Where is her Harley? where her Bolingbroke, that egged her on to her wicked betrayal of her benefactress? King George is seated safe on the throne, and the Steuart crew are still eating frogs under the wing of King Lewis at St. Germains. Cheatery has choked her and her patrons. They fare rather worse than those whom they schemed to ruin.'The investigations which the Duchess prosecuted with regard to other members of the 

family of the Turkey merchant, to whom her own family had been allied, clearly furnished less interest for her. When she had brought them to a summary end, she dismissed the girls as from a presence chamber, and with far less ceremony than a Queen would have displayed.'There, that is enough! off with you! I have other things to do than to spend my time in raw converse with milk-and-water misses. Get you to Bellamy's room.' She touched a table bell to summon a servant. 'She will stuff you with a proper dinner. Then you may go and pick daisies in the park—a suitable employment for you. Someone will show you the kennels, but don't tease the dogs, at your peril. Little June has just had her puppies taken from her, and though she is small, that does not hinder her teeth from being sharp. You will make your way to the Marlborough Arms at this end of the town. I have cited the waggon to meet you in the inn yard at three precisely.'The couple were glad to find themselves outside Her Grace's door. All Bell's soaring ambition to be noticed by her hostess, and treated in a measure as an equal, was nipped in the bud. The two were not less pleased to get away from Mrs. Bellamy. For though her braised veal, stewed lampreys, and spiced junket formed a luxurious banquet to which came healthy young appetites unspoilt by dainty indigestible fare, yet if anything could be more trying to sensitive youth than the Duchess's brutal rudeness, it was the stiff mannerliness of her subordinate. She meant to be hospitable and friendly, but she folded her mittened hands, held in her chin, and addressed each juvenile guest with the term 'ma'am' tacked on to every fourth word in her remarks. It was ease and freedom to be let loose in the glorious park in its early summer greenery, alone together, at liberty to trip here and there, chatter and giggle to their hearts' content.Clary and Bell felt themselves far too old to pick daisies, which was a pastime for babies. In preference the girls scampered to the kennels and uttered little shrieks of congratulation to find the dog colony, for which Blenheim was already known, of lovely liver-and-white coloured toy spaniels, with their long pendent ears, snub noses, and bushy tails, at home and ready to play, small June herself being fain to be consoled for her recent bereavement. Not a dog there frolicked more gaily than these Oxford mistresses in their Sunday best, not likely to be improved in the gambols; though Clary, steadied by the sense that she was responsible to Madam for the frock the girl owed to her patroness's generosity, brought the games to an end before serious mischief was done.The next exploit was to drink from Rosamond's Well, and wonder what had become of the labyrinth through whose intricacies, guided by the cunningly-wound thread, cruel Queen Eleanor brought death to her hapless rival.Bell flung herself down on the turf beneath a spreading elm. Her seat was more mossy, and yet of not a finer pile of living velvet than was to be found in the bowling-greens of the college gardens at Oxford.'Oh, this is better than the grand, dim, tapestried rooms, and the hall with its ghostly banners!' she cried.'It is fortunate you think so,' replied Clary, already exhibiting a glimpse of the gentle irony which afterwards appeared often in her speech. 'For a spreading tree and the turf below it—not so fine as this, perhaps'—patting it tenderly with her ungloved hand—' but not so coarse, neither, may be found by every wayside; while tapestried rooms and a conquering General's banners do not rise at the end of every hedgerow. I like the commonest dusty road that has a fringe of buttercups, and above them a sky as blue and as dappled with sky-sheep as this one over our heads. But I like also the dim rooms where your footsteps echo on the oak boards, and the wonderful pictures, and I love the captured flags that cost dear, though I should not care to scour past them in the dark or in the half-light, for then I think'—and Clary gave a little shiver—'they might look as if they were dripping blood.''What about the cabinet in the corridor you touched my sleeve to take in, and, oh! what about the picture of the fine young lady, with her face daubed black beyond recognition? Was she a witch, think you, that nobody could look upon without danger of being beguiled? Was she Fair Rosamond, come back from drinking in her well here? And the cabinet—did it hold a treasure, or a severed arm and hand gripping a sword, or the body of a murdered infant that, in its wailing life-time, had stood in the way of some great body's heirship?''Nothing of the kind—none of the wild nonsense you can speak when you like. It was Her Grace who was in one of her tantrums—we'll whisper it low—because the Duke had vexed her, and to vex him in return she clipped off all her beautiful hair, that he admired so much, and placed the fleece on yonder cabinet, which he must pass on his way to the frontdoor. Her chestnut curls grew again, and the Duke never repaid her trick by a reproachful word or look (they say he never lost his temper or his control of his handsome soldier's face in his born days), but whether he flung my lady's fleece into the first fire he passed, or whether he strewed it to the four winds of heaven, none could ever tell. It was never seen again.'*'And what about the lady with the black face?' pressed Bell; 'was that the Duchess's work likewise?''It was. She had a desperate quarrel with one of her young kinswomen, and she sought to brand her as you see. If you had gone * Not till after the Duke's death, when his widow found it stored away in another cabinet where he had kept the ribbons and jewels of his orders, his medals, all the precious things he valued most.near enough to the picture, you would have found writ in Her Grace's hand inside the frame, "Her heart is as black as her face." When the Duchess was so ill a year ago that she was without speech, and was thought to be senseless, Dr. Hyndmarsh said in her chamber, "She must have a blister put on, or she will die." She roused on the instant, and answered him pat, "I will not have a blister put on, and I will not die "; and she carried her point: she did neither one nor t'other, and this day she is as well as she ever was.''She is a terrible woman,' said Bell, fairly subdued by these records. 'I wish we were safe back in Oxford. If she were to grow angry with us, if she were to hear that we played too long with her doggies, or that we sat and spoke ill of her in her park, might she not send after the waggon, hale us back, shut us up in a room, and feed us on bread and water till she tired; and that would not be till we were worn to skin and bone?''Nay,' replied Clary with a laugh, 'I have heard tell many a strange story of my Lady Duchess, going the round in Oxford, but never that, instead of speeding her parting guests, she sent after them, kidnapped them back, and kept them prisoners. And, masterful as she is, she has met her match more than once. It is not for me to foul the nest from which I have sprung; but my aunt Abigail, who was so meek and mild, must have been sly and two-faced to oust her patroness. I'm black ashamed when I think of it. Her Grace has defied death in her own person, but her Duke, whom she married for love when he was plain Captain John Churchill, is stricken betimes in mind and body. And my Lord Blandford, her only son, died of the small-pox in his teens, in the hour of one of his father's great victories. Think you not she would sooner have fulfilled the doctor's prophecy, and gone down to the dark grave herself, so that he had been spared to walk the earth in the light of the sun, in his young vigour? Her Majesty Queen Anne lost her boy, too, poor little Gloucester! as should have been King, instead of the gross German George. That I should be guilty of high treason! But would you not have judged that the common sorrow of the two old friends—the Queen and the Duchess—would have stilled all strife and made them friends again?''I cannot tell,' said Bell a little shortly.The sorrow of bereavement had never touched her or hers in the course of her short life. She was impatient of the mention of it; she wondered discontentedly that Clary could dwell on the gloomy topic, and spoil the present enjoyment of their day's outing.But Clary had been a thoughtful child to begin with. A little brother she had loved dearly had died of purple fever; she had never forgotten him, and still cherished his memory. She would have her pensive fits, when she would ponder with tender sadness on where he was now, and what he was doing in those regions of the skies which, according to her devout belief, were his blessed abode.'Let us run,' suggested Bell; 'I am sure that path is a short-cut to the great gate, where we shall be due presently. What if we should find it locked, and have to face Her Grace again, in order to ask where the keys are kept? La! I would rather confront every porter of every college in Oxford.'To escape this alarming contingency, and to exercise the limbs in which the vitality was overweening, the two girls started on a race for the gate, and had nearly stumbled on a group of men-servants round a pony-chair, in which an invalid was being drawn slowly along.'Take care, take care!' the better-informed Clary hastily warned her companion under her breath; 'it is His Grace himself. Do not go too nigh.''What! that clay-coloured mummy a live Duke!' remonstrated Bell incredulously.'And much more,' declared Clary reverently, impressed as usual where Bell was only repelled and disgusted. 'The handsome Englishman to whose genius all the Dutch and German Generals deferred, the victor over King Lewis—the scourge of Europe—in many a bloody battle, the supplanter of King James and his French allies, Queen Anne's councillor and right hand. But don't stare: he won't be stared at; and starers come from all parts of the kingdom to gape at him in his downfall and his weakness, till the reproach has been brought against the Duchess for what she would fain have prevented, his having become a sorry spectacle to the world he once ruled. Come away, Bell; don't cast another look on the poor gentleman to humble him in the eyes of his servants, since he himself is all but past recognising the situation.'Well might the stupid and vulgar, who crave to be thrilled with strong sensations, come to 

gloat over the central figure in the group from which Clary drew aside in pity and awe. What a reverse was there for the great Duke of Marlborough in that nerveless, powerless semblance of a man! In the summer sun in his park, in its prime, he sat muffled in furry wraps, which restored no heat to his exhausted frame. His lack-lustre eyes saw nothing of the waving trees and the sprouting grass. His clean-cut jaw dropped in the last stage of fatuity.CHAPTER IIIA FELLOW-TRAVELLERWHEN Clary and Bell found the waggon waiting for them in the Woodstock inn-yard, they also discovered that they were not to have the waggon all to themselves on their return drive. Bell, who stood up strenuously for her prerogatives even in the small matter of a 'cast' in a waggon, was indignant.'The waggon was hired for our use by the Duchess,' Bell asserted roundly. 'I am sure she did not mean us to have to put up with strange riff-raff on the road.''Her came with carriage company,' the waggoner apologized sheepishly, indicating with the butt-end of his whip the traveller who, as if in anticipation of remonstrance, had retreated into the remotest recess of the waggon. 'Them was bound for Bristol, and turned aside to bring her thus far. Her were keen for me to carry her on to Oxford. I thought that, as her belonged to gentlefolks like your ladyships' sens, you would not mind her presence.' He withheld the chief inducement to the addition to his freight, namely, the offer of handsome pay for a seat. Instead, he volunteered the utmost deference to his charges' wishes. 'If you fault me, young mistress'—addressing Bell in particular—'and are minded to report me to Her Grace the Duchess'—with a manifest quaver in his voice as he said the words—' I'd a deal liefer put down this last piece of baggage. Her can get on to Oxford to-morrow morn with the ordinary country folk, bound for the weekly market: I'll engage to bring her.' He was loath to refund the double fee he had safely deposited in his breeches pocket.'No, no,' interposed Clary, speaking in a whisper, in order not to affront the stranger; 'let her come, Bell. What harm can she do to us?''She may bring us the small-pox from London,' complained the aggrieved Bell.'Not she!' Clary treated the prospect with cheerful incredulity. 'The infection will all have been blown away on the road. She is but a girl like ourselves, and she looks mortal tired. You would not be so cross as to prevent her getting on to Oxford—where she may have friends—to-night.'If you please, young ladies,' said a voice with a slight burr in it, from the obscurity in which its owner had ensconced herself, 'I could not help overhearing your talk. I am not from London—I am from the North. I would fain be at my journey's end; but if this waggon is engaged for a private expedition, and if I incommode you, I will alight and take the road again with the market folk to-morrow, as this good man proposes.'In spite of the burr, the voice was that of a refined young gentlewoman, while the manner was singularly composed and full of tact for a girl of her years. She did not seem to be more than a year or two older than Clary and Bell, as far as could be seen of her in the dusky corner. She was dressed in a travelling roquelaure, and, as if that were not enough, and she had been exposed to the hardship—even in summer—of long nights' as well as days' travelling, she had over her arm, for further protection, a gentleman's overcoat, known in its voluminousness by the name 'wrap-rascal.'But it was not so much warmth that she needed in the summer sunset; it was air. The waggon was close to oppression; although it had been cleaned for the occasion, stale odours clung to it. When Clary distinguished, not only how wearily her fellow-traveller leant back against the rough canvas and hard ribs of the covered cart, but that her breath came in faint gasps as the waggoner cracked his whip and the horse jogged roughly along the deeplyrutted road in the lengthening shadows, she took it upon her to give an invitation:'Madam, will you not come nearer the entrance? The air is fresh here, and the smell of the newly-mown hay is as sweet as can be.'The overture was gratefully accepted, and the two girls could discern a dark-eyed face, pale with fatigue, under a velvet hood, pushed aside like the roquelaure and the wrap-rascal, to let their wearer breathe. Revived by the fresh cool air, the stranger was moved to speak in further acknowledgment of Clary's courtesy.'I am not used to your mild, soft air. Where I come from 'tis still cold and sharp towards sunset so early in the summer. We should not dare to expose ourselves to it, and free ourselves from our wraps in driving, as we are doing now.'Curiosity and a natural love of company overcame Bell's aversion to a fellow-traveller intruded upon her and Clary. Certainly this passenger, however unaccountable her presence there, was not of the ordinary waggon class, any more than Clary and Bell were. With an ambition to show her that she knew something of the North Country referred to, and of the affairs of the great world, Bell broke into the conversation with incautious forwardness, and said a little rudely:'The cold winds ain't the worst things which come to us from the North—we can bear 'em. But ain't that the direction in which troubles are brewed? I heard your Dr. Masham, Clary, say to Dr. Pettifer, when they were sitting over their port in the common room and I was passing by the open door, that there was a storm rising in the North, and I knew that it was of no thunder and lightning he was thinking, for he added in the next breath that the Hessian regiments were prepared for the route.'The North-Country girl, thus pertly challenged, gave Bell a keen glance, and then looked another way as she said quietly:'I believe troubles and storms are not confined to one quarter.'There was a pause, during which Clary descried the evening star dimly visible in the pearly sky.It was the stranger who broke the silence next.'I think I heard you say the name of Masham,' she said hesitatingly. 'Is there a Madam Masham? If so, can you direct me to her lodgings? I bring her letters from friends of hers in the North.''Why, it must be your Madam, Clary!' cried Bell impulsively; 'and she lodges where her Doctor lodges—in the college of which he is the head.''Then, our ways lie the same,' said the new arrival with a sigh of satisfaction. 'You will take me to Madam; I will not need to go inquiring for her abode in the dusk, or to have to lie for the night at the Mitre, and trust to finding her whereabouts next day.'Young as Bell was, she had sufficient acquaintance with the life of the times to have a startled consciousness that her acquaintance with this young person, whose very name she did not know, was advancing by leaps and bounds. To introduce her, without more warrant than was contained in her request, to Madam Masham was a step which even Clary—whom in fits of effusiveness her patroness would call her adopted daughter, the child of her affections—could hardly venture upon.'I didn't know Madam had friends in the North,' said Bell dubiously, 'and I don't belong to the college—I only go there to be with Clary. I am Belinda Annesley.' She delivered the full name with an access of dignity. 'My father is Captain Thomas Annesley, of the house in Ship Street which stands opposite the sign and the bottles of a 'pothecary—Timothy Crane is his name. I must go there the moment we are put down, which I wager will not be before bed-time.'The individual held at arm's length in this fashion smiled a bright, comprehending smile.'You have told me your name and your father's name; now I will tell you mine and my father's. I am Ellinor Bulmer. My father was a soldier like yours; but he has sold out of King George's army, though he is still called Colonel Will Bulmer, of Bulmer Hollow in far-away Northumberland.' There was a slight fall in her voice as it lingered lovingly on the names of her distant home and native county. The next moment she drew herself up and said frankly, and yet with a shade of hauteur: 'It may not be known to you and your friend there, young madam; natheless, Madam Masham—ay, and many another Oxford lady and gentleman—have friends in the North with whom they communicate, granted that it is a place of troubles and storms—all the more so, perhaps, for that reason.'The speaker happened to move her ungloved hand, and a ray of the setting sun flashed on a diamond ring on the third finger, to Bell's unqualified admiration. There would have been no bound to her confidences thenceforth; she would have left Clary, who was more prudent and reticent, far behind, and would have sworn eternal friendship to Mistress Bulmer before the waggon rattled with a heavy clatter into the High Street, but, unfotrunately, the low sun had lit up something else besides a diamond ring. Another movement had stirred a fold of the wrap-rascal and revealed a pocket, out of which protruded slightly the barrel of a pistol, round whose steel mouth a departing sunbeam flickered ominously.Bell gasped and clutched Clary's arm. Then, under pretence of having lost something, she drew Clary back into the dark interior, and whispered with teeth beginning to chatter—for the boldest in rushing into danger are frequently the most afraid to meet it after it has to be faced:'Oh! Clary, did you see the pistol? 'Tis a man in disguise. We'll be robbed and murdered.''What nonsense!' remonstrated the cooler headed Clary. 'Look at her smooth skin—not the most beardless lad ever had a skin like that; see her small hands; she is not above two inches taller than you, and you are not big even for a girl. I'd go bail for her honesty, but she has made a long journey all alone, as it would seem—it may be on some perilous errand—and if she has missed footpads, think of the vagrants and suspicious characters she must have passed on the way! Without question she has been furnished with the pistol in the wrap-rascal for her better protection, and it may be she has been taught to fire it.'Bell was partly reassured, but not so much so as to prevent her from giving the possessor of the pistol a wide berth, and from declining to hold any further conversation with her. When it came to that, Clary herself—though she affected entire security as to the incident—was not quite at her ease about it. She did not see how she could avoid taking Mistress Ellinor Bulmer to the college, or what good it would do suppose she succeeded in shirking the obligation, seeing that any shopkeeper, any undergraduate in his gown and trencher hat, could at once point out Dr. Masham's college to an inquirer.And this Ellinor Bulmer, for whose honesty Clary had proposed to go bail, did look so innocent of all save the earnestness of purpose which enabled her to struggle against her youthful loneliness and weariness. Still, if Clary brought to her patroness's house a source of evil, a vendor of mischief and breeder of trouble in the shape of a daring, desperate young woman, she would never forgive herself.Clary's course was decided for her by the object of her doubts. As the waggon drew near enough to the University city for its stately towers and spires to stand up in relief against the western sky, which had changed from rose-colour to shades of lilac, passing into misty reddish-purple, Ellinor Bulmer, who had been gazing covertly at Clary, spoke again, and proposed to free her from any self-imposed burden in connection with her fellow-traveller.'Young madam, do not vex yourself, as I perceive you are doing,' she said, and she uttered the words with great kindness and consideration. They might have been spoken by an elder sister whose experience of life, with its trials and perplexities, far exceeded that of the younger girl whom she was seeking to shield. 'I will not hamper you with the responsibility of presenting me to Madam Masham. I cannot send my letters by a messenger, for they are of consequence, and have been confided to me by those who put faith in my fidelity and discretion. If they went astray, some people might find themselves in an awkward plight, for which I should truly be sorry. But if you will only tell me when Madam goes abroad to pay visits or to take an airing, I will contrive to intercept her and to do my business with her. For you remind me of my sister Dorothy, who is of an age with you, I should say. She has a tender conscience, and is often troubled how to act.''Not another word,' Clary forbade her. 'Of course I will take you to Madam Masham; you shan't have to hang about the college waiting for her to come out.'But, in spite of the reaction in Clary's mind, the pistol in the wrap-rascal still stuck sufficiently in her throat to cause her to mention the matter to Madam after she had left the stranger in the anteroom and penetrated into Madam's white-panelled parlour. There she found its mistress snugly established on a settee, resting before she set out for a college card-party and supper.Madam was a comely woman, hardly middle-aged. Her little lace cap and long-waisted silk gown were becoming to her. She was lively and fond of amusement—a little flighty, a little fickle, but, still, with a good heart to restrain her faults when they were not intensified by a craving for excitement. It was not easy to satisfy the passion in connection with an elderly, learned husband, and the pungent enough, but decidedly monotonous, academical cliques of college life. Madam had not a specially cross temper, but even serenity itself resents being disturbed on the agreeable verge of a nap.'Heavens, Clary! where is the need for your bouncing in upon me like this without being summoned? Your news of the Duchess would have kept till morning. If she has given you and that minx, Bell Annesley—I'm sure I don't know what you see in her—the rout at last, I'll be bound you deserved it, and she has not been too soon about it. She has let you stay and amuse yourself at the palace wellnigh till nightfall. My head was aching ready to split while you were away gadding. I had swallowed my drops, and the pain had settled down a bit, which I was fain it should do, that I might not look a fright at the Ludlows' this evening, when you must come in and startle me!''I am sorry, ma'am—I should have been more careful of disturbing you; but a strange young gentlewoman joined us in the waggon, and she let fall that she came from the North, and had letters for you which she wished to deliver with her own hand, so I brought her to the college along with me.''From the North did you say? And papers for me?' said Madam, sitting up with interest sparkling in her dark eyes. 'It cannot be from His Grace—another Grace from the pitiful wreck out at Blenheim, Clary; the time is not yet; things are not in readiness. But, there, you know nothing about it—quite as well for yourself, my dear. Don't let us waste words; bring the gentlewoman to me.'Madam's good-humour was entirely restored by the prospect of an anonymous, possibly a proscribed, visitor. But first Clary gave her the detail of the pistol, which worked a transformation in her views.'Lud!' she cried, 'the woman may be nothing better, after all, than one of your gentlemen of the road in disguise, with an eye to the college silver, or she may be a poor, raving mad-woman, with a mind to murder instead of to rob us. Why on earth did you admit such a suspicious character to the college at this hour of the evening, when the Doctor has gone for his stroll to the coach-office to find what news-print the coach has brought down from Lon'on? I thought you had more sense, Clary. I declare my heart is going pitterpatter, you may hear it at the porter's lodge. When I think of it, the porter—he's a stout fellow—had better be brought in to be in readiness along with the butler and the other college servants.''Oh, ma'am! she is just a girl, little older than me and Bell, and she has a good face and is kind-spoken. I'm persuaded she means no harm. Besides, I saw her put down the wrap-rascal with the pistol—which she may have carried for a defence on her journey—on the bench in the hall''That is a small comfort,' acknowledged Madam; 'but you must stay by me, child, to call for help if it is wanted, or I vow not a step shall she take into my company.'It was clear that Madam did not recognise the intruder on her entrance, but her panic fear was so far quieted by the apparent harmlessness of its object, that she endured her approach, returned her curtsey, and received her explanation that she brought credentials from the North. Madam even held out a hand, trembling as if she expected another pistol to be stowed in the packet which Ellinor Bulmer took from the scrip ingeniously hidden in her skirt, and delivered to the individual for whom it was intended.The moment Madam broke the seals and looked at the first signature her eyes sparkled again radiantly.'Sure, it is from His Grace!' she cried exultingly; 'and preparations are forwarder than we supposed.'She might have said more had not the messenger glanced wonderingly and warningly first at Clary, then all round her, as if the walls might have ears.'You are right,' said Madam, too happy not to take in good part the check, though it came from a girl young enough to be her daughter; 'one cannot be too careful. You are heartily welcome, Mistress Bulmer. You are a brave young lady, and one in whom all dependence can be placed, to have been given such a charge.''I was the most likely just because I seemed the most unlikely person to be sent on such an errand,' said Ellinor modestly, still with a wary glance at Clary. 'I did not come by myself all the way; my brother attended me as far as Derby, and in London I met other friends who came out of their road to bring me to Woodstock.''You will have a good rest now,' Madam see assured her. 'Clary, you will tell Turner to that the best bedroom is aired and prepared. Mistress Ellinor Bulmer will be my guest for weeks or months—just as long as it suits her to stay, and she has business in Oxford. Not a word against it, miss '—to Ellinor in reply to a murmured protest. 'There is work to do that may take months to do it in properly, though we have kept true to our principles hereabouts more than in other quarters I could mention. But the absence of those to whom all duty is owing tries us, and makes the warmest devotion but lukewarm. I rejoice that the North is stirring, and that His Grace has forwarded letters to Oxford. The Mitre? Pooh, pooh! even the Mitre would not be safe for such an undertaking, though I know Mr. John Wyatt, mine host, and his good wife are a worthy pair, who would not willingly tell tales and do harm. And for a young miss to stay all by herself at the Mitre would be little short of a scandal; I could never look His Grace in the face again if we should chance to encounter each other at St. James's some fine day, suppose I could be guilty of consenting to such a shocking impropriety. No, Mistress Bulmer: the Doctor and I will feel it an honour to entertain you.' Thus Madam ran on in a rush of eager, sanguine acclamation.An honour for the Doctor and Madam—two people of social importance who commanded the entry into the best houses in Oxford and among the neighbouring gentry; whose society was courted throughout the precincts; whose Tory countenance the Whig Duchess of Marl-borough herself was not beyond soliciting! An honour for them to entertain a stray girl not much older than Clary, on whom they had never set eyes before, whom Clary had brought with such searchings of heart to the college, who had thought it no disgrace to avail herself of a waggoner's greed and to accept a 'cast' in the waggon which Bell Annesley had the next thing to refused to ride in that morning! Clary could make nothing of it; she was thoroughly bewildered. Madam had spoken of an undertaking—a charge which had devolved upon this Ellinor Bulmer. What could such as she undertake or hold in charge?CHAPTER IVMADAM'S PROTÉGÉEMISTRESS ELLINOR BULMER was established for the summer with Madam in Oxford. Her luggage followed her. She occupied the guest-chamber, or as later fashions had given it the more prosaic but still complimentary term 'the best bedroom.' (This title was to be merged in time into the ruder and less hospitable definition, 'the spare bed-room,' which in its turn was to vanish into an undefined unit in a conglomeration of bedrooms, when either the guest was unhonoured, undistinguished from the grown-up members of the family, or there were too many and too frequent guests for one room to be told off for their accommodation.)Clary and Bell saw little of the stranger, who soon ceased to be a stranger, thus unexpectedly and inexplicably set down in their midst. Not to know the visitor better was a source of regret to Clary, who had taken a fancy to her from the first, while the fact that she had been immediately installed as Madam's particular protégée nettled Bell, not for herself, but for Clary. It was she who was being trained to serve as Madam's companion, when the elder lady was in a gushing mood, to be the adopted daughter in Doctor and Madam Masham's lodgings in the college. Who was this interloper who was put in Clary's place, taken everywhere by Madam, and, when the pair were at home, would be closeted together for hours in Madam's parlour?'She is putting you out, Clary; your nose should be out of joint, as father says, if ever nose was. You are not carried by Madam to the Pettifers and the Ludlows and all the tiptop families in Oxford, though I am sure you have a better right than Mistress Bulmer.''I am not of an age to go out with Madam yet,' said Clary sedately, resisting the provocation to jealousy; 'and I ain't so deep in love with grown-up people's card-parties and suppers as to pine to be older and to leave you behind, Bell, unless you also took a sudden spurt of growth.''And Madam drives out with the girl as nobody knows, or even heard tell of till t'other day, to Middleton Park and Wytham Abbey and Bletchington Park, where you have never been.''I don't mind,' declared Clary with rising spirit. 'What should I do at those fine places? Their owners would not reckon me their equal, though my aunt Abby was Bedchamber Woman and Lady-in-Waiting to a Queen, and now (in one of the phrases of the wits in the coffee-houses; Madam sometimes tells me of them—she knew some of them when she was young) she graces a coronet.''You would suit the grand houses and the grand company as well as Mistress Bulmer suits them,' grumbled Bell.'Not I,' answered Clary carelessly. 'She or any other young mistress is welcome to them for me.'Ellinor Bulmer did nothing to provoke Bell's wrath. She took little upon her by word or act, in spite of Madam's marked attentions. In the middle of the many engagements into which Madam drew her guest, and the kind of intent, watchful gravity that was her habitual characteristic—an odd one for so young a woman—Clary had a notion that Ellinor often looked wistfully at herself and Bell, as if she would fain have thrown down the cards or the fan or the tablets, which were so frequently perforce in her listless or weary hands, turned back in years, and been as free from care as the two girls were.She had laughed to see them still clutching their dolls, but she did not laugh when they were at liberty to play ball on the bowling-green, and their merry voices—not yet free from childish treble—rang out in eager calls and bubbling-over laughter, in defiance of the sober and reverend Fellows who came to their windows and looked down, as much pensively as irritably, at the gay young couple. As for the scholars supposed to be absorbed in their studies, the itch that beset them to join in the game sometimes brought them tumbling down their stairs—several steps at a time—and pouring out in the direction of the green. But the maidens knew better than to accept the lads' overtures and to encourage Dr. Masham's students in idleness. Clary and Bell left off playing, picked up their ball, became as demure as Madam's Persian cat, linked their arms through each other, and withdrew on the instant into their quarters in the college.A longing look—akin to the scholars' craving—came into Ellinor Bulmer's dark eyes and hovered about her red lips, drooping plaintively at the corners. However, kind to oppressiveness Madam was, the girl was in exile, weighed down by responsibilities which should have rested on the strong shoulders of a man, and not on the weak shoulders of a woman. Was she reminded of that conscientious younger sister of whom she had spoken to Clary and Bell in the waggon? Was she wishful that the young sister's girlish glee could have been as spontaneous and undaunted as that of these Oxford playmates? Was she sensible that she herself was old for her years, that the glad gift of her youth had been filched from her, and in its stead a burden substituted of secrets and plottings and strivings of which she had to keep account, of which she was expected to work miracles in moulding them to one end?Dr. Masham was not so much taken up with the visitor as his wife was, which was perhaps but natural. He was ponderously courteous as usual, but he rather held aloof from Madam's protégée, and he was chary in joining the two in their rounds of visits. The affairs of the college became pressing this summer, and the Doctor grew more and more engrossed with a treatise on the ancient fire-worshippers of Persia, to which he had been putting touches at intervals for the last ten years. He would shake his head involuntarily when some sign of Madam's violent friendship for Mistress Bulmer attracted his attention.Bell Annesley, who had a bird-like aptitude for picking up morsels of information which escaped the notice of the world in general, as a bird picks up crumbs, reported that the Doctor had been heard to say that Colonel Will Bulmer was a dangerous, reckless man who would risk his all for an idea. As Bulmer Hollow was situated between Derwentwater's estates and Kenmure's outlying lands, there was no likelihood of his lacking opportunity to get himself and others into mischief.But, oh, these idle, enthusiastic women! they were the worst of all; they would not rest contented and thankful to be out of the hurlyburly till they had every head of kindred, friends, and acquaintances in danger of the headsman's axe or the hangman's rope. It was a sorry way for the women to show their regard, but they had always been a queer lot, a riddle without solution.The summer was ended, the dismal autumn rains had set in, when the news-prints brought grievous tidings of rebellion and disaster. The storm had burst in the North. Mar had been out on his famous hunt, which did not have red deer or capercailzie for its object. The Battle of Sheriffmuir had been fought amidst wildest confusion, so that the Steuart and Hanoverian sides each claimed a victory and each repudiated a defeat. But this, at least, was clear: the Steuarts' cause fell broken and distanced for a score and a half of years, and the Government's reprisals on the leaders of the rising were hot and heavy. Mar, whose restless ambition and flighty wrong-headedness had served to work out the tragedy, did not pay the penalty, but on and over the Border high heads were laid low and great houses brought to a ghastly end.Clary and Bell hardly realized the calamity which had come to pass many a mile from Oxford, though, if they had known it, it was thrilling King Charles's loyal,city with keen disappointment, bitter mortification, and bootless rage. Still less did the girls understand the connection between the outbreak of treason in the North and the appearance of Ellinor

Bulmer so far South, till they had glimpses of her in the act of taking her departure from the college and the town.With a blanched face and streaming eyes she was hurriedly packing her trunk. She was in Madam's white-panelled parlour, where Madam, looking greatly distressed and scared, was feebly urging on her young friend this refreshment and that comfort to fortify her for a hasty and lengthened journey. Then the mistress of the house would stop with an inadvertent wringing of her hands and an imploring petition to send her word how His Grace fared, and what was to be the sentence on my Lord Kenmure, till the Doctor himself interposed.He was there with the others at high noon, away from lecture-room and common-room, and his own study—which he loved best of all—he who did not dream of entering Madam's parlour except for a dish of tea, or to make up the party at loo or ombre at the card-table, when Dr. and Mrs. Pettifer and other Oxford dignitaries were supping with the Mashams. The strange experience of finding the Doctor there in the middle of the morning struck the onlookers more than anything else. He was not like himself, either, any more than Madam was like her ordinary alternately languishing and vivacious self.The Doctor was roused out of his perennial tranquillity and trifle of absent-mindedness. His bushy brows were knit sternly, the very curls of his wig—he wore an old-fashioned, imposing cauliflower wig—seemed to bob up and down and shake out little clouds of powder irefully. And it was he who was wont to be the most pacific of Heads of Houses, the mildest of scholars! He interrupted his wife with astonishing promptness and decision.'No, there must be no communication; I forbid it absolutely. It would do no good to those who are in trouble, and it might work much harm to hard-put, innocent persons'—Clary learnt later it might have cost fortune, liberty, life itself, to some of those concerned in recent transactions, if the truth were brought to light. 'Ay, Betty'—turning and addressing his wife more in tender reproach than in fierce resentment, for he had ever been the most indulgent of husbands—'it was an ill wind that blew you, once upon a time, as far as the Northern Marches, where you had the honour to make the acquaintance of His Grace of Derwentwater, and of my Lady Kenmure, since it was my lady—a malignant Gordon, worse luck!—who ruled that roost. It is an honour that might have cost us dear, and may yet be our ruin if we do not walk softly.'It was plain that it was the Doctor's intention to bundle off Mistress Ellinor Bulmer without a moment's delay, and that he refused to permit farther intercourse between her and Madam. But he played his part like a gentleman and a learned divine of Christian humanity. He had not only provided her with a sufficient escort till she should reach some of her Jacobite friends: he had elected to ride the first part of the way with her, in order to disarm suspicion. This was not only a discomposing overturning of his daily habits: it was the incurring of a grave risk should the nature of the young lady's mission become known.Ellinor Bulmer took a solemn farewell of Clary and Bell.'Fare ye well, you two girls. Learn your lessons for your kind tutors, play your merry games, and never, never forget how good God has been to you. What fortunate girls you are! Be sorry for other girls less happy. Drop a prayer for them, when you remember, that they may be upheld on a rough road, and may not grow reckless. Clary, I will not forget how you took me into the waggon, though we are never to meet again.''Don't say that,' remonstrated Clary.'You will come back to Oxford to see your friend Madam,' asserted Bell, who had been staring around her baffled and bewildered.'No, never,' was the doleful rejoinder, which was little short of a certainty, seeing that young Mistress Bulmer had travelled all the way from a Jacobite centre in the North of England to the Tory University of Oxford laden with letters, proclamations, appeals, a light enough burden in themselves, but charged with death and disaster.For they bore the signatures and seals of the Chevalier, the son of the exiled King, as well as of the powerful noblemen enlisted on the side of the Steuarts, in the desperate political warfare still to be waged for many a long year in the future, till it broke out in the last brief glow of what threatened to be that horror of horrors—a civil war.Madam, with her vanity tickled and her love of excitement fanned into a passion, had, to the best of her power, aided and abetted the singular envoy in the distribution of these firebrands. All the Doctor's solid sense and reputation for moderation and fidelity to law and order were wanted to extinguish the burning embers and appease the offended powers that ruled. In King Charles I.'s day Oxford was Church and King to the backbone, and it was still fain to be the home of a lost cause. But, with the rebellion of 'the '15' only just stamped out, a visitor like Ellinor Bulmer had little chance of being twice welcomed within one generation to rest in its academic shades.CHAPTER VCLARISSA AND BELINDACLARY and Bell were Clary and Bell no longer. They were Clarissa and Belinda—only to be addressed by the familiar abbreviation in the strict privacy of close intimacy. They were very little older, and infinitesimally wiser, but they had taken the magic step over the boundary which separates early girlhood from young womanhood, sooner attained in the eighteenth century than it is arrived at in the twentieth. At sixteen Clarissa and Belinda were invested with all the dignity, obligations and restrictions of young womanhood. They were expected to dress formally in a manner befitting their years and station. Their hair especially was subjected to a process of curling and powdering which took more than an hour to accomplish, even when the occasion was not a state one. They no longer skipped and ran; they walked. They ceased to play ball on the bowling-green, commanded by the windows of the Fellows and students. The dolls were laid aside for a permanency; a large part of the girls' time was spent at their tambour and embroidery frames. Clarissa and Belinda wore hoops and hankered after patches. The juniors went into company with their elders, sat upright on straight-backed chairs, played with their fans, sipped coffee and chocolate, sang a little to their very simple playing on the harpsichord, danced country dances and minuets when dancing was in request, were admitted into the round games of cards which prevailed everywhere as an evening diversion. In short, the pair were grownup, responsible human beings whose lessons, like their children's plays, were at an end. For the young women's education was finished. If they read a little in their Bibles, Prayer-Books, and Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying,' on Sundays, and the verses of Mr. Dryden with the latest stanzas of Mr. Pope on week-days, it was at their own instigation and for their private edification.Clarissa did read a little to Madam, who clung to old favourites, and would have a paper of Addison's when she was serious, and Prior's lines when she was in a cheerful mood, but was in truth no reader, and would wag her tongue off talking sooner than listen to the wisdom of the wise, and the quips and cranks of the jesters, for ten consecutive minutes.One change besides that of the girls having passed the Rubicon and issued from the sheaths and shells which were supposed to have protected and veiled their unformed, tender immaturity, had come to Bell. She was not promised in marriage to some drinking, dicing squire, old enough to be her grandfather, as was not infrequently the portion of the penniless daughters of gentle folks in her generation. The Annesleys' nabob kinsman in the Indies had died, and, for a wonder, had not bequeathed his fortune 'to a college or a cat,' but had left it to his own flesh and blood, so that the invalided Captain and his wife were, according to the estimation of those more primitive times, rolling in wealth, and Bell, their only child, was an heiress. She had always been aspiring and full of self-importance; she could now hold up her chin in the air, revel in lutestrings and negligées and huge hats shading her fair-skinned, rose-tinted face, which did not call for rouge, and sail, and swim, and trip along the Oxford streets, and as far as the water-walks under the spreading elms, with the best.It was because of Bell's fine prospects that she was going on a visit to London, to cousins once or twice removed, who would possibly have overlooked her existence had not the Indian uncle been kind enough to withdraw her from the ruck of poor relations, and elevate her into the position of a very creditable and profitable young cousin indeed. Had she remained among the first, she could only have spent the money on that crucial visit to London which was the great event in the lives of the girls of the period, in order to learn a way to earn her bread. Those ways were few and hard then, and, as everybody will allow, it would have been one thing to travel to town in order to strive for a place as an assistant housekeeper, a companion, a worker for a repository, or even an abigail or waiting-maid, and it was quite another to make the expedition for delightful enlightenment and sheer pleasure, to go the round of the routs and ridottos, the auctions and fashionable churches, for the praiseworthy but altogether agreeable purpose of seeing the world and returning to the country house, or the cathedral close, or the college, experienced, emancipated, capable of astounding and altogether eclipsing the unfortunate stayers at home, growing rusty in their well-worn grooves.It was Belinda who triumphantly carried off Clarissa to London in her train. She insisted that her friend should accompany her. She procured an invitation for Clarissa from the ladies with whom Belinda was going to stay. She refused to budge without her ally from childhood. London would be no fun, no glory apart from Clarissa. As her loyalty to Clary had been a redeeming trait in little forward, meddlesome, domineering Bell, so stanch fidelity to Clarissa was a saving grace in not much bigger Belinda, in consideration of the bundle of airs, conceit, and arrogance she threatened to grow into.Madam was not to be outdone in generosity. She could be very generous on some occasions, even as she was tyrannical on others. She had reared Clarissa to be her companion, to fetch and carry for her, to bear her humours; but that was not to say that a girl was not to get a glimpse of the great world, and have a chance of pushing her fortune. Madam not only consented to Clarissa's paying the visit: she grew quite eager for it, and scouted the idea of not being able to do without the girl, though she knew, and Clarissa knew, that the adopted daughter would not be gone an hour without Madam's being at her wits' end how and where to bestow herself. Only a certain amount of custom and of abstinence from her young friend's company would teach her to miss Clarissa less. Madam was fond in her way of the creature she had seen reared from childhood under the college roof, and Clarissa, with a wholesome, happy, affectionate nature, was fond of her guardian, notwithstanding the weaknesses which the younger, naturally a more reasonable and intelligent woman—granted that her judgment was of the crudest—saw plainly enough. Thus a connection which, unsweetened by love, might have been selfish despotism on the one side, and irksome bondage on the other, became kindly, sincere, and faithful.It is difficult to recognise the change which has come over the practice of women in days when an entirely home life in tutelage to parents and guardians is becoming rarer and more rare for girls. Their education takes them afield now, and some of the most critical years of their lives are spent largely amongst comparative strangers. Distance is wellnigh annihilated by the facilities for travel, its safety and speed, its inexpensiveness in a large measure, all of which make travellers even of young girls. They see what their grandmothers would never have dreamt of seeing, and, in place of being content with a visit to what was pompously called 'the great metropolis,' they repair in turn to half the metropolises in Europe, and in other hemispheres, sometimes in the company of their seniors, sometimes after the example of their American cousins, in demure pairs or gay groups of contemporaries. A century ago girls would not have been trusted to walk on a public road, or to ride a score of miles in a coach, unattended by what was regarded as the proper escort of a reliable kinsman or a confidential elderly servant.It is hard to realize what a visit to London—often the only one in their lives—was to these hitherto unfledged young persons. What preparations were made for it, what wildly extravagant expectations were entertained of it, what a turning-point it was in many a fresh, untrodden history! For one example, the length of time spent in the coach ride from Oxford to London, which in those days sometimes took from dim dawn to dewy eve, would amply suffice in a modern experience to convey natives of the city of towers from Christ Church and Merton Meads, not merely within sound of Bow bells. It would enable them to fly by the aid of steam to the sea-coast, to embark in another steam ally, to land and rush headlong through the sandy fields, past the poplar-bordered roads, of France, till the sun set on the banks of the Seine, instead of the pastures by the Isis, and on other towers than the solitary relic of the ancient castle of Matilda and Stephen, or the rude landmark of Robert D'Oygly in his passion of penitence—even on the twin towers of Notre Dame. As for the perils of the journey, they were in inverse ratio to the stretch of land and water traversed. Man or woman may start now for Paris—nay, for Rome or Athens—with a confident assurance of not running a tithe of the risk incurred a century and a half ago in a coach ride between Oxford and London.The last statement may serve as an excuse for the seriousness with which the achievement was contemplated beforehand. Had Belinda been of age, an heiress in possession, and not merely in anticipation, her friends for her, if not herself, would have seen that her will was made, and duly signed and sealed, ere she plunged into unknown danger. If Clarissa had owned more riches than the ten gold guineas and the couple of crowns, which she regarded as wealth untold, bestowed upon her by the princely munificence of the Doctor and Madam, she would have done the same. As it was, she made a thousand plans for the disposal of that inexhaustible treasure, and taking a foremost place in her calculations were the silver buckles of the last pattern for the Doctor's square-toed shoes, and the stomacher of the newest mode for Madam.Instead of making her will, Belinda employed herself in filling groaning mails with the choicest sacques, spencers, open skirts and flowered petticoats, that were to be found in Oxford. They were enough to awaken the cupidity of such gentlemen of the road as had wives and daughters to profit by the light fingers and the lawless daring of the men of their family.When Belinda minced and bridled into the college with tales and displays of her grandeur, Madam was piqued into fitting out Clarissa with some pretensions to be a fit associate for so splendid a young lady. Madam pressed upon her adopted daughter, and would take no refusal, some of her finest muslin 'heads' and Valenciennes-edged fichus, a few of her ostrich-plumes, together with her Bristol diamond brooch and earrings and her Venice fan.'Nay, child,' she exclaimed, with unwonted candour and clear-sightedness where she herself was concerned, 'when I see you grown old enough to use them, I feel you had better have them while you prize them, and set them off, since my day for such vanities is on the wane. Don't trouble to contradict me. Can't I see for myself that I am getting a stout old woman—a sorry figure for a minuet, with my knees too stiff to bend to milk a quiet cow in the college fields when we are a-maying, and trying who shall make the best syllabub? You will write me all the latest fashions, and what the wits are saying in the coffee-houses; what pieces are the vogue at the play-houses; what the scribblers are writing in Grub Street.' (Though Madam was no reader, she was not without a hankering in one of her affectations after a reputation for a taste in belles-lettres, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.) 'The Doctor and I will discuss what you have writ over our game of chequers after supper, when you, miss, are gallivanting among the belles and bucks of Lon'on town.'At last the great day and hour arrived when, in the mists of early morning, Clarissa and Belinda started in the stage-coach from the Bear Inn for their distant goal. Their fellow-travellers—a neighbouring squire and his wife, an elderly tutor and his maiden sister—happened to be only known to the girls by name, and in ordinary circumstances the acquaintance would have gone no farther. But in the exceptional case of riding up together in the coach to London, not only had the juniors been respectfully recommended to the protection of the elders, a bond of union had been established between the whole party in the light of a long-drawn-out, close association in an exciting adventure common to them all. The squire and the tutor had more than their swords, they had their pistols, reminding the girls of the shock they had received in the past, when they found a girl like themselves armed with a pistol hidden in the pocket of a man's wrap-rascal. For gentlemen to carry pistols on a journey was quite a different matter, and the sight of them was a comfort, and not a terror, in the circumstances.But Clarissa and Belinda were not sent out into the world, and trusted on the King's highway, with no more defence than was implied in the cursory care of two gentlemen who, in case of a disaster, had the persons of their own respective ladies to guard and their screams to still. Riding on the top of the coach, in charge of the girls and their luggage, was Dr. Masham's old servitor, Nat Weekes, in the Doctor's livery. Nat belonged to that strange anomalous body of poor scholars who, in rags, often in disrepute, in semi-starvation, haunted the University for the crumbs of learning and the crumbs of creature comforts which fell from the tables of their richer brethren and their special patrons. These humble dwellers in academic groves came up occasionally from the plough, the weaver's shuttle, the smith's forge, the pot-boy's office in country inns, wooed the Muses on the seats nearest the door in the college halls by the aid of tattered books, tossed aside by the original owners, and paper for notes and exercises, begged, borrowed, or filched from tutors' desks. In return for these privileges, the servitors waited at the hall tables, ran their masters' errands, copied their MSS. for them, and were at the beck and call of the ladies and junior members of the Doctors' and tutors' families.Nat had been more fortunate than many, for he had early attached himself to Dr. Masham, who had accepted the obligation, and treated his dependent with kindness and consideration. But Nat's luck had stopped there; though he was credited with being a man of considerable parts, and a storehouse of odds and ends of curious knowledge, he had grown gray as a servitor who had refrained from taking his degree. Either his courage or his ambition had failed him in climbing the social ladder, whereas others of his kind had mounted step after step, till they were far in advance of their patrons, and died Bishops, great Crown lawyers, or noted statesmen.Nat was lean and weasel-like, a shy, distrait man in the livery coat which, when it was fresh, without ink-spots, or stain from the buttery, lent him so much the air of a respectable gentleman's servant that Madam would have him walk at her heels and carry her parcels when she took her airing or went shopping. Or he would escort her sedan-chair when she re-turned from her card-parties, till the bloom of his livery was rubbed off, when Madam relegated him back to his duties to the Doctor and the household in general.Of course Nat Weekes was well known to Clarissa and Belinda, who had alternately looked up to him, played tricks upon him, and essayed to pet him, during their nonage. They were glad to know him over their heads in the strangeness and unfamiliarity of this era in their history. He was not the only individual appointed to look after them. The youngest tutor in the college, Mr. Cyprian King, was bound on a horseback journey to London, and he was to keep within cry of the coach and to meet the travellers at the different stages to see that all was right. In fact, there would have been no need for the attendance of Nat Weekes if Mr. Cyprian King—familiarly 'Cyp King'—had not been a bachelor in his earlier twenties. In spite of the sobriety of his clerical dress—for he had already taken orders in anticipation of a Fellowship—he so well became his black coat, his white cravat, his military-looking riding boots, and the equally military aspect of his three-cornered laced hat, that, though he had a sound reputation for steadiness as well as scholarship, he was too much of what was then called 'a pretty fellow' to be a suitable squire for damsels of the age of Clarissa and Belinda, though he might have suited dames of the ripe matronhood of Madam. He, too, in his genteel poverty, had been a servitor of the University, but it was a servitor of a different calibre from that of Nat Weekes. Cyp King's father was a country clergyman, poor enough, but not so absolutely destitute of money and influence as to reduce his hardily reared children to grinding penury. Very soon young Cyp's ability and diligence won him the independence of a scholarship and of a sufficient amount of teaching of duller students. He rose rapidly to his present covetable position, with the power it conferred of lightening the burden at the primitive little parsonage and of lending a helping hand to his younger brothers and sisters, to whom the first-born of the family was a blending of a fairy-prince and a self-denying hero.When the hurry and flurry of the coach's start was over, and a receding vision of Dr. Masham's knee-breeches and gaiters (Madam could not face the early morning air) lost its depressing effect, because of the cheery sound of the horn with which the coach electrified the village of Summertown, Clarissa set herself conscientiously to receive profit from the very beginning of her holiday. She would look about her and see the country, especially when she got beyond the bounds which she had already reached in some of Madam's drives—a soft, green, wooded country, well watered by purling brooks and tributaries of the Thames.The summer day was cloudy with an abundance of fleecy clouds drawing a pearly gray veil between the world and the sun—softening the fresh pink and white of the dog-roses and the may in the hedges, the golden yellow of the buttercups in the pasture, the blood red and the dead white of the poppies and moon-daisies in an occasional bit of corn-land—and faintly blurring the outlines, as seen in a bird's-eye view from a coach whirling past, of cottage, farm, and manor-house, rows of trees and clumps of bushes. Clarissa, who was determined to be more than content with every detail, decided that it was the very day for a long coach ride, when a blazing sun would have glared in upon the travellers with oppressive brilliance, and would have rendered stifling an atmosphere already threatening stuffiness, since the windows could not be opened on account of the squire's rheumatic shoulder and the tutor's sister's tendency to the snivels.In the same spirit of optimism Clarissa was persuaded that it was restful to her eyes to have no more than a glimpse of the delightful country behind the tutor's stooping back.But the exhilaration of setting out on a great undertaking did not affect everybody with the same form of quiet enjoyment. The squire, not accustomed to sit still, soon began to doze, the squiress was fidgety over her numerous band-boxes and bags, the elderly tutor glued his eyes to a book as if he had not enough printed matter in his study and classroom, and as if the broad book of Nature was nothing to him. Every time he raised his long, thin hand to turn a page he jogged his sister's elbow, which she said gave her a turn, as there was no telling what he might be nudging her for; and whatever else the movement did, it certainly rendered her cross. Belinda wanted to work off her excitement by chattering, and, when she found that her friend Clarissa had been too well brought up, and was too well bred, to vex the ears of her seniors with idle chatter, waxed a trifle sulky, and took to tapping her foot—in case it should presently be full of needles and pins—and shaking her knees to obviate stiffness, in a peculiarly exasperating manner. Even Clarissa collapsed in her phase of resolute improvement of the situation and plucking of all the fine fruit for observation and reflection it afforded. She got a crick in the neck from persistently holding her head so as to look past the Don down the vista created between his bowed back and the side of the coach. The motion of the horses, which had felt so smooth and harmonious at first, grew jerky and irksome, until Clarissa was fain to lean her head against the cushions, as most of her neighbours did, half close her eyes, and, if she could compass it, emulate the squire in his doze. Oh, how humiliating was the result to one who had been minded to be wide awake, receiving no end of new impressions—enlightening or diverting—all the way to London town! What a stupid way in which to spend many hours of the journey so fondly dwelt upon during all these weeks! How poor and frail was human nature!CHAPTER VIWHAT HAPPENED DURING THE LAST STAGE OF THE COACH RIDETHERE were not many travellers on the road to enliven it: a waggon or two; droves of sheep and cattle bound for some cattle fair; an occasional pedestrian; farm carts full of haymakers looking with admiring eyes at the coach and its company; a family coach containing some of the county quality, who did not deign to cast a glance on the travellers by the public coach—while these peered inquisitively at their more aristocratic neighbours—several horsemen—one of whom rode sometimes before, sometimes behind the coach, and deliberately stooped and looked in as he passed it.'He always looks in on your side, Clarissa,' said Belinda with jealous petulance, which Clarissa thought unwarranted. True, Mr. Cyp King did make his investigation on Clarissa's side of the cumbrous conveyance, but, then, who had flouted the young gentleman in the pride bordering on gay insolence, of her youth, fine fortune and fair face as Belinda had flouted him? He had been attracted by her beauty and the merry pertness of her tongue, which was not without a bitter-sweetness in its frank ignorance of life. For Belinda in her dauntless sprightliness, just touched with a fine lady's languishing, had, even where her fortune did not bulk largely, but was rather a deterring than an alluring feature in her,tout ensemble, many more admirers than Clarissa. She was quieter, more retiring in a comeliness which was less flashing, which had to be sought out in the deeper blue of the eyes so often hidden by their modestly drooping lids and brown eyelashes, in the more delicate blush coming and going on the softly rounded cheeks, in the smiling sedateness of the curves of the red lips, which had their archness as well as their innocent earnestness, but

the earnestness was their prevailing attribute. Set at naught by Belinda, who scornfully regarded Mr. Cyp as a poor captive to her charms, he neither sighed nor died, but incontinently snapped the chain in which he had been for a brief space entangled, and sought ample compensation in the gentle reasonableness and pleasant humour, which was never anything save kindly, of Clarissa. Belinda did not approve of the desertion—she did not care a straw for Cyprian King, but she liked a court of adorers, and did not relish the with drawal of the most snubbed and slighted man from their ranks—only she knew her friend too well to blame her for the secession. All the malice Belinda showed against Clarissa was in reminding her sarcastically of what, to Clarissa's affront and distress, Belinda would call Clarissa's conquest.'He never lets his eye rest on me,' Belinda pointed out in an undertone; 'but you are welcome to the bookworm; I do not mean to be satisfied with less than a lord for an escort in future. I have met a few in Oxford, but I shall be introduced to scores in town.''Indeed, less may serve you, miss,' the sister of the tutor, who had overheard the remark, said tartly; 'you may leave them to your betters.''Some of my betters, as I suppose they would call themselves, have been served with considerably less,' was Belinda's swift rejoinder, delivered with mocking emphasis.Then, when Clarissa sat quaking lest worse should follow, the subject dropped. It was too bad of Belinda, with Mrs. Sally Wingfield old enough to be their mother, and an invalid to boot—though her ailments might be fanciful—and they by way of being under her wing! No amiable attention to the elder woman's comfort, no obliging deference to her habits and inclinations on Clarissa's part, would make up for the ungenerous sneer from the young beauty and heiress.Clarissa was driven to the conclusion that anticipation was better than fulfilment, that there were serious drawbacks to perfect happiness even in a journey to London.The coach party fell back into its former stagnation; the stoppages to change horses, the inn-yards, the bustling hostlers, the additional outside passenger or two, which had been an interest at first, ceased to be much of a diversion. The real breaking of the spell of monotony and fatigue, the solid solace, was the good mid-day dinner at an old-fashioned inn, in an old-fashioned market-town, whose principal customers came and went with the coach. The travellers pulled themselves together; the squire expanded into heartiness and hilariousness, cracking jokes with the landlord and hailing the landlady; the ladies peeped at themselves in the cracked mirror over the dining-room chimney-piece; and, finding themselves less dilapidated than they had feared, their spirits rose accordingly. The senior tutor closed his book and looked as if he were prepared to be human for a change. His sister relaxed at the first mouthful of the pigeon pie, and called her brother's attention to the size and sleekness of the landlady's tabby cat. Mr. Cyp had been at the coach door to hand the young ladies out, so that there was no need for Nat Weekes to descend the ladder for the convenience of the outside passengers so precipitately that he had nearly fallen on the sharp point of his long nose, which would have been a foolish way of being of use to any member of his patron's household. It came to light, too, in the course of the dinner, that the junket and the heaped plate of cherries had been added to the desert at the request of the young gentleman of the party, and nobody had so much as pretended to think that the extra dishes were for the benefit of the squiress and of the tutor's elderly sister. Certainly, Belinda refused at first to taste either cherries or junket, or, for that matter, pigeon pie or roast lamb or capon—she was too tired, too faint, too indifferent to food. But when every-body was attending to his or her individual wants, and, down to Clarissa, was having no notice to spare for an 'elegant young female' too elegant for 'human nature's daily food,' then it was discovered—happily, when Mrs. Sally was in too serene a temper to direct all eyes to the waywardness of a girl—that Belinda had made quite a creditable havoc in the dainties provided for her refreshment. As for Clarissa, she was as happy as happy could be looking round the low-roofed room, and out of the lattice windows, beneath which lay the herbbeds of the garden, and beyond them the laden cherry-trees whose spoil contributed to the feast. Clarissa ate her cherries gratefully, and one of the diners could have testified to how becoming was her girlish happiness and gratitude.The party started again with renewed spirit in a rally which was soon to die away, for genuine weariness and aching of bones were to have their turn. The sun still graciously withheld his strength from being brought to bear on the travellers, but the dust was increasing and overwhelming them in choking whity-drab clouds. Resignation in place of exultation was taking possession of even the youngest of the company, presenting figures hardly less drooping than those of their seniors.By common consent, the stoppage for supper at another halting-place was made as short as the changing of the horses would permit, for the shadows were stretching longer and longer, and the London road near its goal, if it was to be traversed at nightfall, was the most perilous part of the journey.As yet it had been pursued safely and without cause for alarm, but just when the drowsy and fast-asleep travellers were rousing themselves to look out eagerly, where the young people were concerned, for the expected lights of London, and to make believe they smelt the smoke of the great city of enchantment, as the coach was crossing a waste piece of common land, the coachman pulled up his horses and had a word with the guard. He promptly communicated with the squire, as the most likely head of the group within the coach, that the coachman did not like the look of some riders whom he could distinguish hovering on the edge of the common. Should he drive on at the height of his horses' speed, or should he turn back? They were not far from the last village and farmhouse; anyhow, the gentlemen must be in readiness with their pistols, and he had better tell them that the outside travellers were some of them women, some of them bagmen who did not happen to be furnished with defensive weapons.At the intimation, Mrs. Sally Wingfield began at once to scream at the shrillest pitch of her voice. The squire called indignantly that there should be no flight, and fumbled for his pistol, which had slipped to the floor. The squiress did not scream, but she grasped her husband's arms convulsively.Let him turn back, Thomas,' she cried with insistence; 'we are not soldiers in a battlefield. Think of your young family, and little Prissy a cripple, and your brother Peregrine as hard as a stone, if the children and me were left to his tender mercies.'In the meantime the coachman could not drive on with the coach swaying from side to side, as the men and women in the top seats struggled to scramble down over the wheels, in order to scatter and escape on foot in the gathering dusk ere the footpads were upon them. Nat Weekes was among the scramblers, though he had no intention of forsaking his post. Yet courage was not among his natural gifts, for he was shaking like a man in an ague when he thrust half his lean body into the wobbling coach to reassure his charge.'Don't be frightened, misses. The highwaymen won't never harm you if you'll give 'em what they want, which there ain't any use in refusing. The Doctor loaned me one of his pistols, but, Lord! if I could bring myself to pull the trigger—as I haven't done more than twice before in the whole course of my existence—I would be main certain not to fire straight: I should only anger the gentlemen, and bring my blood on their heads instead of theirs on mine. Our best policy is to keep quiet and let 'em take our purses. They may tie my arms behind my back, and gag you with your handkerchers lest you begin screeching like Mistress Wingfield, as is in a fair frenzy. But nothing worse will come to pass. They'll take the horses and ride off with the booty; but by the morning light this here coach will be discovered, let it stick ever so fast for the night, which will not last for ever.''Unhand me, woman—wife—I say, Patty!' the squire was shouting with a face like a peony, a voice throttled with passion, and the risk of an apoplectic fit if he were not let loose.'Not if I can help it, Thomas,' the lady refused point-blank. 'Not though you foam at the mouth or strike up your hands in my face. You are only one man against a dozen or a score of desperate thieves whom the gallows are waiting for. Those scurvy knaves atop—I warrant the half of them without helpless wives and families—are making off and leaving you in the lurch. No, Thomas, you'll not shed the robbers' blood and have yours shed, and your wife left a widow, and your dear children orphans, before you can cock the other pistol. You'll have to fell me, your best friend, to the floor first.'The elderly tutor stood with a pistol in each hand uncertain what to do next. He was brave enough, but he was unfamiliar with his weapons, as Nat Weekes had professed himself to be, and he had in a marked degree the unreadiness and the vacillation in action which beset his scholarly class. His sister, in her hysterics, thought only of herself, while she flung her writhing body to and fro in dangerous proximity to the muzzles of the squire's pistols, and even banged her head in its wadded capuchin against the panel of the door, as if she desired in her despair to forestall the murderous deeds of the highwaymen, the galloping tread of whose horses' hoofs could now be plainly heard. Clarissa and Belinda sat silently gasping for breath, with panting breasts and clasped hands, like two startled children, for even Belinda forgot for the moment her inflated sense of her own consequence, and was childlike again. Would the highwaymen spare them if they stripped themselves, as Nat Weekes had promised? Belinda was tugging at the gold chain to which her little enamelled watch was attached. Watch and chain were among her most recent acquisitions, and she had been pulling them out and dangling them in the faces of her companions twenty times that day. But what were watch and chain in comparison with dear life? Clarissa was fumbling in one of the deep panniers—which she wore balanced on each side under her skirt—for her purse, with the ten pounds and the two crowns which were to have lasted so long and brought her so much satisfaction. Oh! where was Mr. Cyp that he was not by to meet and defeat these dreadful men single-handed? Surely he was not within cry, else he would have come to their rescue. Perhaps he had been interrupted, attacked and killed on the spot, for he was young and hot-blooded—not yet dazed and chilled by much study, as his brother tutor showed himself. He would not yield—in orders though he was—without striking a blow in his defence; he would never, never leave Belinda and Clarissa to their fate.The beat of horses' feet drew nearer, and Clarissa's self-control gave way until she shrieked in concert with Mrs. Sally Wingfield, when the glass of the window nearest to her was dashed in and rattled down in sharp splinters, while in the aperture was presented the horrid spectacle of a man's face covered with black crape.It is never darker than before dawn. If the victims had only known it, deliverance was at hand. The coachman, not unaccustomed to such encounters, had righted the coach, and, brandishing his whip, was prepared to whip up the horses and break through all opposition. The guard flourished a cudgel in the faces of two marauders attempting to climb to the roof. The squire, wrenching one hand free from his wife's grip, fired at the aim offered at close quarters by the rascal at the window, and the groan and thud of a fall which followed showed that the shot had taken effect. The gallop of other horses rang on the strained ears, and the apprehension that it was a reinforcement of the lawless band was dispelled, the next moment, by the friendly voice of Mr. Cyp calling:'I am here, ladies and gentlemen; and some good folks I overtook on the road, who suspected, from what they had seen, what was taking place, have done me the favour to accompany me. The rogues find themselves outnumbered by honest men, and are beating a retreat with all their might, leaving a wounded wretch behind them.'So it was, for the highwaymen had been comparatively few in number. The danger had passed; the obligation was to press on to town and get there before deeper dusk shrouded the landscape.There was a little delay, caused by Mrs. Sally winding up the violent exercise of her hysteric fit by fainting dead away. But here Clarissa, even Belinda, accustomed to similar attacks in Madam Masham, in a generation when swooning was brought to a fine art, were competent to aid the squire's wife in cutting laces, unfastening neck ribbon, and applying scent-bottles in order to bring the sufferer round.A further pause was due to Mr. Cyp's announcing, in the middle of the clamour to get on, that he must stay behind with the wounded man. His thigh was shattered, and he was in agony, while he retained sufficient consciousness to protest vehemently, in the midst of his moans against being carried on by the coach—a proceeding which was impracticable, even if Mrs. Sally had not recovered enough to sigh out that she would, for certain, expire if the cruel monster were brought nigh her.A tumult of expostulation was raised against the young man's determination. The highwaymen would return to fetch their fellow, and Mr. Cyprian would fall into their hands.'Possibly,' he answered calmly; 'but if not the man will be left alone without companionship or solace, without an ear to hear his faltering words, or lips to put up a prayer for him on what may be the last night he has to live.'Nobody appeared inclined to share Mr. Cyp's watch, so that Clarissa was impelled to plead in her soft voice, vibrating with emotion:'Don't stay, Mr. Cyp; he is cursing and swearing and utterly impenitent, those who have heard him say. He does not know you. He will not listen to you. What good can you do to him in return for sacrificing your liberty—or—or—your life?'Even Belinda had a word to say to detain him from his quixotic project.'I think, Mr. Cyp, if you give him a cloak to shelter him from the night air, and leave him some food and drink—I am sure Madam Bridges '—naming the squire's wife—' brought both with her in those numerous bags and boxes of hers, against an accident—you will do all that humanity or Christianity requires of you.''You are too good,' he said; and he looked at Clarissa while he addressed the last speaker, 'I am highly honoured that you should care whether I go with you or stay behind. I would not have thought beforehand that I could refuse any request of yours, but here duty calls me, and I cannot be deaf to her voice in order to obey yours. No, not even yours—you must see it. I am in orders, though I have no cure of souls, and am a teacher and not a preacher; as I am a true man, I cannot leave undone what ne'er a Methodist preacher would abandon.'An instinct within Clarissa told her it was useless to urge him farther. But she did venture to remind him, speaking low, as between him and her, when Belinda turned another way:'But you called him a "wretch" when you first drew our attention to him.''Ah!' he said quickly, 'that was in the heat of the fray, when I was full of what he meant to do to you; now he is only a poor lost creature, to be pitied, and, if possible, saved from his evil ways and their consequences. I wish I knew something of surgery.'Fortunately for the peace of those who were forced to leave Mr. Cyp and the patient he had volunteered to watch behind them, before the scattered coach company could be collected and started, an empty return waggon came up. The waggoner consented for a fee to convey the wounded man to the nearest of the outskirts of London, where a doctor could be procured to see to his injuries, and the arm of the law could lay hold of him.There was no more sleeping in the coach, rolling along as if its progress had never been checked; everybody was talking. In the hubbub of tongues, Belinda told Clarissa:'If you don't mind wearing my old shoes, my dear, I vow they ain't altogether a bad pair—not that I can abide would-be saints or bookish men, so that there is no loss where I am concerned. But to think Mr. Cyp should reckon himself a parson, and call to mind more than the Thirty-nine Articles, when so many of the other Dons cast those, and aught else which belongs to them, to the four winds the moment after they've sworn to them! You know very well some of them sit smoking and boozing and brawling in the dining-halls of their colleges from dinner to supper time. I swear Mr. Cyp is too good to live—a world too good for me! Why, Mr. Wingfield is a college tutor, and in orders as well as t'other, but catch him, though he is by twice as many years the senior, as ought to show the example, make up his mind to spend the night in the fields with a wounded footpad, even supposing the rest of the crew were not on his track! But, granted that my most worthy young gentleman may suit a good little girl like you, what will Madam say to the arrangement? She ain't sending you all the way to London just that Mr. Cyp King may fall to your lot; you might have stayed at home, for that matter, if this is all that is to come of it. Have you forgot, miss, that it is against the statutes for a Fellow, let him be ever so young and smart, to marry? He cannot do it any more than a monk can. I fancy a Fellow was a monk originally, when the old colleges were young. If he commit the offence of matrimony, he must e'en resign his Fellowship, and trust for a living for himself and his madam to beggarly, precarious private teaching. Or he must hide his head and hers in a hole of a vicarage, like that from which he sprang, with its crowd of poverty-stricken father and mother and hunger-pinched boys and girls, hanging like a millstone round his neck.''Oh, hush, Belinda!' pleaded Clarissa, in scarlet confusion and distress. 'Nobody is thinking or speaking of marrying; you have no call to drag it into our talk; you do not know who may hear and be vexed by an idle discussion for which there is no reason. As to being poor'—her spirit rising in generous indignation—' we are not all born to wealth, either from being the children of rich fathers or from having nabob uncles in the Indies so good as to leave fortunes which will come to us. But, at least, there is no disgrace in earning a living by our wits, and in doing our best for our own flesh and blood.''Ma foi, child, no!' replied Belinda, who was fond of airing a scanty stock of French, and of seeming to stoop to her listeners as if she were immensely their superior in years and in everything else. 'Who talked of disgrace or of marrying, save to forbid it? Only some of us have mighty long noses.'Belinda's spirits were on the rebound from their recent depression. She gave a series of exasperating little nods, and delivered it as her opinion that it was all very well for Clarissa to stand up for virtuous poverty, but Madam would have her say in the matter, she might depend upon it. And it was notorious she had not a penchant for the gentleman, neither.Clarissa did not need to be told this. She was sufficiently acquainted with the circumstance that, while the young gentleman was a first favourite with Dr. Masham, her patroness cherished a piqued detestation of Mr. Cyp King, because he was so hard-working and sedate for his years and his company that it struck her somehow as a rebuke to her idleness and frivolity. Besides, he had once seen fit to set her right in a gross misquotation from what happened to be the rage of the hour—an anonymous set of witty verses with a local application, of which (to look behind the scenes) the grave and reverend youthful signor happened to be the unsuspected author. Naturally, she could not forgive him for the thankless service.In the end, the affair with the highwaymen was no more than a passing fright—an interesting and appropriate episode, of which the heroes and heroines who took part in it might be a little proud. It figured finely in their first letters to their friends at home, and afforded a lively sensation to Madam and Dr. Masham, among others, as they read Clarissa's carefully-written epistle over their after-supper game of chequers.CHAPTER VIIMISTRESS TERESA AND MISTRESS PATTY BLOUNTTHE ultimate destination of the two girls was not the city, or even the nearest genteel suburb, such as Kensington or Chelsea. It happened to be as far off as Chiswick then was. The three ladies whom Belinda and Clarissa went to visit rented one of the smaller houses on the Mall for a summer residence, and in order to be near a distinguished friend on whose regard the whole family set great store.A confidential servant met the girls in the inn-yard where the coach stopped, and they parted from their companions, including Nat Weekes, and were taken to the Blounts' house in town. There the travellers lay for the night, and Clarissa could not sleep because of the wonder and fascination of the street sounds at midnight, and the early morning 'cries' of which she had often heard.A boat was hired, and the pair, with the trusty maid, were rowed in the summer sunshine by the waterway, the easy distance to Chiswick. The mode of travel was an agreeable variety on the stuffy coach of yesterday; while the travellers were familiar with boating on that link of a chain of what—to those who knew no better—was the great river Thames, which among academic groves was styled the Isis. Of course Clarissa and Belinda were fond of their rural Isis, but what was the Isis in comparison to this splendid Thames, with its rich load of barges and wherries and boats of every description, some of them already filled with gay company bound for a long day's pleasure.'It is London on the water!' cried Clarissa joyously. 'And see,' as they neared Chiswick, and looked out on the green fields, the waving trees, and the flowers in the garden, 'we are to have both country and town in one for the most delectable of marvels.''And we are not too far from the shops and the play-houses,' Belinda made the anxious amendment.The Blounts were the widow and daughters of Squire Blount of Maple Durham, near Windsor. They were Roman Catholics, and their form of religion had produced several results. It had isolated them from their Protestant neighbours, while it had at the same time drawn closer the bonds between them and the few families in the vicinity who, like the Blounts, bore the reproach of being Papists. It sent the girls to France for their education, and, though it was received in a convent school, it brought them back finished women of the world and coquettes of the first water. At Maple Durham the circumstances of the family had been fairly good, but on the death of the elder Mr. Blount his only son succeeded to the property. He had taken to himself a wife, and, as a necessary consequence, his mother and sisters were cast upon the world with a scanty income. They were thenceforth to figure among the victims of what is often the most cruel of all poverties—genteel poverty. They had qualifications for facing it, however; that is, Teresa and Patty had, for the mother was simply a mild, limp woman whom her daughters ruled, over whom Teresa in particular, with the double facilities of an ultra-devout Catholic and an ardent lover of society and social success, domineered. The sisters were able tacticians, full of resource, dauntless, perhaps just a little brazen in the pursuit of their aims, and with at least one firm friend possessed of considerable influence.It was the Blounts' determination to have a share in Belinda's prosperity which caused them the moment they heard of it, to remember the slight relationship between them, and write and invite her, and later her friend, to pay a visit to London by the water at Chiswick. The Blounts would scorn to accept payment for board from their guests, but they could manage to make a profit in other ways, hanging on with grim tenacity to the skirts of the great world with which they were no longer on anything like equal terms. Any additional attraction to the little house on the Mall, which not infrequently saw fine company crowded within its bounds, was a clear gain. And what attraction could surpass that of a young beauty and 'fortune' in one small person? As to Clarissa, she was accepted as a mere unavoidable adjunct, a complimentary baffling blind to fortune-hunters with empty pockets, and to slanderous tongues which pretended that the Blounts were time-serving, grasping, fain to avail themselves of humanity's weaknesses.All this was not against an honest enough conviction on the Blounts' side that they could and would give the two girls a fair equivalent for the benefit their presence might be supposed to confer on their entertainers. The couple should mix for the period of their stay in the best society, should get a glimpse of the great gay world; and what else could the candidates for knowledge ask or expect?Neither did the self-interest at the bottom of the sudden friendship prevent Mistress Patty, who was the kindlier and naturally more amiable of the sisters, from feeling a genuine interest, likely to ripen into an affectionate regard, for the visitors.Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty were past their early youth when Belinda and Clarissa first knew them. Neither of the two had any notable claim to personal charms, except that Teresa's stature was commanding and her nose Roman, and Patty's blue eyes were laughing while her plump hands were small and white.But the absence of tender youth and pronounced beauty in the ladies was of the less consequence since they had, in a pre-eminent degree, the most approved attribute of the time. Their Parisian education had given them—themselves, their clothes, their rooms—that last touch of exquisite neatness, easy grace, refined taste, which are all included in the old-fashioned word 'elegance' The pinching and scraping to which the ladies were compelled were not outwardly visible in their dress, their furniture, their practice. For they went to as many routs and plays and water-parties, hired as many sedan-chairs and pleasure boats—nay, gave as many choice little dinners, teas and suppers—as their associates of highest rank and greatest wealth. How the Blounts did it they alone could have told. Certainly, amidst the lavish display and riotous excess which often prevailed in those far-away days, side by side with the prodigality, though mostly in the background, marched a thrifty economy, and a little money then went much farther than it goes now. If the Blounts, in spite of cleverness, ran into debt and fell into the hands of the Jews, they managed the grievous situation as well as they managed everything else. There was no explosion, no crisis, their lives went on as before, only it did come to light that an old friend settled upon Mistress Teresa an income of forty pounds a year for six years. That looked as if the family straits were com-municated, perforce under the seal of strictest secrecy, to some of the intimate available cronies who helped to relieve them.The dainty establishment and its daintier mistresses were an astonishing revelation to their guests—one of whom had fancied herself a mirror of fashion. Belinda's self-confidence was abashed when she looked round the pretty, cosy little river-parlour—luxurious as it seemed to her, with its Indian screen, its well-filled bookcase, its fauteuils and footstools, its French engravings, its beau-pot of fragrant flowers, its cabinet of glittering coins, its case of brilliant tropical birds and butterflies. She turned from the room to its occupants, receiving the arrivals with gracious cordiality, to find them as perfect as their belongings. It might all be very superficial, the grain beneath might be coarse enough, but how were unsophisticated girls to guess it? There was the elder lady, dressed by her daughters in the fine suitability of rich sober silk and lace hood. There were the younger women in the perfect order—which only French breeding could combine with a certain studied negligence—of their gauzy gowns, their ruffles, their streaming ribbons, their piled-up hair from which a perfumed ringlet or two strayed to their shoulders. Their very muslin aprons and mittens were like those of nobody else whom Belinda and Clarissa had ever seen.'La! Clarissa!' exclaimed Belinda, speaking humbly, almost dejectedly, when the two had been conducted to their bedroom.It may be said, in passing, that it was by no means on a par with the sitting-room. People only used their bed-closets then to sleep in, and were not particular with regard to the surroundings in which they slept. The bedroom at Chis-wick was even barer and more primitive than Oxford bedrooms. For, whatever French customs the Blount sisters had borrowed, they had stopped short of an alcove and a great bed, on which the mistress of the house received her company, in an otherwise highly decorated public room.'Ain't these Blount ladies fine?' resumed Belinda. 'I feel like a farmer's wench or a milkmaid beside them. Whatever shall we do to grow like them?'Mistress Teresa and her sister were deeply interested in the episode of the highwaymen as an item in the girls' journey the day before, and proceeded with lively eloquence to describe the various highwaymen whose acquaintance the ladies had made—not on the road, but in their prison cells. For it was an established custom for women of fashion to visit the criminals, in order to listen to their exciting adventures, detailed by their own graceless lips. One can imagine the taste—not altogether dissimilar from that of the fine gentlemen who had a passion for witnessing executions—to have been a vivid and vigorous version of the enjoyment experienced by a certain class of reader in the perusal of a violently sensational novel.'The gentlemen of the road ain't always mere clerks and shopmen,' explained Mistress Patty, making the sole apology for her predilection which she felt it incumbent upon her to make.'Oh, I know,' asserted Belinda, eager to display her knowledge. 'We had two miserable fellows of undergraduates, who were found guilty of highway robbery, swinging on the gallows at Holywell a year ago. Clarissa here cannot pass the spot without the twitters to this day.''Well,' said Clarissa in modest excuse for her weakness, 'I might have had a brother of their age, as poor as myself, betrayed into crime, to break my heart over.''True, ma'am,' Mistress Patty backed her, and went on regretfully: 'They are often monstrous gallant fellows, though they have broken the law and are justly under sentence of death.'Mistress Teresa began her young visitors' education the very next day. She had a coach for them and herself, and carried them to London, where Clarissa was impressed by the Tower, the Abbey, and St. Paul's; and Belinda was enchanted with the Mall, Birdcage Walk, and Bond Street. There, in spite of the Oxford rusticity that had been forced upon Belinda's notice, which she was wild to rectify, several of the dandies of Mistress Teresa's acquaintance—resplendent in their brocade coats, their laced hats, the last fashion in tie wigs and the amber-headed canes the gentlemen flourished—were fain to join the party and to ignore any defect in the commodes the girls wore, because of the fair young faces they surmounted.Great things were in the air for the time to come—ridottos, auctions, plays, Ranelagh or Vauxhall, a glimpse of the beautiful Princess of Wales as she entered or quitted Leicester House. For that matter, Belinda, deeply dyed with the Tory politics of Oxford, did not hold her to be the real Princess, and even Clarissa, more liberal, had her doubts. But at least Caroline was a princess, albeit a German one, beautiful and witty, and as such was not to be met every day. There was to be a succession of drums; and when the delights of town began to pall, recourse was to be had to a water-party, with a farther descent into the country, for a dance on the green of some village, the villagers staring goggle-eyed at the eccentricities of the gentlefolks.Docile as the guests were, and prepared to be enchanted with all the gaieties got up in their honour, the girls felt bound to speak a word occasionally for the city of towers in its eclipse—to cite Paradise Garden with its boxed retreats divided by privet hedges, down by the river, where private parties or tête-à-tête couples could sup in privacy after they were tired of strolling in the public walks. Why, it was a smaller Ranelagh!As for the physic gardens at Chelsea, of which Londoners thought so much—Oxford people had physic gardens of their own, well-nigh as good, on this side of the Pettypont over the Cherwell, beyond Magdalen.But generally the strangers were too overwhelmed with admiration of the sights to which they were introduced to make any comparison.Kettle-drums were not wanted for the enliven-ment afforded by the continuous company. Not only did the windows of the house on Chiswick Mall look out on the river—multitudinously thronged in comparison with the Oxford rivers—a stream of visitors endlessly flowing like the river itself, usually brought by some river-craft, circulated without pause through the pretty sitting-room. Morning, noon, and night 'dear creatures' of women and 'smart beaux' of men—men of fashion all, if not all peers of the realm, with peers among them both young and old—made their appearance. They sat down to a déjeuner à la fourchette, or a council to dispose of this or that bit of booksellers' gossip—no less than of society scandal, intermitting their arguments to refresh themselves with dishes of tea—in which nutmeg was grated—or of frothed chocolate. A card-table was brought in for a round game of basset or ombre. Mrs. Blount's work-table was pulled forward to accommodate two players at écarté or piquet, in which Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty were proficient. A supper-table was improvised, on which cold English roast beef kept a warm French fricassee in countenance, and Parisian salads supported Dutch cheese and Chiswick gooseberry-fool. The whole wound up with spiced claret-cup and a steaming bowl of rum punch.Then was the season of toasts and sentiments, songs and glees. It was likewise the occasion for one or two gentlemen musically and romantically inclined, stealing out to their boat, chained to the river stairs, and sending up a serenade with a flute and flageolet accompaniment from the water, on which a young moon was casting a shimmering light. Other boats would stop at the sound, form into line, join in the melody, and glide past in a slow procession, thrilling and vibrating in harmony.It would seem that the Blounts kept a summer house at Chiswick for the express purpose of regaling their friends with perpetually recurring fétes champêtres in miniature.The talk of these gatherings was not the talk of Oxford. Yet Oxford was supposed to be the home of learning, the seat of all that was most intellectual in the three kingdoms. But it was learning of a heavy and profound description, dealing with Greek quantities and Latin periods, with Attic philosophies, scientific subtleties, high and dry divinity of the schools—not of a human or a spiritual origin—each and all of them tabooed to women, unless with rare exceptions. Even when the more frivolous spirits at Oxford attempted to play at writing sonnets to ladies' eyebrows, or concocting epigrams and quips, the execution was ponderous, the coarseness was gross. The provincial wit was halting in comparison with the style—so artful that it resembled nature—with the airy improprieties, the repartees like lightning flashes that distinguished the town muse, the town story-teller, the town speaker. Instead of busying itself mainly, as in the case of genuine students and educated men, with ancient histories, classic dramas, political pamphlets, local squabbles, the town intellect carried women's nimble brains with it in dwelling fondly on the poems of Dryden and Pope and Prior, on Swift's 'Tale of a Tub,' and the recently published adventures of Robinson Crusoe on his desert island. The conversation was infinitely lighter and brighter and more within the girls' comprehension. The discussions were not always confined to the literature of the day, though they were apt to turn in that direction. They skimmed over the surface of politics more cleverly and more cautiously than was done at Oxford. Nobody in London drank King James's health in the common-room publicity with which the Heads and Fellows of some of the colleges at Oxford defied the Whig Government. The speakers treated both music and art with considerable ability and fulness, and with the dexterity which made the most of their acquaintance with the subjects in hand. The two novices had never before heard the merits of certain concert pieces and new operas thrashed out as if they were matters of vital importance, like the last comedy of Mr. Vanbrugh or the finest tragedy of Mr. Addison. The pictures which had been in King Charles the Martyr's possession, and been recovered after their dispersion by the instrumentality of Sir Godfrey Kneller, were duly summed up and commented upon, though not many of the speakers knew them, where they hung in the palaces, by more than hearsay. And few prints existed of them, or of the pictures Rubens and Vandyck had painted for the great noblemen's houses, of which Holbein, long before his brother artists, had left examples at Oxford. These Clarissa, when she ventured to raise her voice among those of the accomplished coterie, was proud to prompt Belinda to mention. French prints were all the vogue then, but English engraving was beginning to assert itself, and Clarissa heard the name of a young man, one William Hogarth, who had lately been an apprentice to a silversmith, but was now working in copper, and had done some prodigiously creditable plates for his master.Another odd experience for Clarissa and Belinda was to hear Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty talking aside to each other in French as fast as their tongues would wag, and with a liquid accent which, in its very delicacy and precision, would have rendered the language, even if they had carefully studied it, incomprehensible to them.Belinda listened in consternation. 'I cannot comprehend a single word,' she complained in her bewilderment; 'I could not speak like that to save my life. Yet, sure, you have heard, Clarissa, how many compliments I have had paid to me on my French phrases.''My dear,' said Mrs. Blount placidly, 'I have gone to France with my girls and stayed for months at a time in the country, but never a word did I pick up of their queer lingo. I'm used to it, but it do sound outlandish, even in the mouths of my Tessie and Patty.'CHAPTER VIIITHE GREAT LITTLE POET AND HIS MOTHERCLARISSA preferred Mistress Patty to Mistress Teresa, while with Belinda it was the other way. Mistress Teresa's was the dominant spirit, no doubt. Everyone had to dance to her piping—she ruled alike mother and sister—with but one exception where Mistress Patty was concerned. Teresa Blount was a restless, ardent woman, whether in going beyond the penances prescribed by her priest, or in surrendering herself to the whirling eddies of London dissipation. There was something different in Mistress Patty—woman of the world though she was—something gentler and more restful, pointing to half-submerged natural qualities which were not to be found in Mistress Teresa's harder, more passionate composition. Sometimes when Clarissa—in spite of her girlish love of gaiety—was forced to see that the Blounts' life was very much of a racket, and when she felt wearied and fretted by it, she would turn to Mistress Patty, who would take her out to help her to feed her poultry in the back-yard or to take a stroll on the Mall, just as they sat in the house, without troubling to put on hat or spencer, only holding up their fans before their faces when a passer-by stared too boldly, or the sun in the sky blazed too rudely for their complexions. Or Mistress Patty would call to the black page-boy, who was always grinning and showing his white teeth, to fetch them a pair of boat-cloaks, and they would go out on the water by their two selves. Then she would be quietly entertaining for the gratification of her young companion, while the bons-mots and repartees that were constantly passing in her circle, which Mistress Patty would repeat for Clarissa's benefit, were delivered with a less strong spice of mockery and irony than they would have had on Mistress Teresa's lips.One day a question was bandied between the two sisters, not in the French tongue, which they employed with such finish and glibness, but in English so plain and so audible that the guests' ears could not avoid hearing it.'Do you think he would mind, Tessie?' inquired Mistress Patty anxiously, and yet with a look as if she had no great expectation of a satisfactory answer. 'I believe he would rather like to have a report of his place conveyed to Oxford; and it would be such a great thing for the girls to be able to say that they had been taken to see him. Sure, they might boast of it all their lives.''You know best, Patty,' answered Mistress Teresa coldly, holding her high head, as it struck the lookers-on, a couple of inches higher. 'It is your business, not mine. If it had occurred to me, I might have demurred at the presumption of intruding upon him, but the proposal is yours, and no doubt you have warrant for making it.'There was a faint but perceptible sneer in Mistress Teresa's high-pitched voice, and Mistress Patty as manifestly flinched at the sound. She recovered herself, however, though with an effort, and addressed the girls:'Belinda and Clarissa, what do you think? I am going to carry you to Twickenham to wait on the great Mr. Pope and his mother—I hope you appreciate the honour.''Oh, I have seen the little poet in Oxford, when he was staying with his friends the Harcourts at Stanton Harcourt!' cried Belinda not very enthusiastically. 'Will he write some verses on our visit, and give us them to keep, Mistress Patty?'Mistress Patty shook her head. 'That is as it may be. He don't care to see strangers always, so many flock to have speech with him, and, in place of showing favour to women, he is often put out by them.''Because of his humps—back and fore—his leaning to one side, and his sparrow legs, which may betray you into a guffaw of laughter if you don't take care,' said Mistress Teresa with malicious minuteness.'Never!' cried Mistress Patty indignantly, her cheeks flaming up, her blue eyes—usually tranquil like her mother's—sparkling with shocked anger. 'If I could bring myself to think——''Oh, no, no, Mistress Patty!' Clarissa, who did not often put herself forward, felt impelled to proclaim. She had given a little gasp; she was so overpowered with hearing the honour and privilege which was to befall them; and then to have it hinted that she and Belinda would be so unfeeling, so barbarous, as to laugh —not to say at a poor gentleman's infirmity, but at the affliction meted out to a great man, to the finest poet of his day. 'We should be proud to be suffered to enter his presence and make our curtseys to him; as you say, we may boast of it to the end of our lives. I do not set up to be a judge of books, like you and your friends, ma'am, but I have read the lovely words he wrote on the pair of true lovers slain together by the lightning in the hayfield, in the thunderstorm at Stanton Harcourt.'Mistress Patty was reassured at once.'There, child, don't say you haven't taste, and a kind heart besides; and so has Belinda, too, I make no question. 'Tis something to have it in my power to do you the service. I've known Mr. Pope since he and Tessie and I were children together; our fathers and mothers were friends when we abode at Maple Durham and the Popes were at Binfield in Windsor Forest. And when folk say he is changed since he was no more than the sickly, book-loving son of a retired city merchant, as is now a famous man with the whole world running at his heels, I tell 'em, "'Pon my honour, ladies and gentlemen, you don't know him a bit. Ask his old mother whom he cherishes, or his nurse that short-coated him and taught him to walk, or his former real friends, and you'll hear another tale.''Epitaphs are not in my way,' remarked Belinda; 'but I've read his "Rape of the Lock "in Lintot's Miscellanies, written all about the theft of a curl from one Mistress Arabella Fermor by her lover, whom, I was told, she forgave and married afterwards. It was recalling what was said of the story that put it into my head to think he might compose a few lines for us to write and keep in our pocket-books. "The Rape of the Lock" was vastly entertaining, and showed Mr. Pope was familiar with the usages of genteel households.''No household is too genteel for Mr. Pope, miss, nor no company beyond his measure,' pronounced Mistress Patty, still jealous for the dignity of her distinguished friend.'Oh, my sister Patty holds Mr. Pope above the Prince of Wales and the King's self, and she always resents a slight to him as if he was her private property!' Again there was a hint of spitefulness in Mistress Teresa's observation.Mistress Patty took no notice of it, beyond looking with wistful fixedness in her elder sister's face. She went on with her effort to impress the girls with the position Mr. Pope had attained to."Tis as like as not, when we reach Twickenham, we'll find my Lord Amherst or my Lord Bolingbroke bearing him company in one of his arbours.''Oh, my Lord Amherst is an old acquaintance of mine!' asserted Belinda, with great promptness and a trifle of pert conceit. 'He was presented to me, and I stood up with him in a country dance, at one of our Oxford balls. We are not quite Hottentots down there, Mistress Patty.''I never said you were,' declared Mistress Patty, a little taken aback by her visitor's pretensions, and provoked to repay her in her own coin. 'And I suppose you have been taken in to dinner by my Lord Bolingbroke, one of the foremost statesmen of the recent reign?''Lord, no!' cried Belinda flippantly; 'what should I have to do with an old gentleman, a Minister of the late Queen's according to your own tale, ma'am?''He and my Lord Oxford were friends—or hall I say foes?—of my aunt Abigail's,' said Clarissa, half to herself.All the way to Twickenham, to which the three ladies were driven, Clarissa kept regretting that he was not to have the opportunity which she and Belinda were enjoying, to which he was far better entitled, of which he would have made much more. Then he was Mr. Cyp King. He had business in town which was detaining and occupying him a good deal, while the cost and loss of time involved in a journey to and from Chiswick meant something to a poor, upright, busy young fellow. It meant absolutely nothing to the selfish, idle spendthrifts of quality who made parties and took their pleasure by river or by road, leaving the payment to the people who served them, and dared not press their claims at the risk of losing sundry chances in the far future.But the gentleman's remissness in paying his respects to the young ladies who had been put partly in his care in travelling up to London (it had given rise to both silent, pained wonder and outspoken, careless conjecture where Clarissa and Belinda were concerned) was due rather to his modesty than to his prudence. And his modesty was not without cause to be up in arms in its defence, for when he did come Mistress Teresa had coolly taken the matter into her own hands. If she did not send Mr. Cyp off with a flea in his ear for his pains, she dealt him but a scurvy welcome, utterly lacking in warmth or in any invitation to repeat his visit. This proceeding on the part of the ruling power in the house hurt and dismayed Clarissa; it discomforted Belinda. She considered the affair as half hers, and she liked to manage her own affairs, particularly where the dismissal of attendant admirers—even if they had withdrawn from her court, and betrayed a strong inclination to attach themselves to that of Clarissa—was in question. Mistress Teresa did not mind her guests' disapproval in the least, while she was laying herself out to afford them all the advantages in her power. She regarded it as part of her duty to keep undesirable swains at a distance. She was not going to have a poor university Fellow come about the girls. He would either break their hearts by keeping his Fellowship and leaving them in the lurch unwed, or by giving up his Fellowship and marrying one of them to poverty and drudgery as the wife of a Vicar without private means, or as the housekeeper to a toiling schoolmaster. She had the interests of the foolish young things at heart. She had also her own interest, and that of her mother and 

sister Patty to think of. She was aware that the two visitors—especially Belinda, with her fortune and her saucy liveliness in addition to her fresh, fair beauty—formed a considerable addition to the attractions of the house on Chiswick Mall. To keep up the attractions, so that the place should continue the chosen resort of the cream of the great world, was the aim and struggle of Teresa's days. How hard a struggle it was when she and Patty had grown passée, and their mother would soon fall into her dotage, only Teresa could, but never would, confess. For this object Teresa, even while keenly susceptible to other influences, had manipulated the family friendship with Mr. Pope, and manœuvred so that his reputation and their intimacy of ancient standing should bring grist to the mill of her social ambition.In like manner Belinda, if she made a great match and were properly grateful to the friends who had brought it about, should help the Blounts if their popularity were on the wane, which was almost inevitable with new-comers on the scene, new aspirants to be leaders of society. There was less chance of Clarissa Hill fortifying or advancing the Blounts' position; still, one never knew beforehand. There were people who were irresistibly drawn to these quiet, demure misses—witness the extraordinary success of Clarissa's sly aunt Abigail. There were men sufficiently well-to-do to look over the absence of a portion. The child was not a bit hard-favoured; she was almost as comely as her friend Belinda Annesley, with a softly retiring, lilylike charm peculiar to herself. No, Clarissa Hill was not near to a forlorn hope, though if Mistress Teresa got her off as well as Belinda, and disposed of her also to anything like signal advantage, her thanks should be double and treble those of the other—the beauty and the fortune in one—who was quite cut out to make a dash, whose rustic soupçon of clumsiness and awkwardness would be cured by time. Only she must not interlard her English speech with horribly mispronounced French words—no, not to save her life—else her high estate would be in deadly peril. What if 'Old Q.' or Selwyn or a host of others overheard her? It would set their teeth on edge and turn the very hair of their wigs white, so that they should have no more need of powder; it would bring down a ban upon her, which would never be lifted off.It was as a kind of indemnification to Mr. Cyp for the treatment he had received an innocent indemnification unknown to him and only half confessed to herself, that Clarissa kept wishing he were in her place: he was so much more worthy to fill it. He was greatly taken with Mr. Pope's verses; she had heard him praising them to Dr. Masham. Though he would not allow that the English poet's translation of Homer was equal to the original, he was much struck by an early sketch of the 'Essay on Man.' Oh yes, if Mistress Teresa had but behaved more friendly, it should have been Mr. Cyp, and not Clarissa, who was to be brought into the company of the great poet of the day; indeed, there were enthusiasts who held that he was the first English poet of any day. His verse was exquisitely turned, finely polished, full of point; his satire bit to the bone. He lacked the rude ruggedness of Shakespeare, the elaborate scholarliness of Milton, the blatant robustness of Dryden; but he had gifts of lucid, gem-like brightness, wit, passion, particularly his own, worth them all.Mr. Pope was unaccompanied by any of his aristocratic friends when the ladies encountered him in his grounds in which he took delight. Oh, the pitifulness of that stunted, hump-backed backed figure, which had difficulty in holding itself upright, to which God had given so big a brain, yet not big enough to escape being warped and embittered by the denial of man's common heritage, a strong, healthy, symmetrical body! Oh, the sadness of the long, pale, worn face, delicate as a woman's, with the noble forehead and the lustrous eyes. The forehead was fretted with peevish discontent and bootless rage against destiny; the eyes were clouded with jealous distrust of mankind. They had sidelong, shifty glances which betrayed the crafty cunning of the weaker animals; when they stood at bay, they blazed with malice and all uncharitableness, degenerating into a vixenish fury of spite as wretchedly mean as it was wellnigh crazy.But Pope amidst his summer gardens and lawns was always in his least morbid mood. He was glad to see Mistress Patty, who held a high place in those kindlier affections of his, which were as tenacious as they were limited. As a rule, he shrank from strangers, and his attitude towards women in general was of a dubious and fitful character, full of half-mocking compliments on the one hand, passing suddenly on the other into fierce scorn and dogged hatred. No English poet, not even Byron has written such scathing lampoons, such cynical tirades against women, as were penned by Pope. But he had his relentings; the fresh, artless girlhood of two of his visitors disarmed his criticism, while his rampant vanity was soothed by Belinda's frank homage.'Oh, sir, this is an honour! If I could only tie your shoe, I would be uplifted to the skies.' And the deep reverence of Clarissa's awed silence touched him even more nearly.He volunteered to show them his little hermitage while Mistress Patty, who was no walker, went in to sit with her ancient friend and former neighbour, the poet's aged mother.The grounds were like the man, as what chosen and prized indulgence, what hobby of hobbies persisted in, does not acquire something of the mould and colouring of the mind which has created it? Pope loved shadows, mysteries and surprises; therefore his great grass-plots merged into thick woods surrounding and sheltering the whole spot. (Did the spreading, umbrageous trees help to remind him of the giant oaks and elms with which he was familiar in his happier boyhood, when, partly ignorant of his deformity, partly ignoring it, in the safety and love of home, he wandered into the forest to lie at ease under the sheltering boughs, and devour Spenser's 'Faërie Queene'?) Within the girdle of the wood lay tortuous green mazes and lawns—the man himself was tortuous—opening the one out of the other when least expected, so as to awaken a cry of wonder just as the spectator thought the chain was ended, only to find himself in a new verdant vista leading to a new flowery roundel, half hidden by its encircling fringe of hawthorns and lilacs, sweetbriars, medlars and quinces, in which the nightingale ran riot under the moon, after the concert of blackbirds and thrushes had come to a close. Between the upper and the farthest down lawn, reflecting itself in the river, ran the famous grotto, cool on the hottest day, contrived by means of bits of glass ingeniously let into the sides to form an underground panorama reflecting the landscape without, and freely decorated with snowy pink-lipped or purple-lined shells and glittering fragments of spar. Pope enjoyed the astonishment and admiration which what was considered then a pretty piece of art and a charming embellishment to a garden, aroused in the novices to whom he displayed the marvel.Introduced into the house, Clarissa and Belinda found Mistress Patty in a comfortable sitting-room, chatting cheerfully to a venerable lady in a warm shoulder cape and hood. Her eyes lit up with pride and tenderness when they fell on Pope, and his eyes softened indescribably as he returned the look, for the irritable, moody, suspicious man was the best of sons.'Hey, mother!' he challenged her gaily, 'how many good old stories have you and Patty Blount there not gone through since I have been doing my duty showing these young baggages my walks and seats and favourite parterres?' Then, as her laugh ended in a cough, he struggled to his feet hastily and crossed the room to examine the window behind her. 'Plague upon this draught!' he cried; 'I believe it penetrates through the glass itself, be the sash closed ever so tight. We must have your chair lifted, mother.'Mistress Patty poured out the strong coffee which was her host's chosen refreshment, and told the girls to nibble away at the biscuits—girls were always hungry, before the coach drew up at the door.By an adroit manœuvre, Pope secured the seat next Mistress Patty, while the gist of the matter was that there was not the smallest occasion for artifice. As master of the house he could take any place he pleased without objection—least of all from gentle Mrs. Pope. But the poor great man was so accustomed to dissemble and deceive, that plots like storms in a teacup had become as the breath of his nostrils. He could not be straightforward though he tried. At Mistress Patty's elbow he kept addressing her in the idly gallant phrases and extravagant compliments which formed a great part of the conversation of the men of parts to the women in their generation. Had she made a compact with Phœbus not to spoil the lilies and roses in her cheeks when she went out to feed her chickens in the back-yard, as one of the blooming witches he had been escorting had told him she did. He knew it was her practice, for he had been granted more than once—as she might remember—the privilege and honour of assisting her to scatter the crumbs? Or was Phœbus jealous of the chickens and minded to slay them at one stroke?Mistress Patty shook her head incredulously. She had done the same when he had hinted to her, in the very manner in which he had implied the like untruth to one half of the fine ladies of his acquaintance, that the allusion to a woman's charms in the eloquent line of one of his most popular pieces was meant for her—Mistress Patty. A flush rose in her cheek nevertheless, and her pretty blue eyes were raised to his half wistfully, half reproachfully.At this he drew himself up, and, with a spice of mischief in his air, began to inquire very particularly for Mistress Teresa, as if the answers to his questions were of special moment to him. Then the flush passed from Mistress Patty's face till it looked faded under its rouge, and her smiling lips quivered slightly.Watching the pair while Belinda prattled to the old lady, and recalling some chance words Clarissa had heard and stored, because everything which concerned the great poet was of exceptional interest, she was forced to credit that Pope professed—more openly than usual for him—a lively platonic attachment for each sister in turn, and, thus playing with edge-tools where women were concerned, requited the Blounts' constant friendship by sowing division and discord between Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty.Mistress Patty seemed tired and was silent during the first part of the drive back to Chiswick, but when some mention was made between the girls of the fact that Mr. Pope's fame did not appear to have cooled his homely affection for his mother, the elder woman brightened up and burst out enthusiastically:'Yes, indeed, he is as good as gold to her; and what do you think she told me when we were alone together? He is gratifying her by letting her think she is helping him in his Homer. He gives her some of the pages to copy, and, oh, my dears, you cannot fancy what her spelling is like! She never spells the same word twice in the same fashion—she writes "leave" at one moment "leve," and at the next "leeve"; and "service" now "sirvis," now "servos." She alters the names of persons and places, which she ought to have known perfectly well, in the oddest style. Thus I have seen her put our old house, Maple Durham, which she hath visited many a time, "Maypell Dorum." Won't the printers have a task in correcting her mistakes? But her son's heart is in the right place if his temper is not to parry with, and his being at the mercy of every scoffing fool who can make game of his poor misshapen body, and at the same time can take advantage of his gifts, has thrown him back upon guile and spleen for his defence.** Dr. Johnson's statement that Patty Blount—to whose womanly devotion Pope clung for solace in the end, while he bequeathed to her the greater part of his fortune—neglected and forsook him in his last days, is now viewed as an unfounded aspersion.CHAPTER IXANOTHER GRANDE DAME'SHE is coming, Patty; she has taken a house at Twickenham, near the Popes. He has got her to sit to Kneller for her portrait. They have renewed their old friendship, broken off by her stay in Turkey. If we can only get her to come to us, she will be the making of our drums and suppers. She is more run after than anybody else in town. She is a beauty and a wit of the first water: I tell you we're in luck; she'll be no end of an acquisition.'The speaker was Mistress Teresa, worked up into a fine glow of satisfaction, so that she was both effusive and confidential for the moment.Mistress Patty was not altogether sympathetic in the great good fortune which was bringing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu into the Blounts' neighbourhood.'Hum!' she said doubtfully, 'I don't like her Tessie. She is all head; she has no heart. If she takes us up, she will throw us over without a scruple whenever it suits her. Her tongue may be witty, but it is also nasty. Nothing and nobody remains sacred to her. I know her beauty and rank and wit have all taken Pope by storm. He has an immense opinion of her taste and judgment. He even submits his verses to her. But I believe, though she calls herself his friend, she worries and torments him, until some day she will turn upon him and madden him.''Tut, tut, Patty! what have we to do with that? We are mighty squeamish, and censorious too, when we apprehend a rival in somebody's good graces. Why, if Lady Mary has brought back a cure for the small-pox all the way from Constantinople in her snuff-box, she will be looked upon as a public benefactress, and will be more the go than ever. Lady Mordaunt writ t'other day that her ladyship has tried the practice on her own little son, and he has come through it all right, and will now be fenced against the disease. The Princess of Wales talks of adopting the plan for her younger children. Princess Anne and another of the elder Princesses have already had the pox. It is all fudge about Lady Mary's taking us up and throwing us over at any moment. We'll make her acquaintance in the easiest manner possible through her friend Pope, and the terms on which they stand to each other are too cordial, just at present, for her to affront him by being in haste to give us the cut direct. We should be two born idiots not to avail ourselves of the advantage. Once introduced to her, trust me for ingratiating myself and making myself necessary to her. Only, if you should come across her, and I am not by, be in readiness, Patty, to do the agreeable to her.'Mistress Patty made rather a wry face, but she gave in and acquiesced. She had been so brought up in the idea that any overturn of the somewhat precarious footing which the Blounts held in the great world, any decrease in the constant round of company of which they contrived to be the centre, would be an overwhelming misfortune, that the fear of the calamity had penetrated her through and through and overpowered all other considerations. As well be out of the world as out of society. That she and Tessie should sink into two obscure, neglected, forlorn old women was an end which Mistress Patty dared not contemplate. Sooner than face its approach she would be a party to any number of petty ruses and barefaced stratagems.Clarissa and Belinda were on the qui vive to see this other grande dame, whose despotism was not that of a reigning Queen's favourite, but who reigned supreme by her own unapproachable personality.The girls had not long to wait. Mistress Tessie, having managed to encounter Lady Mary in Pope's grounds, called on her in her own house, was received graciously, and presently the great lady paid a return visit to Chiswick Mall. Surely it was something—it was much for Clarissa and Belinda—to be in the same room with the greatest, most observant and intelligent traveller of her generation; with the boldest advocate of grasping the horrible nettle of small-pox by inviting a mild attack of the disease, in order to be proof against its virulence for the natural term of man's life; with the greatest beauty of her time in this or in any other country.Lady Mary's tall, stately presence seemed at once to fill the crowded, overfurnished, over-decorated little sitting-room, and to usurp every-body's attention, while she was too secure of her own superlative qualities, too careless of public opinion, to come in with a rush and a dash, far less to dream of posing for the benefit of the circle in which she found herself. She entered it very quietly, sat down with the greatest simplicity between Mistress Blount and Mistress Teresa, and devoted her speech to them as if she was perfectly content with them for an audience and desired no other. Yet at the same moment she was the mark for every eye and ear within those walls, though the identity at which this ruck of quality and fashion suddenly paused and gaped was only recognised by a select few. How beautiful she was and how strangely dressed! For she was a law to herself in dress as well as in much else. When all the rest of the world were in hoops and long, stiffly-whaleboned waists, Lady Mary chose to appear in part of the Turkish dress in which she had herself painted. She wore a long, loose blue silk jacket and vest, with a sash striped in red, blue, and gold colour, a short, straight, primrose-coloured skirt, and a white turban. Her beauty was nearly perfect in harmony of feature and complexion—at once so glowing and so delicate in the glow that it defied sun and wind, and dared tan, or even a freckle or two, to reduce it to the level of other women's complexions. The flaws lay in the hard brilliance and absolute coldness of the eyes, and in the sinuous tendency present in the fine thin lips.Clarissa inevitably compared Lady Mary to the only other grande dame she had seen—Duchess Sarah at Blenheim. The last, in her deshabille, sank into an unlettered, uncultured rustic—an acknowledged randy to boot—when placed side by side with the highly-instructed, highly-accomplished, high-born beauty. She had taught herself much of the current knowledge of the period, including a good deal of Latin and a little Greek. Her wit was as keen as steel, while she could wield it with all the more effect that, in spite of her vivacity and energy, her coolness always remained unruffled. Her utter indifference to what had to do—not with the intellect—not with political power—not with large public interests, but with private personal feelings, was unassailable.Clarissa would have liked to compare, not the persons alone, but the characters and the fortunes of two of the historical women whose paths she was destined to cross; but she had not the materials for the comparison, she could not see beyond the little hour of her day, she had to leave to posterity the analysis she longed to make. She could not read these two famous women's careers from the beginning to the close. She could only guess that Sarah Jennings, her remote kinswoman, who had not started in life by rebellion against parental authority, who had returned young John Churchill's love and sacrificed for it the youthful ambition which might have accepted one or other of the splendid matches laid at her feet, who had been true to him in spite of her unruly temper, labouring to promote his interest and honour in life, revering his memory in death, who had loved and mourned the young son whom God had taken from her, virago though she might be, was honest to the backbone.Of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Clarissa knew still less, but for a time she was prominent among the girl's surroundings, and even exerted some influence over her doings and Belinda's. That circumstance, in addition to Lady Mary's striking face and figure, in which there was so much nobility and so little humanity, made a deep and lasting impression on Clarissa's mind. She listened with interest to all she heard of 

her in after-years. She read with avidity one of those lively, graphic letters from Turkey circulated in manuscript among the writer's friends, which established her reputation as a traveller and author. In the course of time fragments of a wonderful woman's history, which stood out apart from the histories of most women, reached Clarissa. She heard how the supercilious curl of the fine lips had dissolved the literary friendship with Pope, and transformed it into so fierce an enmity that, with pens dipped in gall, they proclaimed their mutual scorn and hatred—not to their contemporaries alone, but to readers in other generations, who shrink back from the blasting, brutal malice dictated by dead hearts and hands.Clarissa learnt eventually how the gifted girl, Lady Mary Pierrepont, had broken away from the control of her father, the Duke of Kingston, and set his commands at naught in order to marry Mr. Edward Wortley Montagu; how the woman and wife, after twenty-five years of wedlock and motherhood, separated by common consent from her husband and children—with no offence alleged on either side—and was content that their intercourse thenceforth should be confined to a formal correspondence, while her home was in Italy and theirs was in England, for twenty-four more years—how her sole connection with her only son, a shameless reprobate, was persecution on his side and resistance on hers—how on the death of Mr. Wortley Montagu, an aged woman, drawn by the only tie which had power to constrain her—the link to her daughter, Lady Bute—she came back to England to die. The all-powerful leader of society without a rival in the past looked round, in the one short year which was left her, on the few who remained of her court, and declined to resume her sway over them, or over a younger generation, attracted by her reputation as the chief of the wits and beauties when Anne and the earlier Georges filled the throne. Nay, she hid her face from the sons and grandsons of her courtiers. She covered it with a mask when she could not avoid being seen, that people might not view the wreck which time and disease had made of her regal beauty.But all these strange, sad details were veiled by the dense mists which obscure the future when Lady Mary rose like a star of the first magnitude on the horizons of Chiswick and Twickenham, and when Mistress Teresa, as she had boasted, so recommended herself to the great lady that she came once and again to grace the little house on the Mall. She inspired Clarissa with awe and a kind of reluctant admiration.'I think she could be cruel,' the girl said to herself. 'Her tongue is so destitute of pity, or mercy, or the least shred of faith in man, if not in God, that no wonder her wit grows harsh and coarse, and even vile. I believe that Mistress Patty is right, and that Lady Mary was born without a heart—though how doctors account for it I cannot tell.'But Belinda was fascinated by her splendid ladyship, hovered about her whenever Belinda was in Lady Mary's vicinity, and would not be withdrawn from it by Mistress Patty's whisper, 'Come away, girls; this is no tale for your innocent ears,' at the moment when the visitor was relating, with the utmost nonchalance, a piece of pungent scandal whose evil savour the flashes of her wit could light up with a ghastly radiance, but could not redeem. 'They say she reads Greek; I wish she would sometimes speak in it, or in some other ancient dead tongue,' protested Mistress Patty: 'for her good stories—though most of her listeners laugh at 'em and applaud 'em—ain't edifying, least of all for young people like you. For Tessie and me, we have been out in the world since we were chicks, so that it is no wonder we are hardened wretches; but I vow I feel myself blush at some of her tirades, and I know our old mother can't abide them.'Mistress Patty was right; the cynicism and pessimism of more than a century and a half ago were crude and coarse, even in the mouth of a woman of quality and of rare intellect, to a degree incredible in the present day.Mistress Patty proceeded to give such an example as she could produce to the listener of Lady Mary's lack of sentiment and taste.'You remember, Clarissa, the beautiful epitaph writ by Mr. Pope on the pair of unfortunate lovers slain together in the thunderstorm in the hayfield at Harcourt Stanton? You admire it mightily, as it deserves to be admired. Well, what did my lady do about it but laugh it to scorn, parody it in the most impudently ridiculous style, and assure the writer that, if the poor young creatures had lived to marry, she would only have given them a year for the man to beat his wife, and the wife to be the worst slut and drab far and near.''Oh, how could she say so?' cried Clarissa her tender heart pained and shocked. 'Working men and women are as fond and faithful as their betters. Does she not believe in the virtuous poor? Did death not make them sacred to her?''My dear, nothing is sacred to Lady Mary and her set.''But people say, Mistress Patty, that, if this cure of hers answers, the nation will owe her a great debt: she will rid us of a horrible scourge, or she will render it by comparison harmless. She will save thousands of lives, and the children's children of the men and women of our day will rise up and call her blessed.''It may be so,' acknowledged Mistress Patty, baffled and perplexed, 'and she is in earnest about it. She is braving no end of abuse and calumny. Nine-tenths of the doctors in the country are against her. She was set upon by a mob when she was coming out of her chair t'other night, and it was all that her servants could do to get her safely into her house. If the Princess of Wales were not backing her she would assuredly be worsted, and a woman like her does not relish being worsted. Whether she does it from love of power, whether a big brain like hers craves big ends, or whether she can care for a multitude while she is careless of the individual, it is bootless to inquire—and I ain't sure if it is for us to inquire, child. We don't look a gift horse in the mouth, and if Lady Mary is right in believing that she discovered a remedy in the East, which she has brought back with her, and would fain give free to the suffering human race in the West, then, be she what she may, let us take it and be thankful. If it is God Almighty's pleasure to work His will by sinners as well as by saints, what have we to say against it? Are our own hands so clean, little Clarissa, that we should refuse to touch a precious gift because the fingers that lavish it on us ain't so lily-white as we could wish 'em to be?'Mistress Patty's philosophy was sound if it was deficient in originality, and, truly, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was the English Sphinx of her generation.CHAPTER XA HAIR OF THE DOG WHICH BITIF Clarissa revolted against Lady Mary's rule she revolted still more against the influence exercised by Lady Mary's satellites, who, without her genius, without a certain proud, frank stoicism which belonged to her and often disarmed her opponents, followed in her track and assumed quiet insolence and haughty heartlessness when they had them not.There was one follower of Lady Mary's whom Clarissa came near to loathing. He was a young nobleman in the Prince of Wales's household, and his pretensions were far above those of any of the sprigs of nobility the girls had encountered at Oxford. Indeed, he did not deign to notice Clarissa, though he showed an inclination to pay some patronizing attentions to Belinda, by which the silly girl was highly uplifted in her own estimation. It was not because he ignored her, and preferred her friend, that Clarissa had a silent quarrel with the gentleman; many people agreed with him in that respect with whom Clarissa had no disposition to quarrel. He was a fop of fops. His flowered damask coat was of the richest material, the most delicate hue. No fine ladies' laces could equal in exquisite texture his cravat and ruffles. He was not content with a single watch set in brilliants; he wore a couple, one at each side.Now, Clarissa held that a man's dress best became him when it was of a sober richness and gentility, befitting his rank and sex, which might be supposed to be above the frivolity of fantastic modes, garish tints, and general man millinery. Every man was not in orders, so that all could not be in black, but at least each individual might have the sense to clothe himself with sedate simplicity and dignity.The young peer was said to drink ass's milk for his health, an obligation for which he might have been pitied if he had not languished over his delicacy of constitution, as an evidence of his natural refinement and superiority to his kind. It was reported that he painted his face in order to disguise the chalky whiteness of his complexion.Well, Clarissa was quite accustomed to the use of rouge by her guardian, Mrs. Masham, and by all the other elder, and by some of the young, women of her acquaintance. It has even to be owned that, in contemplating the course of years when her roses and Belinda's should have faded, she had been wont to regard the supplying their place with rouge as a possible disagreeable necessity. But for a man to paint, a man whose beard bristled in spite of him, was different, was horrible, and, after all, to daub one's cheeks and lips with paint was a filthy resource. The associates of Lord Hervey, when goaded and provoked by him beyond measure, were in the habit of borrowing Pope's name for him, 'Lord Fanny,' and applying it in his hearing, and Clarissa thought the nickname well deserved.Lord Fanny was reckoned a wit of a sneering, sardonic type, but Clarissa cared for no wit that was not good-natured, kindly and magnanimous on occasions. But it was not so much for his effeminacy or for the sharp sting of his tongue that Clarissa had a rooted aversion to the young gentleman; it was because of a perception she had that he was treacherous to the core and capable of all baseness. She longed with all her might that Belinda might have nothing to do with him, and might soon be out of his neighbourhood. She could almost have wished that the holiday of their lives, the gaiety of their visit to the Blounts and to town, were over, their gadding at an end, and the pair safe back in the comparative retirement of Oxford, in no peril save that of the vapours or the spleen.Lady Mary's wonderful prescription for small-pox was the talk of the town, and was pressed upon the reluctant medical faculty and the distinguished circle of its advocate's friends, family and retainers with a high hand. Lady Mary had undergone in her early youth the dreaded disease, when, though it had withheld its ravages on her person and spared her beauty, it had cost her a brother. There was no call for her to subject herself to the Turkish ordeal which she was urging upon her fellow-creatures; if there had been, without doubt she would have faced it undauntedly. But mischievous people wondered if Mr. Wortley Montagu had also come through small-pox in his boyhood, or if he was simply proof against his clever wife's insistence. Perhaps she gave a greater sign of the sincerity and depth of her belief when she had the experiment tried on her infant son—only neither in her motherhood nor in her wifehood was Lady Mary credited with over-weening tenderness. If she was ardent in anything, it was in exemplifying the worth of her remedy, in making converts to her opinion, and in getting men and women to submit to the process of inoculation at the hands of one of the very few doctors who had already accepted Lady Mary's theory, and, having tested it, were ready to admit and champion its efficacy.Accordingly, when Mistress Teresa, in her desperate desire to promote an intimacy with the great lady who was the rage of her world and her day, gave utterance to a capital idea which had crossed her scheming mind, Lady Mary caught at it. Mistress Teresa did not propose herself as a subject for inoculation, she said jauntily her beauty, so much as she had ever had, was well on the wane; it would soon be a thing of the past; such as it was, it was not worth guarding. But here were her young kinswoman, Belinda Annesley, and her friend Clarissa Hill, two likely country-bred lasses in full health, in the bloom of their attractions, which it would be a sin and shame not to take every precaution, while it was in their power, to preserve for many a year to come. When would such an opportunity occur again as this which now presented itself to be treated by Lady Mary's own physician under Lady Mary's eye? The young Princesses could ask for nothing better. And where was there to be found two more fitting patients for the experiment than these two girls in the flower of their youth, strength and comeliness—which would thenceforth escape all risk of being frightfully marred and scarred well-nigh beyond recognition?Lady Mary added her authoritative arguments to clinch Mistress Teresa's persuasions; she even deigned to coax and pet the victims. She had them to her house at Twickenham; she threw out the prospect of their paying her a visit on their recovery to Mr. Montagu's place, to make the acquaintance of her noble connections and friends. Belinda and Clarissa were lucky young women to have such a chance.To do Lady Mary and Mistress Teresa justice, one of them thoroughly believed, with some reason, in the antidote. Again, though inoculation with the virus of small-pox was, in fact, to create a form of the disease itself, the attack as a rule was mild, and any instances of death resulting from it were few and far between. The most objectionable detail was that the sufferer might convey infection of the most malignant kind to any person who had never had small-pox, with whom he or she came in contact. For this reason the invalid had to put up with a strict system of isolation in addition to a spurious illness.The necessity was so calculated to depress the spirits, and to deter fresh recruits from joining in the campaign against ignorance and prejudice, that the custom was to inoculate in batches, households, families, parties of friends. They were then consigned to the care of trusty servants or relations to whom the complaint was believed to be innocuous, because, on their pock-pitted faces, the ministering angels showed tangible signs that they had passed through its fires. In these circumstances, it is edifying to read that the patients bearing the penalties of slight sickness and close confinement in common, managed to extract a considerable amount of fun, not infrequently of a riotous character, from the situation.The arrangement proposed for Belinda and Clarissa was that the house on Chiswick Mall should be converted into a temporary hospital, with an invasion of its bounds forbidden to its ordinary crowd of company. Mistress Teresa was to go on a round of visits—to Lady Mary among her other hostesses—till the week or two of quarantine was at an end. Then the house would be fumigated and re-opened to its public. In the meantime Mistress Patty and her mother remained in it, that the girls might not feel themselves forsaken or turned over to strangers. The old lady was supposed to be beyond the age when infection was rampant; besides, it was understood she was to keep in her own corner and have nothing to do with her ailing guests. Mistress Patty considered herself to have had some minor form of the ailment, and so to be comparatively safe. She was not to discharge a nurse's duties; these were committed to an elderly retainer of the Blounts, who had just rounded the corner of partial blindness as a consequence of the grievous epidemic. Only to look in her seamed face and darkened eyes was to make any panacea for small-pox welcome. Mistress Patty's greatest deprivation was that she could not go near the Popes in those days.Clarissa demurred at first to the undreamt-of interlude in the girls' gaieties; and she was for some time backed—in an underhand fashion, it must be confessed—by Mistress Patty. Clarissa did not see that she was warranted in disposing of herself as was decreed, without the knowledge and consent of Madam Masham She did not live in dread of the loss of what April morning beauty she could claim, so that the threats of its insecurity did not move her. On the other hand, she was convinced that if by any disaster she was disqualified from her service to Madam, she would be failing signally in her obligations, she would be playing an ungrateful part in return for Madam's great kindness in allowing her the holiday. But her proposal of writing to Madam to learn her will in the matter was strongly opposed by specious representations of the uncertainty and the delays of the post, and that it would be positively unfeeling to torture Madam, who, though she would certainly approve of the step if she understood it, could have no comprehension of it without lengthened explanations. It would be, therefore, unkind to furnish her with partial information of the event before it took place.As for Belinda, she was infatuated in her determination to comply with Lady Mary's wishes. She had never been ill in her life, so that it was easy for her to say that she did not mind an illness which everybody assured her was fudge compared to the ailment of which it was but a faint, beneficent shadow. She had always done what she liked, and never more so than when she was the heiress in prospect of a fortune. She was satisfied that her father and mother would think she was wise in following the excellent advice of her great London friends.If more were needed, it was given by my Lord Hervey, a habitué of Lady Mary's drawing-room. He was ever ready with high-flown compliments on the patriotism and philanthropy of the fair creature who was willing to sacrifice herself to promote science for the public good, and with solemn assurance of what his despair would be if the sacrifice proved a grain harder than was anticipated. Whether he and Lady Mary laughed in their sleeves when the pretty simpleton was out of hearing, or whether he alone put his tongue in his cheek when her back was turned—for beneath the crust of the fine manners of the day was a solid substratum of Tom and Jerry coarseness—Clarissa could not pretend to decide; but she stiffened in-stinctively, as she was wont to do in Belinda's defence.'At least, she will be shut up from him and his flattery for some time to come,' Clarissa told herself as one comfort. 'Catch him venturing where small-pox is named, even in the sense of inoculation, in order to be delivered from its cruellest injuries. Perhaps it will open her eyes to recognise that he is not in earnest; that he would no more stoop to her than Prince Fritz of Wales would lay his coming crown at her feet. And if my Lord does not mean what he says, what business has he to try to turn the head of an innocent young girl who is worth scores of fine gentlemen such as he is?'If Belinda would run the gauntlet, it was clear she must not do it alone. Her friend must be by her side, in the same plight, sharing whatever danger existed, soothing and sustaining her. For Clarissa had not been altogether so exempt from illness as had been Belinda's happy experience. She could guess that it was one thing to laugh at untried sickness and another to bear it bravely when it came. From time immemorial the saying had been fulfilled, 'They jest at scars who never felt a wound.'The deed was done. Belinda and Clarissa were installed in the upper regions of the house on the Mall, where they were to be voluntary prisoners—prisoners of hope for some weeks. Lady Mary's enlightened physician made the all-important punctures and insertions, and afterwards attended his patients daily to watch the effects, with all the courtly politeness which was to be expected from him. And he and Lady Mary were justified in their conclusions; a small amount of fever and of weakness were the sole ransoms paid for the immunity promised.Mistress Patty called daily like the doctor, generally with a vinaigrette at her nose, and showing no inclination, as formerly, to tarry in the company of her young friends, but displaying conscientious regard to the purpose of her visit, which was to learn how they felt and to see that they had all the care and comfort which they required. The old lady, her mother, in the secret invasions which she insisted on making of the proscribed territory, though she had far less in her power, was, in her fearlessness and in her unlocked garrulity, a more enlivening visitor. The parcel-blind victim of the calamity which the girls were cheating did her ministrations faithfully enough There was nothing to complain of; there was an infinitude to be thankful for, if one could only realize it. And if the invalids had not happened to be just two girls a little strange and desolate in their absence from home and their enforced seclusion; if, instead, it had been—what was the case in many a country and town house a couple of decades later—a party of merry youngsters doing penance for future health and beauty, without doubt they would have made nothing of the disagreeables of the situation; they would have contrived to find in it material for an abundance of jests and laughter.But with the two it was otherwise. Clarissa was humbly grateful, and if she was not exuberantly happy she was cheerfully resigned to be for a brief space hot and restless, faint and weary, as the forfeit she had agreed to incur. As for the sudden stagnation of the innumerable engagements into which the couple had been plunged, she called it a rest from the turmoil of gaiety in which Belinda and she had been whirled along till they were dizzy, and could hardly keep their feet, or tell whether their heads or heels were highest.But Belinda, who had been so wilfully and saucily confident of her capabilities of endurance—Belinda, who had the reputation of being a young woman of the highest spirit and daring, had broken down ignominiously, and was reduced to the verge of despair. To her who has never sustained a pin-prick, a prick is a stab; failure of appetite, a lagging foot, are symptoms equally marvellous and alarming,Unquestionably, the position was irksome. The doctor, whose coming made a break in the dull monotony of the days, did not possess the gossiping chattiness which was an indispensable attribute of the early chirurgeons. Even if he had been endowed with 'the gift of the gab,' his friends and interests were so far removed from those of the girls that his loquacity would simply have bored Belinda. The flying presence of Mistress Patty was more teasing than her absence would have been. The old lady's stories of her past were fatiguing. The very view from the window of the broad silver ribbon of the river and its living freight, with which Clarissa had been enchanted to begin with, now struck Belinda as a positive mockery of their stationary melancholy and misery.Clarissa could not tell what Belinda had looked for to lighten a painful, tedious captivity. Daily, hourly billets-doux, flowers and sweets, original sighing and dying verses in her honour, books—though she was no great book-lover, she left that to Clarissa—inquiries and messages without ceasing, even the gracious compliment of a call in passing from Lady Mary?A few congratulatory notes from members of the Blounts' circle for whom Belinda did not care a straw, a curt communication from Lady Mary that she was pleased to learn from the doctor all had gone well, as she knew it would. Not a word or sign from my lord.Belinda was low and peevish. She had been indulged and deferred to all her short life. Lately, since her heiress-ship had risen above the horizon, she had been treated as a bright, particular star to be set apart and worshipped. She was not able to stand the contrast. It bewildered, distressed, and angered her. Her mind in its sickness and mortification turned back to the scenes and the people she had undervalued; a dozen times a day she wished herself back in Oxford. She craved for news of her home, her familiar haunts and cronies, among whom she had reigned a queen, while the scanty letters of her mother—still monopolised by her father's infirmities—and Madam Masham's fitful epistles to Clarissa, full of her own occupations and troubles, held little that concerned Belinda. Then a source of information which would also be a pleasant interlude in their dreary banishment flashed upon her. She had accidentally heard that the business which had brought Mr. Cyp King to town was not ended, and that he would have to come to London again to finish it. He was even now on the road, or arrived at the address which he had given when he called, in case the young ladies should wish to command his services. Mistress Teresa had treated the possible contingency coldly, and Belinda herself had been inclined to scout it at the time. But circumstances had altered.'Do you know what I'm going to do, Clarissa?' she asked her companion. 'Why, write a line to Mr. Cyp—I warrant he's back in his Gower Street lodgings by this time—and bid him come out to Chiswick to let us hear the last Oxford news, and titivate us a bit, so that we may give the dumps the go-by. I'm mortal affrighted I'll go melancholy mad before I'm let out of this hole. Mistress Teresa isn't here to shut the door in his face and Mistress Patty and the old lady won't mind, for he ain't one of their pets. He won't heed the infection himself. You told me once he sat up all night in the college with a man dying of putrid sore throat; and when nobody else would stay beside the butler's lad as was bit by a mad dog, my gentleman held the boy down—snapping and foaming—till the life went out of him.'But Belinda met her match for once. The usually pacific Clarissa was roused to a white heat of ire. She sprang up and confronted the speaker, who was lying on her back, her arms crossed above her head, on the shabbiest of old sofas in the shabbiest of garret sitting-rooms. For every article of the furniture was confiscated either to help to form a bonfire to celebrate the young ladies' recovery, or to be given away to some of those miserably poverty-stricken wretches whom the plague itself would not have hindered from clutching at the tainted sticks.'Never, never!' cried Clarissa, in such a blaze of wrath that her recent weakness could not support it, and her limbs were trembling under her. 'Not if I can prevent it! What! bid a man here to risk his life for your diversion! I will write to Mistress Teresa; I will write to Mr. Cyp himself, and vow that I will never speak to him again if he come here on your invitation.'Belinda sat bolt upright in her amazement, electrified out of the weakness and weariness, with which she had believed herself overwhelmed, by the passage-at-arms in which she found herself all at once engaged.'Hoity-toity, miss! I was not aware, from all that has come and gone, that he was, precisely speaking, your property yet. It is not so long ago since he aspired to be mine—before you inveigled him from me.''Belinda!' protested Clarissa.Belinda had the grace to be ashamed.'Well, I never said that you employed unbecoming arts, or that you were not welcome to my old shoes if they fitted you. Sure, what should I want with them, when there are better fish in the sea than has ever come out of it where I am concerned? But you have grown so touchy, Clary; I do not know what has come over you.'Clary was so overcome that she sat down at the end of the sofa and cried as if her heart would break.'It sounded so wicked, Bell, as I never could have believed it of you. And to think he has been so scurvily dealt with, and yet was to be brought back at your beck and call to meet a terrible death as like as not! And if it had been to save you from any deadly hurt he would not have grudged it; and I—I would have been fain to put myself in your place, for we have loved each other true, and you've been a dear, kind friend to me, Bell. But only for your amusement, and to while away a heavy hour! How could you think on't?''That is just what I didn't do, Clary; I didn't stop to think on't,' said Bell penitently. 'I must be growing a selfish wretch as ever was. You were right to tell me on't.'CHAPTER XICLARISSA'S AUNT ABIGAIL AND THE OLD ACQUAINTANCE RENEWED UNDER HER ROOFTHE ban was removed. Clarissa and Belinda were again well and at large, so much so that, Mistress Teresa having returned and resumed her active rôle of marshalling them to all the as yet unexplored sights in the town, they appeared, as a reward for the time spent in retreat, at a representation of 'The Beggar's Opera.' There they had a short experience of the delights of being regarded as lions or lionesses, since, to Mistress Teresa's glorification still more than to that of her charges, they were openly pointed out and stared at, as the two country misses who had found the courage to go in for the new preventative against small-pox, and had come out fresh and blooming like a couple of daisies. But the fleeting renown died at its birth; in such a seething, effervescing element nothing lasted unless the heroes and heroines who attained fugitive fame were persons already of notoriety, and not of the vaguely obscure origin of 'country misses,' even although they were under the chaperonage of women of fashion, and one of the little girls was 'a fortune.' This momentary éclat was the sum total of the girls' reward, unless such as belonged to conscious virtue and a sense of safety in having become walking advertisements of the advantages of inoculation. There was no other testimony to Belinda and Clarissa's public spirit, no other compensation for what they had borne. The girls were not let down gradually from what had been the airy, extravagant expectations of one of the two, and in the instance of the other a half-temptation to lend herself to be deceived like her neighbour. Suspicion and distrust do not recommend themselves without a struggle to generous and gentle natures. The fall in Belinda's confidence was as abrupt as it was complete. Lady Mary, after ascertaining from her doctor that the inoculation had gone off well, and that the cases of the two young women on whom it had been tried could be quoted as triumphant examples of its success, saw no cause for having anything more to do with them, and dropped them without hesitation. Why should she trouble herself farther with two pretty young country ninnies? They were not her kind; they did not belong to her class. They should be eternally indebted to her for delivering them from any danger from the small-pox, and there was an end of the matter. This resolution was not in the least affected by the long letters which, in the first stages of the operation, Mistress Patty, being on the spot, wrote with every detail of the symptoms to Lady Mary. She just glanced over the pages, burnt them, and did not dream of vouchsafing an answer, while she wondered, yawning, what the woman could mean by bothering her with such trifles.My Lord Hervey had found some other pursuit more congenial than that of idly fooling a young girl.Lady Mary was at Tunbridge Wells now that the June freshness of summer was being replaced by the brooding heat of July and August. Lord Fanny was at Bath. There was no whisper of Mr. Montagu's country seat. By the time her ladyship went back to her house at Twickenham and her literary friend-ship with Pope, Belinda and Clarissa would have returned to Oxford. There was some consolation in the reflection to Clarissa, who while it hurt her that Belinda should be hurt, would rather have her as she was, than see her the dupe and plaything of a heartless man or woman of quality.But Belinda was bitterly disappointed, so bitterly that she was silent on the subject. As for Mistress Patty, in spite of her worldlymindedness, she inveighed against the short memories of great ladies. Even Miss Teresa, who had not found her sojourn with the distinguished offender so agreeable and beneficial as she had anticipated it would be, was betrayed into laying aside her dignity and tact in order to join en famille in the animadversion.But the climax of the injury was felt when the doctor's bill was handed to the girls. It would have made a deep inroad into Clarissa's ten pounds if Belinda would have suffered this.'No,' she said; 'it was all my doing, and the whole debt is mine. But to think that we should be asked to pay for having been made ill, in order to carry out my lady's theories!Sure, I would as soon have had the small-pox as have been forced to find we had been such ninnies.'The descendants of the old Turkey merchant—of whom Clarissa was one, and Abigail, Lady Masham was another—were scattered far and wide, so that only Lady Masham had a house in town, and even she was absent from it on the girls' first coming up from Oxford.When she returned from paying a country visit, and found Clarissa's letter respectfully announcing the presence of herself and her friend at Chiswick, and asking when she might be permitted to pay her duty to her aunt, Lady Masham sent a formal note back inviting the girls to come to her on a particular day, and briefly mentioning that it was her day for receiving company. Perhaps the reference might mean that, while she acknowledged the kinship, she did not consider that it warranted any claim to private intimacy.After their prolonged abstinence from society, Clarissa and Belinda set out with something of their old zest on the expedition. They had a coach to convey them to the somewhat obscure quarter of the town in which Lord and Lady Masham had elected to reside. As her charges were going to wait on a relative of Clarissa's Mistress Teresa had brought forward some other engagement, and excused herself from the necessity of chaperoning them.The truth was, she was aware that Lord and Lady Masham's means were limited, in spite of all Lady Masham's saving propensities when she had filled a position of trust and honour. In those days she had many a gift lavished upon her, not by her royal mistress alone, but by all who sought Court favour, and schemed to benefit their political view and the interest of the King across the water, by thus bribing the good word of the all-powerful Bed-chamber woman.But to Mistress Teresa, with her soaring social ambition, Lady Masham had sunk into an insignificant person. From the time of the late Queen's death, and the unopposed succession of the son of the Electress Sophia to the English crown, her Ladyship had withdrawn with all haste into the obscurity from which she had suddenly emerged, content to lead a private domestic life, determined not to draw down upon herself what had threatened to be the punishment of her great tempters, prompters and allies, Harley and St. John. She had neither the capacity nor the inclination to be a prominent dame de salon, far less to be the rallying-point of a lost cause. Mistress Teresa, who, in spite of her religion and of the Blounts' friendship with Pope, had given her allegiance to the rising sun—the reigning dynasty—despised Lady Masham accordingly.Her invited guests did not hold their hostess so cheap; to them she was still invested with the reflected halo of her past importance. They dressed with great care to do honour to her and her company, as if good Queen Anne were still to preside over them.And as it happens that in every age of the world's history and fashions it has been women's fancy to adopt, for a change, a saucy challenge in the shape of a pretty mocking version of some part of men's attire, Clarissa and Belinda patronized the particular version which was the mode in the reigns of the earlier Georges.Over their light blue cloth petticoats the girls wore blue cloth coats and long vests richly trimmed with silver lace and silver buttons. Their Mechlin ruffles and cravats were strictly in order, and, to complete the transformation, above the fair curls, drawn back and tied with blue ribbon in the style named, from its originator in England, 'a Bolingbroke'—which some of the more exquisite of the dandies were introducing, in order to supplant the more or less cumbrous wigs—sat perched the most provocative of cocked hats, silver-laced like the coats.Two more charming would-be gallants never alighted from a coach and tripped up the broad flight of steps leading to the front-door of a quiet, somewhat dull-looking house in an out-of-the-way, genteel district of town. The hall and staircase were not without dignity in their simple solidity, but they did not approach to being handsome, while the livery of the lackey who showed the visitors in was plain to a hint of parsimoniousness.The thin, pale woman—giving an impression of under-size—who stood receiving her guests was befittingly attired. The lutestring, of a sober gray hue, was of rich stuff, and her négligée was composed of such fine lace as had been in a Queen's coffers. But while there was a neatness so precise as to amount to rigidity in the arrangement of the dress, the same effect was produced as was present in the figure and face, that of an absence of all distinction—an element almost of retiring homeliness, in one who was a person, but never at any stage of her career a personage.Here stood the woman of whom the Tories said that she was modest, sensible, and trustworthy, a good woman, to be respected and relied upon; while, according to the Whigs' scornful estimation, she had proved herself mean, cunning, and capable of treachery. For had she not supplanted and overthrown in Queen Anne's good graces the friend of many a long year, the friend who was not only Abigail Hill's kinswoman, but the benefactress to whom she owed her minor post at Court?Possibly the Tories' verdict was the nearer the truth, taken with the pinch of salt which should qualify most verdicts. For there were physical traces of resemblance, and there might also be mental points, between Lady Masham and her niece Clarissa, who was 'good as bread,' according to the French phrase, which is more satisfactory than the English saying, 'good as gold.' The natural tranquillity of aspect was the same, so was a certain air of thoughtfulness and discretion. But Lady Masham's was a narrower, more contracted face than Clarissa's, besides having lost all its youthful glow—in fact, being more than a trifle pinched, blanched, and aged for her years—as if, in addition to her struggle with poverty in her youth, she had passed through further storms and trials in her prime. Her mouth must have always been smaller and tighter than Clarissa's, her eyes more nearly set, her forehead less open. It might be that Abigail Hill had a clear enough sense of justice and fairness, but that the spontaneous springs of generosity and magnanimity were lacking in her, while, undoubtedly, the saving grace for Clarissa lay in her love for her neighbour, her tenderness for all human creatures.As for those who do not cease to reproach Abigail Hill because of her 'base ingratitude' to Duchess Sarah, let them think what it must have been to be the protégée of that illustrious termagant, to be perpetually crushed by her arrogant tyranny and galled by her brutal rudeness. In contrasting the cousins—Sarah Jennings and Abigail Hill—the difference between them is, not to say startling—it is positively comical in its extremity—Duchess Sarah radiantly beautiful, imposingly splendid, in her slovenly morning deshabille; Cousin Abigail insignificant in her company dress. The same impassable gulf existed in character and temper—the one woman self-asserting, domineering, passionate, the other woman ready to relinquish her brief season of power, with-drawing from observation, patient and silent under calumny.Lady Masham's temptations to be untrue to the Duchess's cause had been overwhelmingly great. They had been connected both with her deepest affections and her strict sense of duty She had loved that comely, lazy, incapable husband of hers—an individual as far removed as possible from the great Captain of the generation—when he was a handsome page of honour, not so unkind as to fail to respond to her kindness, passably honest in his stolidity—which could hardly be said of his famous contemporary—not without a strain of manliness and good-humoured philosophy in submitting to be the nobody at Court which, without question, he was. And what was she but a nobody also, according to her own humble summing-up of her attractions and advantages? Yet she was conscious that she was—in mind at least—better endowed than he. She was shrewd, prudent, qualified to guide him, to induce him to lead a respectable, happy life, and to make her a thrice-happy woman, managing for him in those domestic, housewifely cares which were dear to her. What was it not to her to have those merits of his—passive rather than active—recognised, and by her doing? to secure for him a peerage, and to know that, what with the modest patrimony he had inherited, what with her savings from her salary and her perquisites what with her thrifty habits, the title could be maintained—not splendidly, but creditably?It was not Abigail Hill alone who used these arguments; they were pressed upon her by the subtle art and the specious tongues of Harley and St. John, who saw their opportunity and seized it.On the side of duty there was Abigail's indulgent mistress, the Queen, ageing, sickening, clinging to her last favourite for protection from the fierce despotism of her former friend, turning yearningly and relentingly in her loneliness—a widow and childless, with her last hopeful little son lying in his quiet grave—to him who was at least of her flesh and blood, though she had not seen him from his infancy—her father's son, her half-brother James, whom Englishmen called the Chevalier de St. George. Surely he was of more account to his sister than her old German cousin, the Electress Sophia, and the German Prince, her eldest son.The Protestant succession, which had been the plea for certain treaties between England and Hanover—could it not be as well secured by solemn pledges on the part of Prince James, as by robbing him of his natural right and transferring it to one who was a stranger and three-fourths a foreigner? Why, not only the dying Queen in her last moments, but a large proportion of the Englishmen who lived in the following reign, when everything had gone against the Steuarts, and the House of Hanover was established somewhat insecurely on the throne, were of Queen Anne's opinion. Then, how could the stability of the Protestant succession, in the sense of the House of Guelph, be supposed to have weighed heavily with Abigail Hill?Lady Masham glanced somewhat disapprovingly at the girls' costume, of which Clarissa herself had entertained doubts—whether it was not too fantastic, too apingly mannish. But Mistress Teresa had assured her it was the height of the fashion, and worn without a scruple by the well-brought-up daughters of the best families in the kingdom. Belinda's will and pleasure and Clarissa's own youthful vanity had done the rest in reconciling her to her quaint guise. But as her aunt contemplated it, some old agreeable associations caused her gray eyes to soften and her lips to twitch with an amused, pleasant recollection, which brought out her slight resemblance to her niece more strongly.'My word, Niece Clarissa! I am forced to find your masquerading and that of your friend vastly becoming. Let me present you to my lord, but do not be offended, miss, if he should make a mistake, and, instead of bowing low and addressing you two as Mistress Clarissa Hill and Mistress Belinda Annesley, be betrayed into slapping you on your backs and greeting you with, "Well come, young masters!"My lord, to whom my lady always paid proud, marked deference, thus giving others the key by which they were to regulate their tone to him, was lounging in the background of the not too spacious, not too sumptuously furnished room, talking idly to those of the company who gave him least trouble. His early good looks were over full-blown. He was getting stout and bald, but Clarissa could still say with truth that he was 'a most proper gentleman,' retaining a courtly presence in addition to what was native and not acquired, a thoroughly good-natured expression. He returned her respectful curtsey with a very civil, smiling bow, and asked without prompting, though with a trifle more of formality than of warmth in his interest, for his kinsman, Dr. Masham of Oxford, and his Madam.The company was fairly representative of the Tory side of politics, when politics still asserted an overweening influence in most assemblies. No great names were to be heard—the owners of the names were conspicuous by their absence. Probably they had more to do in that busy world of ruling spirits which was then, and is always, engaged in making history, than to appear at a polite gathering at the house of a woman whose power for good or for evil, according to their faction, had clean passed away in her very life-time. Yet she had sustained no severe adversity, she could not be said to have fallen; and, in place of having to subside to her commonplace level in tragic despair, she was clasping the laurels of her securing—the husband of her youth and her love, their social position, their competency—with serene complacency and genuine content!But there were enough people of rank and fortune present to show that the Tories' collective memory was not too short and ungrateful for services which had been faithfully rendered—though their object had been unhappily frustrated—and to have caused Duchess Sarah's beautiful face to have grown fiery red with furious resentment and black with the scowl of unappeased hate.Lady Masham had done her duty to the girls when she had spoken a few friendly words and presented them to his lordship. She could not be expected to waive her obligations as general hostess in order to look after two nonentities, granted one of them was kin to her, which she had at once acknowledged. Clarissa told herself and Belinda this as they moved about in the throng, more stately though less brilliant than that to which they had been accustomed at the Blounts'. Granted the country cousin and her companion knew nobody—save their host and hostess—in the circle, they ought to be sufficiently edified and amused by looking about them. Refreshments were freely offered to them by the men-servants and by courteous strangers who looked admiringly and with due reserve at the fair young faces, while their coach was to come for them to carry them back to Chiswick before the couple could reasonably be tired.Suddenly, with a bright gleam of satisfaction lighting up each face as it began to wax languid, and even with a subdued little cry of pleasure from both Clarissa and Belinda, their eyes simultaneously fell upon a face perfectly familiar to them among the blank faces around. Each darted forward among the shifting groups, and Belinda was the first to reach the owner of the face.'Mistress Bulmer,' she cried, breathless with excitement and pleasure—'Mistress Ellinor Bulmer—you here!'The young lady addressed turned quickly with a leap of answering gladness in her grave eyes.'And you here, Clary and Bell! Wonders will never cease. But now I remember, one of you is related to Lady Masham. And how does dear Madam Masham do, and the Doctor?''Purely well when I last heard,' answered Clarissa. 'But we did not dream of meeting you this afternoon, Mistress Bulmer; we should have been too happy if we had guessed it.''Hush!' Ellinor Bulmer was saying with her hand to her mouth, and that twinkle, half arch, half deprecatory and sorrowful, in her brave sweet eyes: 'there are no Bulmers here. There is an Ellinor Brereton from Sunderland, of whom Lady Masham knows something, whom she kindly bids to her house because it is a change for the said Ellinor, whose circumstances are—well, not what they might be. Anyhow, neither my lady nor her friends—the present company particularly considered—are to undergo a grain of inconvenience because of her kindness.'Both Clarissa and Belinda understood what the words meant. The Bulmers were still under a cloud. If the head of the house had been proscribed by name, with his neck in danger and his worldly goods attainted, in consequence of his share in the late rebellion, the proscribing and attainder had not been removed. He continued in peril as a rebel, while the members of his family remained suspects, which some of them had shown too good reason for being in the past. There were too many unfortunate families in a like position for the girls not to grasp the situation, while Clarissa was happy to find that her aunt Abigail, in retaining her prosperous allies, did not forget the poor on the Tory side, the sufferers from the late frustrated outbreak, but did what she could to help and comfort them.Clarissa, delighted as she was to encounter Ellinor Bulmer again, would have consented, after ten minutes' eager conversation, to let her go and vanish into fresh obscurity, as Ellinor had seemed to suggest.But Belinda had got reason to be sickened of new friends and fine acquaintances, so she went on pressing Ellinor as to whether she was living in London, where she stayed, and if she would not permit them to come and see her.Ellinor hesitated.'Well, I do not think there would be much harm or anything to fear—for you—if the ladies in whose house you are staying do not see grounds for objecting. We are in but a poor way, with lodgings in a poor street; however, it is quiet and respectable enough for the class that occupies it; besides, we are not the only gentlefolks stranded there, and, as it happens, it is not far out of the direction of Chiswick. If you will—if you like—if your guardians do not forbid, it would be a great treat to me for us to have a long talk all by ourselves, and at home, of Oxford and my dear Madam, who was so good to me. I should be more than pleased, too, to introduce you to my young brother Ralph, who is faring hardly, like so many other unhappy people in these troublous times,' ended Ellinor with a hastily-stifled, patient sigh, more for another than for herself.The sequel was that it was arranged between the three that Belinda and Clarissa should make a call on Ellinor at her lodgings—on a future day to be afterwards specified, always provided Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty Blount gave their consent to the visit.CHAPTER XIIIN HIDINGMISTRESS TERESA listened with some dryness and coolness to the girls' urgent plea to be allowed to keep their engagement with their friend, whose father, or somebody nearly connected with her, was in trouble. Could they not make a more desirable assignation? So like heedless young people to enter into such an arrangement! But, as the young lady had been a friend and visitor of Madam Masham's, in whose house Belinda and Clarissa had rushed into a school-girl friendship with the visitor, and as the call in Wright's Buildings was only to last the length of the time spent in drinking a dish of tea—of course a more protracted stay was out of the question—Mistress Teresa did not see how she could put her veto on the brief interchange of common courtesies. Besides, the most ardent and disinterested of chaperons is not infallible or without her selfish shortcomings. Mistress Teresa wanted a night off from what she called 'dancing attendance on the young monkeys.' Wright's Buildings was not only within a reasonable distance of Chiswick; it was in the vicinity of a rather more exalted quarter in which an old gossip of Mistress Teresa's had her abode. It would be killing two birds with one stone if Mistress Teresa Blount were to share a hackney coach with her charges, drop them at their lowly destination and proceed on to her better-sounding quarter. She could have an hour's chat with her friend, and return to pick up her misses and convey them back to Chiswick Mall, without the possibility of their getting into mischief in the short interval.Accordingly, Mistress Teresa dropped the willing pair with a sniff and a tuck-in of her flowing skirts at the corner of the Buildings, adding a parting admonition to them not to keep her waiting when she drove back for them, otherwise the coachman might be surly or he might demand double fare.After all, Mistress Teresa need not have been so fastidious, since she had known the sharp mud of Paris ruelles, and had not turned up her nose at it in her younger days. The place was not unsavoury, though it was but a row of unequal, irregular houses, some of them thatched, most of them one-storied, in all likelihood inhabited for the most part by chairmen and link-boys, by the humbler mechanics, the pettiest of petty tradesmen—the people's bakers and butchers. But its redeeming feature lay in the fact that, like most of outlying London at that day, the country pure and simple was not far away. Green fields, waving trees, hedgerows—dusty, but full of sap and vigour—were close at hand. Wright's Buildings might have been the primitive single street of a homely village. The scent of the last-mown hay and of blossoming beans was wafted from the farther end. Just beyond lingered a fragment of a common, on which a few geese still grazed, while on the slimy green surface of its shallow pond white water-ranunculuses still tempted adventurous children to a ducking.It was into one of the partly thatched and partly stone-roofed cottages—roomier than the others, for it had been an ancient inn—that the girls went in search of their girl comrade. There she stood waiting to receive them, the brocade worn for Lady Masham's company day, and rather the worse for the wear, with reason, since it had been the state and festival dress or both her mother and grandmother exchanged for a washing chintz. It had also done considerable duty and was faded in its turn. But yet, with its dim rich colours set off by Ellinor's clear-starched muslin apron and neckerchief, it became the sedate comeliness which even in her cumbered girlhood, had lent a touch of premature matronliness and motherliness to her looks.The low-roofed room was not deficient in space, and one side of it was furnished with a long, low lattice window having a deep window-seat. Two of the compartments of the lattice were open on quite an extensive kitchen-garden, which had formerly met the requirements of the wayside inn, and still retained its herb-beds, its fruit-trees, and the one walnut-tree which had supplied the walnuts for pickling—a valued item in the inn cuisine. The garden was not unlike that of the country town inn at which the coach travellers stopped to dine on Belinda and Clarissa's journey up to town. It was Clarissa who had appreciated it then; it had been entirely overlooked by Belinda. But it was Belinda who, after greeting Ellinor Bulmer (or Brereton), now ran to the window and cried out:'What a dear, delightful old garden! Why, I like the view into its cool quiet greenness better than that on the Mall, where the river is always running on, and boats and people are constantly coming and going, and there is no rest and peace, and nothing to call one's very own.' Yes, Belinda had learnt some things, unguessed at before, of fine life in London.The floor was simply sanded, the walls were bare save for a birdcage, yet she made no outcry. Clarissa joined her, and immediately agreed with her, and thought of clusters of ripe cherries and a kind face glancing wistfully into hers to see if she really enjoyed the refreshing fruit thoughtfully provided for her delectation, and ready to be rewarded by a single answering smile for his mindfulness and the trouble he had taken. The season of cherries was over, the walnuts were as big as filberts on the tree a few paces distant, Clarissa reflected pensively, and they had never heard whether Mr. Cyp King had accomplished his second visit to town. If so, he must have taken to heart Mistress Teresa's snub to his pretensions.There had been an uncertainty about the day and hour of the visit, so that though Mistress Ellinor, seeing their shadows outside had got up gladly to meet her young friends she had been disturbed in an ordinary occupation, and had not secured time to rid herself of the traces of it. All around her on the oak table and the great carved chest—the chief articles of furniture in the room—were bits of needlework, portions of half-made gowns, skirts, bodices, sleeves, etc., in the coarser woollen stuffs and undressed linen. What could she want with all these common dresses, some of them smaller than could be comfortable, others larger than would be convenient? Clarissa read the riddle, but Belinda had to wait till presently—after Ellinor had, colouring shamefacedly, hastily gathered the articles together, folded them up, and deposited them in the usefully capacious chest, she straightened herself, stood upright, and, looking full at her companions, told them the truth, with an assumption of a jest which had another side of pathetic earnest:'Ladies, in case you should labour under any misunderstanding with regard to the company you are keeping, and be tempted to reproach me later for double dealing, I must give you a piece of information—'tis true I ought to have imparted it sooner, but you will admit I had not much opportunity, and letters are not always to be chanced. Let me introduce to you the assistant dressmaker of Wright's Buildings—fairly competent, I venture to assure you, since the old goody who had the post before Ralph and I came here, does not see it necessary to do more than to give me a few general directions. They ain't over-particular about their everyday garments—those worthy working people who are good enough to employ me—and I, of course—I try my best to give my customers satisfaction.'Belinda stared and gasped, Clarissa's lips quivered; the next instant both girls sprang forward and hung upon Mistress Ellinor.'Oh, if we had only known sooner,' they cried out, 'we should have brought our huswives and our thimbles and offered our services.''Clary here is an excellent needle-woman. I ain't so good, but I might improve if you would show me how—I'd be so proud to help you.''Dear hearts! it is sweet of you, but I always put by my work at this time, to make the place homelike for my brother when he comes in. He does not care to see me continually with my needle between my fingers; though when it is a half-holiday he will sit in the window there—there is room for us two, or for half a dozen more—and correct the boys' exercises or read to me while I sew.''Correct the boys' exercises!' repeated Belinda, mystified.'Oh, you do not know all,' Ellinor entered upon an explanation. 'Ralph is usher in a small school hard by. Think of a Bulmer of the North an usher! But, sure, he don't mind it, and he is fit to be the first usher in the greatest of schools in your Oxford. For he is our scholar, I tell you—the only Bulmer as ever was a scholar that I have heard tell on. Many a stout soldier and bold rider—ay, and hard drinker—has left his sword or his hunting-crop or his silver drinking-mug to be kept in remembrance of him at the old house, but ne'er a one has left a book, unless it were old Sir Guy. He bought the big family Bible—a Geneva bit here, and an Amsterdam bit there—when the Reformation was in the air, and had them bound together in the black leather cover with the silver clasps. It was remembered of him that he said heaven and hell were between those clasps. But I misdoubt me the book was opened by his successors chiefly to consult the leaves where the names of the sons and daughters of the house were written, with the dates of their births and marriages and deaths.''I know,' said Clarissa; 'the Doctor and Madam have such a Bible—I think by her wish—and I have often seen their names written at the head of the proper page in a fair clerkly hand, which I can come bound is neither hers nor his: maybe it is Nat Weekes' hand. You can read plain the date of their births and of their marriage; but below it is white paper without a word, like a tombstone on which only a couple of lines or so are carved, and the rest left blank. When I come to think on't, the leaf is very like a tombstone. I do not think the Doctor and Madam can care to turn it up, for, you see, they must remember their birthdays and their marriage-day.''Why should there be a record like that on a tombstone in a Bible?' protested Belinda restively.'Why, Belinda, because of the genealogies,' Clarissa reminded her. 'There are no such genealogies as those which are to be found in the Old Testament, and even in the New. The record of a family's history is its genealogy.''But the Jews were bound to preserve their descent; I have heard the Doctor say so,' Belinda asserted confidently. 'My father, Captain Annesley, Mistress Ellinor, and my mother, have been too much rolling stones in their day to burden themselves with such testimony. I am not speaking in disparagement of the Doctor and Madam, Clarissa, but since we all know they came down from Adam and Noah, who heeds whether the Doctor's progenitor was a second or a third cousin of Lord Masham's forefather, or whether Madam, who by her maiden name was a Bulkeley, was a great-grand-daughter of Dean Bulkeley, or only of the Dean's younger brother?''Oh, but it does matter,' insisted Mistress Ellinor, who was of a more precise and methodical cast of mind. 'Suppose a fortune were to come from your father's cousin to your grandson when he is in existence, wouldn't it be necessary to show your father's relation to his cousin, yours to your father, and your grandson's to you?''I thought that was the business of parish registers,' said Belinda carelessly. 'I'd as lief my grandson fell back on them.'And is there a school near in which Mr. Bulmer can be an usher?' Belinda changed the conversation, moved by a mixture of inquisitiveness and incredulity. For, with a lively recollection of the front view of Wright's Buildings—compared with which the old inn garden into which the girls had been looking was well-nigh aristocratic—the kind of usher required for the neighbouring urchins did not strike the listeners to be properly of the stamp of a Bulmer—whether of the North, South, East or West.'Yes,' answered Ellinor simply, 'there is one which an old Canon of the Abbey, who was likewise a son of the squire of the manor on which Wright's Buildings are built, founded and endowed for sons of London citizens. It was a country school for them in those days, and the best thing is that it is just round the corner, so that, as my brother is not the only usher, he can come home of nights and sleep under the same roof with me. He would not have taken the post otherwise, and he might have had a far better post, through the interest of folk like Lord Masham and his lady; but Ralph'—she pronounced the name 'Raaf'—'would not consent to be parted from me. All the rest of our family are scattered; only Dolly is with our father in France. I could not have got to them without delay and difficulty, and Ralph said he would not have me knocking about the world like a poor servant wench—not so long as he can stay by me and take care of me.'CHAPTER XIIIRALPH THE RENEGADE'AND does he like being an usher?' asked Belinda dubiously.Her idea of an usher was an individual of the poorer servitor class, who was fain to adopt livery to cover his rags, and fill his stomach at a master's expense, in order to eke out a living on the hard road to learning. Or he was a man whose board in a school was so limited, and his permission to have his clothes washed by the school washerwoman so restricted, that he was notably lean and hungry-looking, while the less he betrayed of shirt-fronts and cuffs—lace cravats and ruffles were not for him—the better.'He says he doesn't mind. He prefers teaching to being a scrivener, which he tried first. He maintains that, if I stitch seams and work buttonholes, he may set copies and put boys through their chap-books. He has always the consolation of wielding the birch when his scholars are too tiresome—as if Ralph, the best-tempered of us all, would have recourse to the birch if he could help it! Oh, it is hard upon Ralph! For a woman it is a little matter; her calling is to make herself helpful and pleasing, and it is of small account, so long as she is a good woman, how she does it. But for a man who is to be master, who may be great and famous and influence hundreds and thousands of his fellows, it is of vast moment. Ralph's scholarship—the only kind that has ever appeared for as many generations as can be recalled of a hunting, riding, fighting race—is of no mean order, though I, his sister, assert it. His teacher, who was so proud of him—the old Puritan who was a nonsuch in learning—said so over and over again. He (Ralph) was to have gone to study at a foreign University—at the Sorbonne, and perhaps afterwards in Italy—when the trouble broke out. And he had nothing to do with it; he had far less than I, he was so young. Do you know he is my twin brother?''But you were thought old enough, girl though you were, to be despatched on a grave mission, involving the lives and fortunes of a university city and its surroundings,' Clarissa ventured to recall the circumstance.'Oh yes!' admitted Ellinor; 'but girls are so much forwarder than boys. When he talks of taking care of me, it is all the kindly fudge of sprouting manliness, because, of course, it is for me—while I obey him, since he is the man, and my brother acting in my father's stead—to take care of him.''Don't do it too much, Mistress Ellinor,' interposed Belinda with a laugh, 'else you will make him a molly-coddle; and molly-coddles and all such stuff among those who should be the stronger sex, are fair sickening.'But Ellinor would permit no reflection on the lad who was clearly her oracle.A molly-coddle!' she cried indignantly. 'Why, he is six feet two in his stockings, and his fist would fell an ox if he cared to do it. And I would have you know that, though he was too young to take any part in the rebellion, it was not because he could not form an opinion in politics. He has formed one, and, sure, it is very much his own.' She hesitated a moment, and cast down her eyes as if not certain how her companions would receive her information. The next instant she looked up at them and spoke firmly. 'He is entitled to his opinion ain't he? and you may take your Bible oath it is an honest one. He hasn't come to it without much hard thinking, and sore disputation between him and his conscience, for a lad of his age.''Nay, what conclusion hath he arrived at?' inquired Clarissa, wondering on account of so much preparation.'He will not take action against our father and family—no, nor against the cause, if he can help it. He cannot deny the blood in his veins and the creed of his fathers, so he is a suspect, like the rest of us. But he will not rise up and strike when the time comes for our side, since he is no longer of our way of thinking. He has argued out the question for himself, and he is convinced that the late King James and his Councillors have so forfeited their pledges and their rights that the mass of the three nations is utterly alienated, and no Steuart Prince will ever wear England's crown or reign at St. James's again.''Be silent!' cried Belinda passionately. 'This is rank sedition; your brother is a traitor knave to his true King. He had better not come near Oxford with his base Whig views;' and she stamped her foot imperiously till she left the print of her high red heel on the sanded floor.Mistress Ellinor was too long-suffering to bid a girl who knew no better quit the house for calling her well-beloved brother a traitor knave. Besides, she would have said the words a little more quietly, but in an essentially similar strain, a couple of years ago. She had been brought up in the love—the next thing to the worship—of the old royal race, the white rose, the red tartan. She loved them still with fond devotion. It was not for her to sit in judgment and count the spots on the sun; only her Ralph had taught her that honest men may disagree, and that there are two sides to most questions.'Words have different meanings in different places,' she made the soft answer which ought to have disarmed wrath. 'What is loyalty in Oxford—yet, unless there is another revolution, they will soon have to proclaim their loyalty with bated breath—is foul treason here in Lon'on—enough to make one acquaint with the hangman's rope or the hulks—and Lon'on is the bigger city, the capital of the kingdom: you will admit that, miss? Ralph believes that the Protestant religion and the people's freedom would have been in danger if the Hanoverian succession had not saved them. He thinks that, whatever may be the faults of King George and his chief Minister—the great Sir Robert—they have been the means of saving the country, and that the King and his Minister have not been more vindictive against their enemies than they could help being.'Belinda's mittened hands were over her ears. 'I will not listen,' she cried, 'our late rightful King, or his beautiful Queen Mary, our present King or his good young Queen, who has never set foot on English ground, all in banishment, dependent on the charity of King Lewis! Oh! how can you say a word against them, Mistress Ellinor?''I know—I know,' responded Ellinor with eager sympathy, 'and I think I could just die to give them their own again; but Ralph says the misfortunes of the sufferers in a cause do not render the cause righteous, as women are tempted to hold.''Oh, a fig for your preaching brother!' was the scornful rejoinder, when at that moment a step was heard without. A glow of pleasure flushed Ellinor's pale cheeks.'Hark! here he is to speak for himself,' she announced joyfully, as if his speech were incontrovertible. 'But, mind, if the landlady brings in the cakes, we are Breretons—not Bulmers. 'Tis not our fault that we have to hide our names as well as our heads.'Enter a young giant in a threadbare but well-brushed coat, and linen so irreproachable that it was plain it was got up not at the school but in Wright's Buildings, with a head of ferocious red hair, and beneath it a face so boyish in its openness and general good-will that the owner looked no older—as, indeed, he was not—than the girls around him. It was difficult to credit that already he had sufficient force of character and independence of spirit to break off from his party, even while he was bearing its penalty, and to cherish convictions foreign to its principles. But there in evidence were the breadth and heaviness of a forehead which belied the sunniness of the eyes set under it, and the gay philosophy of the mouth, whose very insouciant pout bespoke cheery defiance, and not sullen animosity.For the last five minutes Belinda had been vowing to herself that she would not speak to this young renegade or allow him to touch her hand. And now she broke down, when he came in so young and fearless, so absolutely at peace with himself and the world, though it was treating him scurvily, and he was at variance with an important section of it—so glad to find girls of his own age and degree waiting on his sister. She tried to toss her head, appear as if she saw him not, and decline to accord him the greeting which, as joint owner of the lodging, however humble, she was visiting, she was bound to grant him. But the knowledge that he was utterly unaware of her sentiments, and that the piteous eyes of Ellinor and the pleading eyes of Clarissa were fixed upon her, proved too much even for her intolerant temper. She extended the tips of her fingers, to be respectfully bowed over and then cordially grasped, and looked another way to escape the innocent frendliness of his gaze.Presently, when Ralph the renegade was assiduously passing the cups and the cake with a hospitality worthy of a better man, his sister, jealous of the impressions he was creating, said:'We are all behind the scenes here, Ralph; I think you may free yourself from that hideous encumbrance.'With the gleeful sense of relief and absence of consciousness of a lad who was as boyish in heart as he was little more than a boy in years, he tossed off his red wig, whose colour had jarred on his olive complexion. He displayed hair in a Bolingbroke as dark as his sister's, looking round upon the audience in the meanwhile with a merry claim for their congratulations. Belinda could not for the life of her help joining in the laugh of the others. Sure, he could not be the villain she had been in such haste to dub him; he was too young, too blithe, too good-humoured, and that laugh was a wonderful break-down of hostilities. For a little longer she laboured to be silent or only to speak in monosyllables. Belinda, whose tongue was wont to wag so fast, who was apt to be the leader, if not the monopolizer, of the conversation—how long would her dumbness last? She had come down so far from her height of detestation of a renegade as to laugh in chorus with him and the company. Ah! that was a great and significant fall and implied ground lost beyond recovery. Her dignified condemnation would never again regain its stern entirety.The renegade, in that unconsciousness of his which was in itself a horrible stumbling-block and bewilderment, was full of gay excitement. The other examples of quality reduced to lodge in Wright's Buildings happened to be quite an elderly couple, who seldom stirred abroad, and were crushed by the adversity which had befallen them. The Bulmers were largely shut out from the society of young people like themselves, and when they happened to come across it, as in the present instance, it acted like an intoxication on Ralph—truly, as Ellinor had said, a boy to that day, in spite of mental struggles and worldly cares and humiliations, while she had been a woman from her earliest girlhood. He was as wildly gay as a manly, modest lad could be on a first introduction, which was not a first introduction, after all, he explained to the two girls, for had not his sister told him all about them hundreds of times? As he ran on making jests and talking merry nonsense for their and his gratification, it was not in nature that Belinda, who could talk such nonsense with the best, should not cut into the conversation, indulge in a droll sally or two, and have her ability in this respect acknowledged. She was always listened to in Oxford; why should she be beaten by a boy little older than herself, a boy who had just divested himself of a red peruke, who wore a threadbare coat, and was fain to act as an usher in a charity school in London? Why, indeed? Nevertheless, she was beaten; his was the quicker, shrewder wit, and she had wit enough to see it, and duly to be piqued and stimulated to fresh efforts, not to be dulled and paralyzed by jealous resentment. The freemasonry of youth, which nothing can equal or eclipse, was at work, working with might and main.Ralph Bulmer would have his new acquaintances stroll with him and Ellinor in the old inn garden before the coach with Mistress Teresa rattled and jolted up the unpaved street. Then all the children of the quarter would troop round, and all the older people peep out of windows and doors, to stare open-mouthed at the rare spectacle.If the cherries were gone from the trees, there were still some summer pears left, and the six-feet renegade was ready to climb the pear-tree with the agility of a squirrel, regardless of the detriment to his shabby coat and his knee-breeches, pluck the fruit and throw it down, if Mistress Belinda Annesley and Mistress Clarissa Hill would deign to pick it up.Clarissa had been charitable and civil all along, but it had been in Belinda's mind not to break bread—at least, not to swallow a morsel of it—under the roof of this monster of a backsliding Jacobite, but to slip the fragments into her pocket, and when she got outside to cast them to the winds, as she would have shaken the dust from her feet. And there was she scrambling for the yellow pears he aimed at her, gathering them in her skirt, planting her white teeth into the largest and ripest, and nodding up to him as a sign of its honey-sweet excellence. When he returned to terra-firma, and picked a posy of clove carnations for her, forgetting to give another to Clarissa, she did not touch it gingerly, and then let it drop as if it were so many stinging-nettles: she put it to her face, smelt it with lingering approval, and stuck it in her bosom, where the crimson flowers showed like a bleeding heart against her white frock.At the last there was a scuttle, not to keep Mistress Teresa waiting, and there was no time or attention to spare to prevent the renegade putting her into the coach and shaking hands with her, as if they had been dear friends all their lives. Not that Mistress Teresa made him proud by her notice; she turned her shoulder to him, and, when the coach swung on its way, inquired superciliously what sorry rapscallion of a fellow was that, whom Mistress Bulmer trusted to escort her visitors to their coach? She would warrant he was no man of rank and fortune.In the girls' own room for the night, after an unusual silence, Belinda began with an insistent sweet wheedling, which was a way of hers in combination with her imperiousness:'Now, Clary, don't you think that Mr. Ralph Bulmer cannot really hold those detestable Whig doctrines his sister foolishly attributed to him? He is quite young, and, when he was rid of that horrid carroty wig, not so bad-looking.''La, Bell!' exclaimed Clarissa, in lively remonstrance, 'you don't think all Whigs are old and ugly?' She was the more moved to protest because she had an intuition that Mr. Cyp King's political opinions were not of the undiluted Tory type which Belinda preferred. As to answering her question, the person consulted could only say that, when so young a man made up his mind to stand apart from his family, he was generally pretty determined in his views.'He must have picked them up with his learning from the old Puritan tutor of whom Mistress Ellinor spoke,' remarked Belinda pensively. 'But, sure, at his age he must be open to reason, to be spoken to, and shown the error of his ways.''It might not sound reason to him, and he might not think he was in error,' replied Clarissa, seeing mentally those eyes whose deep setting contradicted their light-hearted-ness, and that brow whose heaviness was at odds with its smoothness. Clarissa had a suspicion that doggedness dwelt in such lines.'There!' cried Belinda discontentedly. 'You always see things in a disagreeable light, Clarissa, and you are growing more and more contradictory every day.'CHAPTER XIVAN INVITATION TO A ROYAL NURSERY'HEYDAY, girls, you are in luck!' cried Mistress Patty Blount, coming into the river-parlour on the Mall in great exultation, both because she had an extraordinarily flattering piece of news to tell, and because it had fallen to her share for once, and not to that monopolizer of agreeable announcements, Mistress Teresa, to impart it. 'Mrs. Clayton hath communicated to me through a friend that Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales—no less—desires your attendance at Leicester House to-morrow morning between the hours of ten and eleven, that she may question you on your experience of inoculation and inspect your faces for herself, to ascertain that they have sustained no radical damage from the experiment. She hath heard of the operation by common report—not from Lady Mary, who seems to have forgotten both it and you; but it matters less since the two do not take kindly to each other though her ladyship visited Hanover and Herrenhausen in the late Queen's time and made the early acquaintance of the Princess. She is greatly interested in the small-pox prevention, and would have Princess Amily and Princess Caroline subjected to it.''I thought the Princesses were with the King, their grandfather, at St. James's, in order that he might superintend their English education,' objected Clarissa, all in a flutter at this great distinction, so much so that she was inclined to question its authenticity.'He superintend their English education!' exclaimed Mistress Patty in strong derision. 'The poor old gentleman couldn't speak three sentences of what should be the King's English to save his life. I hope I ain't mouthing treason, but there is a Tory song in vogue which pretends that"'The very dogs in England's CourtThey bark and howl in German."He! he! I must convey those lines to Mr. Pope, and he will ask my Lord Bolingbroke what he thinks of them. No; it was a spiteful trick on the best of mothers and on an affectionate father to get at them through depriving them of their children, poor little dears! as had no voice in the matter. It was the less bearable since some of the company at St. James's were ill-fitted for the charge of innocent young things.''Take care, Patty,' her old mother warned her; 'least said is soonest mended, and birds of the air carry heedless words in their beaks and drop them who can tell where? Your tongue is like the church bell out there, and will run its rig whatever betide. I wish it were as free from scandal as the church bell.''Nay, mother, don't disturb yourself; everybody knows there is no love lost between St. James's and Leicester House. Possibly the very newsboys know the why and the wherefore better than the King and the Prince or the Princess and the Duchess of Kendal. But if Sir Robert has had any hand in this trick—he is not my King, and I may let out my breath on him—it is a great disgrace to him. Clarissa, the Princesses visit their parents at regular intervals, else I believe the country would interfere to put a stop to the cruel injustice. You two fortunate misses are cited to meet the Princesses, that they may be the more easily induced to submit to the inoculation when they hear and see how little you suffered from it.'Belinda gasped.'Little!' she cried; ''tis little you know of what passed, ma'am, if that is what you think. I would not go through the trial again—no, not to be made a Princess!''Oh, Belinda! 'tis because you were never ill before that you still think so much of a few days' headache and sickness and a few weeks' confinement,' Clarissa remonstrated with her friend, feeling that Belinda's bitterness was a reflection on the Blounts, in whose care the girls were, who had encouraged the step which Belinda resented having taken, though it had been really done of her own free will.'I'd like to see you tried with the offer of being made a Princess, were it but for a week, my dear,' chuckled Mrs. Blount.The harmless desire to see Belinda tried as she had suggested increased her resentful stubbornness.'I ain't going,' she asserted loftily. 'If the King thinks he is my King, and that I am his obedient subject, he is mightily mistaken, that's all. Even if he were, I ain't his slave, to be at the beck and call of his daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales. The Princess of Wales indeed! There ain't one. The dear young prince over the water—the true Prince—a baby in his nurse's arms, unwed as yet.''Belinda Annesley, what are you saying?' demanded Mistress Teresa, coming into the room. 'Do you mean that we should all be taken up for a hornets' nest of Jacobites in disguise? You must not sport your Oxford Tory politics here. What is all the pother about?'An explanation was given, and, though the command to repair to Leicester House next morning had come through Mistress Patty, and not through her elder sister, Mistress Teresa waived the small grievance and chimed in:'Of course you'll hold yourselves in readiness, girls; you've all the luck that's going. I've only been over to pay my respects at Leicester House along with the rest of the public, while you're having as good as a private interview. You may count yourselves honoured.''I don't.' The young Tory rebel was goaded into denying the imputation flatly. 'If she wants to see whether inoculation spares faces, she can send for the pardoned criminals on whom it was tried first, and spy on them for pock-marks,' said Belinda, alluding to the circumstance that the practice of inoculation which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought from Turkey was first ventured upon, in England, in the case of a batch of condemned criminals to whom a free pardon was granted on condition of their submitting to the test. 'To think of Clarissa and me being made to serve as examples, like the pardoned criminals!' continued Belinda, still indignant and ireful.'You may thank your stars, miss, that you were delivered, by your friends' care for you, from all danger of being pock-pitted as if you had received a charge of gunpowder into your face and had your youthful bloom spoilt. It is true of poor Princess Anne, whose rosy cheeks are all rough and dinted. Even Her Royal Highness herself is not without slight traces of the small-pox. Little wonder that she would fence her younger children from the spoiler! You are two ungrateful baggages if you don't bless the day you came to Chiswick and had the chance of being inoculated.'Mistress Teresa was not seriously angry, or afraid of Belinda's putting her threatened insubordination into execution, though she used the word 'baggages' in her speech. Such terms as 'baggage' and 'hussy,' which have descended to later generations with rude, unsavoury associations, were freely used in Clarissa's day, as often in merry banter—even in veiled compliment—as in wrath.In like manner, Belinda's sturdily phrased refusal was not so decisive as it had at first sounded. She was in a little ferment of Tory loyalty that morning to atone for certain misgivings and repentances in connection with a traitor in the Tory camp, who had taken it upon him in his scant leisure to seek out the house on Chiswick Mall, to which he had no invitation, which he could not presume to enter. But he was at liberty to pass at intervals with a gay, fearless glance at the broad window of the river-parlour, and such a flourish of the shabby cocked hat over the red wig as might, in its depth of laughing homage, have disarmed the sternest of dragons.'Who may that big scarecrow of a youth, with the carroty locks all on end, be?—I see him passing now and then,' inquired the unconscious Mistress Patty. 'He favours some of your wild beggarly Irish or Highland gentry who put on the airs of their betters, and yet are fain to stand behind a haberdasher's counter, or to grind with a pestle and mortar in an apothecary's shop, or to fill a stool in a notary's office. I declare he takes it upon him to salute this house as he passes. His salutation must be for Tabby in the kitchen or Betty in the linen-closet. That kind of person has always a brother or a cousin as is supposed to be rising in the ranks, who wears the cast clothes of his superiors and must ape the manners of gentlemen.'It was on the tip of Belinda's tongue to say: 'No, ma'am, he is no beggarly Irishman or Highlander; he is a Bulmer of the North, come of a race of squires every bit as ancient and unlettered and bigoted as ever were the Blounts of Maple Durham, though they've lived to be the friends of poets and wits. And, if you could but guess it, while he is in hiding for the political offences of his family, he is—alack that it should be true!—more of your way of thinking than becomes an honest young gentleman.' But, retaining a grain of prudence and catching Clarissa's warning eye, Belinda was able to keep Ellinor's secret.It was in the revulsion from her warring feelings at this time that Belinda took refuge in an outburst of rampant Toryism; but her vehemence calmed down with a speed in proportion to its heat. She was quickly talked over by the awkward position in which she would place Mistress Patty if she persisted in her refusal to accompany Clarissa to Leicester House, after Mistress Patty had pledged herself to Mrs. Clayton's friend that the misses would be only too delighted to be conducted to the Princess, shown to her and questioned by her. In addition to not failing poor Mistress Patty, who had only meant to promote her guests' interests and gratify the girls, there was the temptation, getting larger every moment as Belinda's discomposure abated, to take the wind as it blew in her barn door, and grasp the rare occasion of being admitted to the home and presence of a Princess—granted it was a wrong Princess. The error had not prevented her beauty, wit and influence over her husband from being talked of in London circles—Whig and Tory alike—till it spread throughout the country. The interview was to be of what might be classed as a domestic nature, robbing it of the character of public homage to the lady whom the Tories regarded as one of the Hanoverian usurpers—a highly dangerous usurper. But when it came to that, it was absurd, as Miss Teresa would have said, to speak as if it were of the smallest significance to whom chits like Belinda and Clarissa paid homage, or, indeed, to speak of their paying homage at all. And the time was presently coming when the head and front of the Jacobites in Oxford—Dr. King, who was in the Chevalier's confidence, and carried on an active correspondence with St. Germains—would travel up to London, the leader of a deputation from the University to wait upon King George and congratulate him on his return from his visit to Hanover! It was a blind, no doubt, but it was one of those blinds which have a double interpretation and prophecy, as clearly of wary hedging and possible submission, when the cause has grown desperate, as of wily deceit and cunning stratagem to mislead and finally get the better of the enemy.It is certain that Belinda and Clarissa would not obey the Princess's summons in the guise of two girl amazons. On the contrary, that, dressed in their best, it would also be in their demurest, most maidenly best of mantua and commode.They were fetched by Mrs. Clayton's friend —a bustling, obliging, commonplace person—to Leicester Fields. There they waited in their chairs till a communication was brought to them from Leicester House that Mrs. Clayton was ready to receive them and to usher them into the royal nursery, to which Caroline of Anspach was in the habit of paying daily visits for the purpose of teaching and playing with her children.Mrs. Clayton was one of the Princess's Bedchamber women, and so great a friend of hers that rumour had it she ruled the Princess as the Princess ruled the Prince. Accordingly much court was paid to her in order to secure her intervention for applicants desiring presentation at the receptions held at Leicester House, in order to secure favour with the rising sun in the person of the heir to the throne. In this light Mrs. Clayton was a lesser Abigail Hill. She certainly accepted gifts from the clients who thronged around her, and was noted for the display of such fine jewellery on state occasions as was not reckoned within the compass of her purse, and was attributed, with the malicious uncharitableness which prevailed in the region in which she dwelt, to the blackmail she levied on her court within a Court. Neither the blackmail nor the lavish display of jewellery which was said to distinguish her in public places agreed with her reputation as a woman of parts, an intellectual woman in a generally unintellectual generation. But into what result, however clearly defined and well established, does not human inconsistency step in, upsetting theories and dislocating systems in the most bewildering, distracting fashion? Grasping and vain in spite of her higher aspirations (or unscrupulously maligned), there is no question that Mrs. Clayton was a woman of thoughtful, studious tastes. They led her to prize the acquaintance of such philosophers and men of science as great, gentle Sir Isaac Newton, and to seek to introduce them to her royal mistress, since her royal master was not only incapable of appreciating them: he regarded them with positive aversion and contempt—the irritated, suspicious contempt of the smaller for the greater mind. Mental capacity in common was the bond which united the Princess and her Bedchamber woman, together with mutual sympathy and respect, which the ignorant onlookers mistook for inordinate regard, with its accompanying subserviency, on the Princess's part. In reality the mistress's character, with its marvellous power of self-restraint, of accommodating itself to circumstances, of devotion to the interests of her husband, and to the welfare of her adopted country, was a stronger, more practical character, better calculated to rule than was that of the servant.CHAPTER XVCAROLINE OF ANSPACHIT was a comfort rather than a disappointment to Belinda and Clarissa that the highly-informed Mrs. Clayton, with whose erudition they had been duly impressed, took very little notice of them after the first introduction. She was too much occupied with higher questions and too self-engrossed to have much attention to spare for them. They were at liberty to look about them as they passed the sentinels on guard, entered Leicester House, crossed the hall, and mounted, not one, but several staircases, losing in dignity and gaining in shabbiness as the higher ascent was accomplished, until the girls arrived at the conviction that Leicester House, which was the residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, so far from being the most sumptuous of the great houses they had seen, was quite eclipsed, not only by the mansions of the higher nobility, but by the houses of the smaller gentry, alike in its comforts and indulgences, and in its articles of beauty and value. The truth was, the income extorted with a grudge from the first George to maintain his only son and the heir to his kingdom, the Prince of Wales, the Princess, and their family, was so ridiculously inadequate to the situation that only the homeliest economy could make it accomplish its purpose.Denied the splendours of St. James's, the quaint Dutch dignity of Kensington Palace, the stateliness of Hampton Court and Windsor, the Prince and Princess of Wales were fain to content themselves with a private dwelling-house inferior in not a few respects to the town-houses of many of their subjects. Accordingly, the nursery to which the visitors were taken, though spacious, was as primitive and plain as any German nursery of the period, and considerably plainer than most of the contemporary English nurseries for the children of the upper class. The rugs which alternated with the bare boards were of homely materials—clipped strips of red and black cloth knitted together with yarn; the chair on which the Princess of Wales sat, with the baby, afterwards William, Duke of Cumberland, in her lap, had a straw seat; while the two young Princesses, Amily and Caroline, had wooden stools on either side of their mother.But from the time that Mrs. Clayton, in her formal manner and somewhat sonorous voice said: 'If it please your Royal Highness, here are the two young ladies you wished to see,' Belinda and Clarissa could contemplate only the central figure, regal and matronly, to which Mrs. Clayton and another lady with a nursemaid or two in the background served as an environment. She bent graciously towards the girls, who curtsied low. Then she put out her disengaged arm, still round and white, from which her silken elbow sleeve fell back, and Belinda herself could do naught else but slip down on one knee and kiss the hand so frankly extended to her.Caroline of Anspach was one of the beautiful women of her time. She had not the rose and lily complexion of Duchess Sarah of Marl-borough, but Duchess Sarah might have been likened to a rampaging milkmaid when matched with the daughter of Princes and the mother of Kings to be, when she chose to exercise her sagacious patience, her immense endurance. But, alas! she could rampage with the best also; for those were days when men and women in all ranks were not only rude and spoke their minds, but spoke them with a fierceness and a coarseness which, with few exceptions, can only be heard now amongst the most ignorant and degraded of the population. Those fine ladies and gentlemen with their hoops and patches, their Bolingbrokes and solitaires, were far from fine in their speech when overtaken by human nature's passions of envy, jealousy, rage, and revenge. A well-brought-up girl of any class to-day would stand aghast if she were under the necessity of listening to words which fell from the lips of Princesses and Queens in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The old fairy tale of the spell-bound heroine out of whose lovely mouth dropped, not pearls and diamonds, but 'loathly' toads and scorpions, was graphically illustrated at this period of the social life of the nation. Caroline's German extraction was not in her favour, for the German Courts of her time were far from being models of either morals or manners, and her superior enlightenment and many fine qualities did not exempt her from the contagion. Her wit, which could scathe as well as enliven, was not always free from scurrility and brutality. The English ladies around her could be objectionable enough in this respect, conspicuous among them the Princess's rival in originality and brilliance, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; but even they professed themselves to be scandalized by some of Caroline's broad sallies.Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's perfect symmetry of figure and face and pearly delicacy of colouring and skin were lacking in the Princess's beauty, which was already impaired—as it was in later years greatly marred—by an ever-increasing tendency to immoderate embonpoint.Still, seated there at her ease in her straw throne, with her baby in her lap and her blooming girls by her side, enough of her early charm remained to fascinate even the spectator the most unwilling to be fascinated. Her bearing was queenly, and, when she was so minded, could be as gracious and winning as in another mood it could be sarcastic and repellent. She had about her finely-poised head the same wealth of chestnut hair in rich masses and twining tendrils as Duchess Sarah possessed, the same creamy white, plump throat and neck, veiled by her lace neckerchief, while her expressive hazel eyes and mobile mouth far transcended in attraction the somewhat staring eyes and set mouth of Blenheim's noble virago.Without doubt here was a beautiful woman, not yet past her bounteous prime, unmatched in dignity, and, when it so pleased her, in sweet womanly friendliness, which robbed condescension alike of its haughtiness and self-complacence.For to see Caroline in the twin aspect of her wifehood and her motherhood was to find her at her best. Yet even there the foot of clay peeped out. The cherished daughter-in-law and pupil of the Electress Sophia, to whom Caroline bore a considerable resemblance, she had learnt certain things from the astute, devoted elder woman. These were a love and an abuse of philosophy, a worldly standard of judging good and evil, a resolute determination to be blind to the inferiority and to all the shortcomings of the man with whom she was mated. This tolerance extended to swallowing the sins wholesale without an effort to improve the sinner or check the sin—which, to be sure, in the case of a Prince might be fraught with danger of estrangement—so long as she re-tained her power over him and her dominant voice in his and the country's affairs.As to her motherhood, it was not from the Electress Sophia, who seems to have treated all the members of her large family with commendably impartial affection and concern for their welfare, that Caroline drew that revolted attitude of love to hatred turned, which animated her when her children grew up to oppose her wishes, and, what was infinitely worse, to act in defiance of their father, and to plot against the foolish, irate little man, to whom his wife had during the whole course of her wedded life implicitly deferred. Then there were no bounds to her furious casting off of the offenders. She was fond of all of them in their infancy, and tenderly attached to Caroline's dying day to her younger son—the baby in her lap. She was so good a mother to those two daughters seated by her, that when they were approaching middle age, still under the paternal roof, Princess Emily, or Amily, whose tongue was sharp, like her mother's, and her general circumspection as great, while she had been accustomed from her girlhood to pay the utmost respect to the King, her father, was driven to an outbreak of passionate reproach for the incredibly selfish form his grief took by the death-bed of the invincible woman who was controlling her last agonies for his sake. As for mild-eyed, gentle Princess Caroline—she never recovered from the blow inflicted on her by her beloved mother's death—she withdrew into retirement from that day, and faded away, sickening of the vague disease of pining over an absent presence, a vacant place.As a painful contrast to these three faithful descendants and to the younger Princesses, Mary and Louisa, still in their girlhood at the time of their mother's death, and dutiful and affectionate children always, were the elder son and daughter of the family, and the relations which existed between them and their mother. Frederick, or Fritz, was doomed to perpetuate the traditional hostility between father and elder son in the House of Guelph. The circumstance that he was left behind for state reasons to grow up in Hanover, when his grandfather, George I., came with the rest of the family to lay hold of his inheritance according to the law of succession, which assigned the crown of England to the nearest Protestant heir, seemed to have the effect of utterly alienating the cross-grained, perverse lad from the rest of his family. Not a particle of natural feeling appears to have survived in him, nor, where he was concerned, in any of the other members of the divided house. Amongst the torrents of abuse launched at him, none was more envenomed, more terrible, than what was poured forth by his mother. In the same strain she lashed with her unbridled tongue her daughter, Princess Anne, and the husband she had thought fit to accept in the person of the hump-backed Prince of Orange. The curiously assorted marriage had the formal consent of the King and Parliament; but the father and mother of the bride cherished behind the scenes a strong objection to the union. Indeed, Caroline, for reasons which are not clear, elected to view her daughter's tolerance of her bridegroom's sickliness and deformity as a deadly insult to her whole family, and overwhelmed the pair with mocking derision.But it was not a Princess incensed and outraged with whom Belinda and Clarissa had to deal; it was the first lady of the land, full of a noble, tactful courtesy, which well became her, to two abashed girls who were not of a rank or a nurture to be used to Courts and their ways. She signed for the pair to be provided with seats and to seat themselves, for she was quick to perceive that their trembling limbs could hardly support them.'I am vastly obliged to you for complying with my request to see you.' She spoke fluently, but with a foreign accent, pronouncing obliged 'obleeged.' Her voice, however, rang pleasantly, and her smile was at once candid and friendly. 'You see, I have my Princesses there to think of in trying this antidote, and I desired to judge for myself whether it did what its promoters promised—whether it did not leave behind the spots and the blurred redness of the real disease. I vow I can spy none. I compliment you, misses, on your charming complexions; one could not ask for fairer, finer skins; they might have been steeped in milk or washed in May-dew, as German maidens wash their faces once a year. Nay, there is no need to blush for yours. Now, will you reassure my Princesses by telling them what I understand is the truth, that the little operation is not very painful?''It hardly hurts at all, madam,' Clarissa found voice to say. 'It is no worse than to prick your finger with a needle.''Didn't I tell you so?' the Princess of Wales appealed triumphantly to her daughters, who had manifestly quaked with apprehension when the question was put. 'And afterwards there was only one short slight bout of sickness?'This time she looked at Belinda, who felt herself compelled to answer.'I did not think it short or slight, madam; but people tell me that was because I had never had an illness I could remember in my life before. I was only in bed for a day and a half, and I have been very well again for a long time now.''Good!'—the Princess pronounced it' goot'—she said with a laugh. 'When a girl is young and strong, and her finger aches, she thinks she is going to die on the spot. Is it not so, Linchen?' she rallied the younger and more timid of her Princesses, with a caress in the rally. 'I like that nothing should be hid.'She would have made further inquiries, but there was a stir in the passage without, the door was thrown open, and an under-sized, red-faced man, in a velvet coat and diamond knee-buckles, fussed into the room, and began a blustering speech in German to the Princess.The Princesses, old and young, started to their feet, and the two girls instinctively followed their example, while Mrs. Clayton, the other Lady-in-waiting,and the servants—all of whom had been already standing—backed till they could back no farther, and remained ranged against the wall.Caroline was instantly, as she never failed to be, at her husband's service. With her little Prince in her arms, she stood up and gave her whole attention to what the Prince of Wales was blurting out in his hectoring, ungainly fashion. She could only vouchsafe a muttered 'Thank you' and a bend of her head, with a glance over her shoulder to the girls. They knew themselves dismissed, and would have turned and fled to the door, in a most natural but decidedly unceremonious style, had not Mrs. Clayton, who was long-legged, taken a swift, noiseless stride in their direction. She caught the foremost fugitive by the arm, reminded her in a stern whisper of the curtsey, at which nobody looked, and then dragged her walking backwards, her companion stumblingly following her example, not certain whether her head or her heels were highest, till the door closed behind them.Safe in their chairs, with the chairmen swinging the light weights along with a will, the moment the country so near Leicester Fields was reached, Clarissa popped her head out of her window to congratulate Belinda on the great event being well over. Wasn't the Princess fit to be a Queen? And at least they could say they had seen near at hand the future King, the hero of Dettingen—or was it Fontenoy?'He a hero!' cried Belinda in lively scorn—'as little a hero as a King. I wot there will be two, and more, at that bargain-making. Wait till my Prince of Wales grows up and comes over the water. That fellow Ralph Bulmer, or Brereton—pest on his two names!—can never have seen this horrid little man. He a Prince and a King! I would not credit him with being anything better than a German huckster. She is well enough if she were not fat and his wife; but I declare I had as lief call any petty trademan in a back-alley Prince and King as stoop to kiss yon ill-mannered lout's dirty hand.'CHAPTER XVIA STREET SCUFFLECLARISSA and Belinda had been with Mistress Teresa at one of the last routs of the season. People of the first fashion were rapidly dispersing, to gather again at Bath or Tunbridge, to rusticate at their country seats, the more adventurous of them to cross the Channel and see what France and the Low Countries were like. The girls had grown somewhat satiated with London routs and festivities; Belinda's keen relish for them had been blunted by the conduct of her finest friends after her inoculation. Strange to say, amidst all the gay scenes she had passed through, there was none she recalled so often, or so wistfully, as the afternoon spent in the homely locality of Wright's Buildings and the old inn garden, in company with the amateur dressmaker and usher. It might be that his defection from Tory principles preyed upon her mind, and that she was burdened with an ardent longing to turn the renegade from the error of his ways.The chief interest of this last rout, and one which had tickled Clarissa's sense of humour, was that the strangers had been fortunate in having pointed out to them Lord and Lady Petres, the originals of that other 'Belinda' and her audacious lover, whose quarrel, destined to immortality, roused the classic, comic muse in the lad Alexander Pope, lying dreaming among the oaks and beeches of Windsor Forest. Alas for the lasting appropriateness of poem and people! My Lady Petres' coveted locks had waxed thin and gray, and had long been replaced by a powdered periwig; my Lord Petres, a grave, elderly gentleman, grown stiff with rheumatism, was hard to realize as a frivolous, nimble burglar.Another distinction which belonged to this winding-up of the revels was that the ball was so numerously attended that hackney coaches were at a discount. Mistress Teresa, having failed to secure the reversion of one of her friends' private coaches for herself and her charges, was reduced—in the strait—either to hiring a torch-lit boat or to engaging chairmen to convey her and her party the distance to Chiswick. Neither expedition, after midnight, recommended itself to her; but it was a fine summer night, not more than a deepish dusk at the worst, while the morning light was near at hand, and would be breaking in the east before the confines of the town were past. With six stout chairmen what was there to fear? Only tiresome delay and fatigue, and the rousing of the house on the Mall in broad day, with the tell-tale sun shining full on crushed finery and fagged faces, instead of having them screened by the welcome gray shadows of the small hours.Mistress Teresa argued without her host. They were delayed in starting till nearly the last departing guests had taken their leave and the last of the wrangling, shouting coachmen had cracked their whips and rattled off with their freight. Then, the three belated sedan-chairs and their bearers had barely got beyond the turmoil, and traversed two comparatively quiet, semi-dark streets, when the strained ears of the ladies were startled and alarmed by a series of wild whoops and halloos drawing nearer and nearer. The shouts were uttered, as the alarmed women descried with difficulty, by a party of men rushing tumultuously down the street, scouring it as they did so, giving chase to any of the few pedestrians—whether men or women—the rioters encountered, dashing out the rare lights, making the night hideous with their uproar.'Watch! Watch!' shouted the chairmen, but it was not to defend the little group from highwaymen that the guardians of the public were summoned. Highwaymen did not penetrate into the thoroughfares of towns, least of all of the capital, even under cloud of night, and highwaymen do not herald their approach by yells and whistles. The youngest and simplest persons there, Belinda and Clarissa, knew so much. It was a more formidable, because a more reckless and irresponsible foe, trading on their immunity as men of quality—whom it was next to impossible to bring to justice—in order to indulge in what to them, after a drunken orgie, was the choice freak of setting law and order at defiance, hunting and harrying, insulting and scaring every harmless creature, man or beast, that crossed their path. These were the young 'Mohawks,' 'bucks,' or 'bloods,' who, during Anne's reign and the two suc-ceeding reigns, were the terror of every peaceful citizen and his womankind, who by an evil chance were benighted on their return from their taverns, coffee-houses, and junketings.'Go on; pay no heed to them,' Mistress Teresa, unable to restrain a quaver in her authoritative voice, called to the chairmen.'Better stop and let them run by, my lady, since the Watch ben't at hand—I jalouse they've had a tussle already. If you anger them, the gentlemen will think little of knocking over the chairs, when there would be broken poles and hinges, torn leather, and splintered glass to answer for. Speak them fair, my lady, if they make so bold as to speak to you. They are only some of your quality out for a racket,' the eldest of the chairmen counselled Mistress Teresa in a loud whisper. To his fellows, who followed his example in putting down their burden at the darkest side of the street, he added in a lower aside: 'They are all of the same kidney, lads, and Jack will do Jill no harm. Jack is as good a customer as Jill—faith! a deal better, for he tosses out his change from his laced waistcoat as she never deals it out of her embroidered pocket; we be bound to look to ourselves—we be but poor working folk.'The words were not out of his mouth, when the crew were swarming round the chairs. The men's appearance was not improved by the detail that they were in the rich evening dress of the period, in the last stage of disorder, soiled and splashed with wine, blood, and mud. For they had been drinking, fighting, and, as they reeled along, rolling in the mire. Their cravats and ruffles were hanging in rags.In one case, not only the cocked hat, but the wig was gone, exposing the shaven pate above the leering, gibbering face; in another a ghastly daub of white powder, fallen from his wig on the one cheek, and on the other a crimson stain from a gaping slash, lent a Grimaldi grotesqueness to the fellow's aspect. Bedlam broken loose would not have been more horrifying. Masked highwaymen were nothing to this mad rout. Masked highwaymen were desperate, lawless men, still they were in their senses, they could be implored for mercy, they could be bribed, threatened, defied; but these aristocratic savages were unapproachable, unaccountable, so far as knowing what they were doing.The girls drew back quaking, each in the farthest corner of her chair.The door of Mistress Teresa's chair was wrenched open by the man with the bald pate; it gave him a singularly idiotic air, which his words did not belie.'Your health and song, madam,' he said, in thick, stuttering accents, making the lady a low, mocking bow, which, in the unsteady state of his legs, nearly sent him sprawling at her feet.Mistress Teresa's high spirit reasserted itself. She rose to her feet and addressed a rebuking challenge to the assailant.'Sir, you are under a gross misapprehension. We are not nameless, unprotected females; we are three gentlewomen returning from my Lady Onslow's ball. The Court as well as the magistrates shall hear of this insolence.''Ho, ho! ha, ha!' he laughed a tipsy laugh. 'I say, you're monstrous comfortable there; 'tis getting beastly cold outside here; I swear I'm as tired as if I had hopped a sack race. Can't you make room for a partner on your seat?' and he tried to force himself past her. But Mistress Teresa in her steadiness was the stronger of the two, and she thrust him back until, the pole of the chair catching his foot, he tripped and measured his length on the road, his misadventure turning the laugh against him from those of his comrades who had witnessed his antics.In the meantime, a jewelled hand brandishing a lit torch plucked from some sconce by a doorway, the melting tar and resin streaming down the coat-sleeve and threatening to scorch to the bone the wearer in his present intoxicated insensibility, was intruded into Belinda's chair, at the imminent risk of setting her and her peach-coloured gauze dress in a blaze.'Oh, mercy! I shall be burned to death!' shrieked poor Belinda, skipping here and there in sheer affright. 'Will nobody seize hold of the light, drag the wretch away, and save me?''Nonsense, my pretty buzzing bee! There ain't any intention of smoking you to death—sure, the honey of a kiss mightn't be worth it,' drawled the torch-swayer by way of comfort.And yonder was Clarissa, with a face as white as paper, being lifted and led stumblingly from her chair by a cavalier who could only mumble disjointedly:'The honour of a coranto—just one—couldn't refuse so small a favour.''I wouldn't mind dancing a coranto,' faltered Clarissa with chattering teeth; 'but I'm afraid I'm too sick to stand up, and you, sir, don't seem any better than I—besides, where is the available space?''Hold, you scoundrels! what are you about, stopping and frightening the ladies?' The lusty cry came sounding through the night air, causing the hearts of the assailed women to rebound with a great throb of relief and hope, and, in one case, with a thrill of amazed gladness as at an incredible recognition.But the cry only proceeded from the foremost of two men who had descried the situation and were hurrying to the rescue—if there could be a rescue where the new-comers were outnumbered six to two. Stay! there were several of the Watch straggling up at the heels of the two champions, and all were sober, ablebodied men in full possession, not only of their wits, but of their bodily members, while the six chairmen, seeing how the wind was veering round, veered round with equal promptitude and raised a clamour.'Hands off! Villains, what are you about, stopping and molesting the ladies? Let 'em be, d'ye hear, or 'twill be the worse for you!'Coincidences do happen sometimes, and it was by one of them that Ralph Bulmer and Cyp King—on his second business visit to London—had a single friend in common, and had happened to meet at his house, sup with him, and stay late in their disputations that night—so late that, Mr. Cyp being far from his lodgings, genial Ralph Bulmer had invited him to return with him to Wright's Buildings. There Ralph would find accommodation for a guest during what part of the night remained, though he himself should have to give up his own bed and sleep in a chair instead.It was Mr. Cyp who freed Clarissa from the partner who would have led her out sorely against her will to an inappropriate dance on the cobblestones, while she strove to compose herself and to convince her rescuer that she could get back to her chair without his aid, for poor Mistress Teresa was being held at bay by a real madman. And it was Ralph Bulmer who knocked down the man with the torch, extinguishing it as he did so, and held Belinda's hands and soothed the frenzy with which she was still struggling.'Is it you, Ralph—Ralph Bulmer? Oh, look if there are any sparks about me! I must be burning, and to perish by fire is a dreadful death!''No, no! There ain't any sparks about you that I know of save one, and, sure, you don't think he would hurt you?' said Ralph coaxingly.The foe, taken aback in their turn, and not in a condition to recover from the surprise that their will should be questioned, dealt several random strokes with their sword-canes—one of which inflicted a cut across Cyp King's wrist. Then they suffered themselves to fall back in sullen baffledness as the chairmen seized their poles and proceeded to start anew on their journey.'You will permit me to walk by you, madam, till you reach your destination, and my companion will do the same by one of the young ladies,' volunteered Mr. Cyp, speaking to Mistress Teresa and looking at Clarissa, standing as he did between the two ladies. He added in an undertone, by way of an obligation to take the walk, 'I have scant faith in your charioteers.''We are deeply indebted to you, sir, and under the circumstances, though we are loath to put you to further trouble, we are not at liberty to decline your attendance,' answered Mistress Teresa in her grand manner.'Heavens! he is bleeding,' cried Clarissa, catching a glimpse of the hand he was trying to hold behind his back. She grew white as a lily again, but she was able to whip out her handkerchief, move with eager, timid steps to his side, and ask in a voice trembling with anxiety and distress, 'Oh, sir, where are you hurt? You must take my chair—you must indeed. I am young and strong; I can walk the distance to Chiswick. Remember, 'tis on our account you have got hurt; don't deny us the comfort of succouring you, and of anticipating the risk of your getting faint on your feet, as you propose to go. Let me bind the wound and stanch the bleeding.''Not at all,' he said peremptorily. ''Tis nothing—a mere scratch. One of you fellows'—turning to the chairmen—'tie my handkerchief round my wrist, and do not let the ladies be sickened by the sight of the plaguy blood-drops. No, Mistress Clarissa'—his gray eyes melting, his voice sinking and softening indescribably—'I am not ungrateful; but you must not put yourself about for me because of a trifling graze which I am only too happy to have incurred in your service. Do not forget that Dr. and Madam Masham committed you and Mistress Annesley in part to my care.''He is right, Clarissa,' said Mistress Teresa, who had some experience of men's looks in the circumstances. 'The injury is not serious; the walk will do him no harm. And you will give us the pleasure of your company at breakfast, Mr. King; we have seen too little of you,' remarked Mistress Teresa, boldly ignoring the fact that the 'too little' had been entirely her own doing. The gentleman bowed his acceptance of her invitation, and she changed the subject of conversation with practised adroitness by directing a little well-bred ridicule against Clarissa's agitated proposal: 'As to a young gentleman lolling in a chair, and a young lady walking in a ball-dress along Chiswick Mall at six o'clock in the morning—why, my dear Clarissa, 'twould be enough to make saints swear.'Poor Clarissa was abashed enough already. Why had she made herself conspicuous by coming forward and drawing attention to the sword-cut Mr. Cyp King sought to conceal?She had made quite a speech about it, and proffered her assistance—which had been rejected—in remedying it. Had she been forward, unmaidenly? What would Mr. Cyp think of her—he who was in orders, and evidently regarded modest, dignified reserve as the first essential in a young woman?She heard what he thought when, in spite of his wrist, he put her into her chair, and murmured:'Kind, sweet Mistress Clarissa! I am grateful. I vow I would be—not to say scratched—wounded to the quick to excite the same gentle sympathy, to receive the same dear offer of help.'Though Mistress Teresa had graciously thawed to Mr. Cyp in consideration of his having gallantly led the rescue which had delivered her and her charges from an extremely trying and perilous adventure, she did not vouchsafe a particle of notice to the big, shabby, red-headed youth. She knew him in a moment to be one of the proscribed Tories, the scurvy young rascal who had handed the girls into the coach at the door of Madam Masham's acquaintances' lodgings in Wright's Buildings with every sign of uncalled-for, unseemly, familiar friendliness. Neither did she fail to recognise him as Mistress Patty's scarecrow, who had a habit of passing the house in the Mall, looking up to the window, and bowing to the ground as he did so.The poor usher did not take Mistress Teresa's neglect of him to heart. He was not in the slightest degree daunted by it. He did not see why he should be. He walked cheerily close by Belinda's chair, his hand resting on one of the open window-sashes, as Mr. Cyp did not venture to do in relation to Clarissa's chair. For he had outgrown the easy presumption of youth which Ralph Bulmer was showing in seeking to entice the occupant of the chair into gay chatter and laughter.But Belinda could not at first chatter; she was too full of what had happened to her, and of resentment at her cousin Mistress Teresa's unworthy, heartless conduct. Could she pretend to be ignorant of the fact that, had it not been for Ralph Bulmer, she (Belinda Annesley) would certainly have come to an awful end? Another wild wave of that death-dispensing torch in the hand which strong drink had palsied, and Belinda would have been the hapless victim. Yet Mistress Teresa grudged the gallant youth the slightest countenance on her part. Then, it remained for Belinda to reward her deliverer. She must take the matter into her own hands. She roused herself to shake off the shock she had received, she responded to his blithe talk; soon the two heads were together in merry confabulation, plotting boy-and-girl mischief as likely as not.CHAPTER XVIIA WATER-PARTY AND A DANCE ON THE GREEN'TAKE care, Clarissa,' said Belinda teasingly to her friend a few days after the street scuffle. 'Once, twice, thrice does it. Once from the footpads, twice from those horrid "Bloods": you'll only have to drop into the river and let him pull you out, and then, as Mr. Cyp has saved you three times, you cannot do less than bestow upon him the article he has been so brisk in recovering.''Take care yourself, Bell,' Clarissa responded. 'You are never done telling how, if it had not been for Mistress Ellinor's brother, you and your dress, and the chair too, I dare say, would have been reduced to ashes.''But that is only once, and he ain't going to get a second chance of saving me from drowning,' replied Belinda, with a pout. 'As to the village green, where we are to dance, there may be goring bulls or worrying curs about, when he is supposed to be far away,' she ended with recovered good-humour and a mysterious nod.A double festivity had been in the air for a considerable time. The date had been fixed for weeks. La crème de la crème of the world had been vanishing for some time, but still there was enough left for a water-party and a dance on the green, which Belinda and Clarissa must not miss seeing, while the close of their visit to town was drawing every day nearer and nearer.Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty were fain to admit themselves considerably disappointed in the result. Neither girl—though she had commanded every advantage of special introductions and fine society—had made a great match, or, for that matter, a match of any kind. Yet their looks were not in fault, and one of them was 'a fortune'—quite a pretty fortune for a country girl. With regard to Clarissa, the sisters did not mind their failure so much (their old mother did not mind it at all for either girl. 'Poor young things!' she would insist, 'let them have their fling and be happy while they may; they will be settled—each with the cares of a house and a husband on her shoulders—soon enough'). Mistress Teresa had so far given in with regard to Mistress Clarissa and her Oxford scholar and cleric of a swain, to whom, it appeared, she must have stuck through thick and thin. For the girl had found admirers far more eligible, in a worldly sense, than the man she preferred; still, though she had always been civil and gentle, it had been clear enough to tire out the gentlemen's patience that she would have none of them.But the Blounts' collapse in the case of their cousin Belinda Annesley was a more vexing and mortifying affair, for which they felt a deeper responsibility. She was the more striking belle of the two girls; and she was 'a fortune.' For a short time when my Lord Fanny dangled about her—not that she had any chance of being made my Lady Fanny—that proud post was reserved for a Court beauty—the prospect was that she would become the height of the fashion—a prospect to which she had then no objection. She would confer new lustre on the house on the Mall, while she might have half a dozen coronets to pick and choose from. What had marred the auspicious outlook? Was it the false step of the inoculation, which had withdrawn her just long enough from the public stage for the fickleness of man to come into play in forgetting her? Yet it was not so much the men who drew back, as Belinda, who had shown signs of satiety and disgust with what had at first delighted her. Perverse as she had proved herself—and when were girls to be depended upon?—Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty had not lost all hope, and would not relax their efforts to the last. Above all, nothing on earth should induce them to be parties to the outrageous folly of encouraging that audacious, out-at-elbows Tory boy to hover round her. True, he was a mere boy, hardly old enough for the paltry usher's post he was glad to fill for a screen and a livelihood; but such precocious boys and self-willed, rebellious girls were better kept apart.Accordingly, the Mistresses Blount might be said to have bidden their guests, killed their fatlings, made every other preparation—including the collecting of the amateur water band, who, with their flutes and hautboys, were to discourse mellow water music like that to which Handel contributed for the delectation of his royal masters, the two first Georges.Clarissa had looked eagerly forward to this excursion on the river highway with which she lad grown so familiar, her own Oxford Isis writ large,' and still undimmed by the smoke of steamboats, unpolluted with the sewage and garbage deposited in it from the small towns 'with every modern improvement,' which in Clarissa's day were rustic villages innocent of scientific processes of defilement. She could lot imagine any pleasure greater than, on a still, ripe, summer day, when nature, after her bright blooming time, was passing into her bountiful fruitage, to be quietly rowed so as it were to float along among all the other craft. This craft was distinguished by the gaiety of its errand, by the gallant company of ladies and gentlemen who were bound on a day's high holiday, by the echoing strains of music sounding softly on the water, heralding the boat's progress. The jocund notes proclaimed to the work-a-day people in the barges and market-boats and on the banks that here were the quality, who neither toiled nor span, but fretted and suffered even as their fellow-mortals, holding a daylight open-air revel which all passers-by might rest on their toilsome oars, or stay their trudging feet, to stare at. The goal was away in the direction of Teddington, Maidenhead, Marlow. The meadows were more in a state of nature the trees stretched their branches at their will the trim lawns, the luxurious villas, of a later period were absent; but the scene, to a lover of the country pure and simple, was not less fair.Ah! but Clarissa found there was a pleasure rarer and keener than what she had imagined. It was to enjoy all the other delights she had anticipated, and at the same time to share them with Mr. Cyp sitting by her side. His conversation was reserved for the most part to low-voiced remarks for her ear alone—comparisons of the silvery Thames with its parent while yet a bashful maiden in her teens, implications of future charmed hours spent together on the mother stream.Belinda was less entranced; on the contrary, she was restless and excited, changing her place from one group to another every time the boat was stationary for a few minutes, to allow the better inspection of a fine view or to try the experiment of hoisting a brown sail. Sometimes her sallies and repartees were as lively as ever; sometimes she would sit silent, her lips apart, her blue eyes gazing into the distance as if her mind were far away, back in Oxford among her sworn servants. Or could it be in a crowded, somewhat mean schoolroom, where, amidst the close air, the dust, the monotonous patter of boys' voices, a manly lad was resisting the inclination to yawn and stretch himself, was buckling himself anew with a cheery will to his work, braced and gladdened by a reward which lay before him in the near future?The programme for the day had been carefully planned. A cold collation had been sent in advance to a shady spot, where the pleasure-seekers were to come ashore and do leisurely justice to the entertainment. Afterwards the party were to re-embark, and to proceed a little farther to a primitive village, which had, nevertheless, its peculiar crowning attribute. This was not its 'pound' for straying cattle, or its 'stocks' for human offenders: it was its 'green,' which in summer had its turf kept smooth and fine, no geese being permitted to waddle upon it, or young pigs to root it up. As Chelsea was famous for its buns, Richmond for its maid-of-honour cakes, Kensington, later, for its Queen's gingerbread, Greenwich for its whitebait, so Little Thornley was renowned for its 'green,' for from time immemorial parties from London—not infrequently of high degree—had rowed up the river to finish a day's junketing with a rustic dance on it. That masquerading as rustics, and aping of their work and play, formed a marked feature of the upper classes in the eighteenth century. At the Blounts' water-party a sprinkling of the guests chose to come in character for the concluding act of thier programme. Amongst the cocked hats, laced coats, and Mechlin cravats, there figured at intervals the rough jackets and caps of improvised watermen, the long frieze coats and red vests of supposititious farmers, the floury garb supposed to be the proper attribute of millers. The younger ladies were not behind in these fanciful transformations. In place of hooped petticoats, bunched-up trains, negligées and inordinately high head-dresses, there were limp linen skirts to match with the crooks and coronals—of drooping daisies, red poppies, and golden field-marigolds—of Dresden shepherdesses; or there were the short, linsey-woolsey petticoats, white short gowns and quilted cotton hoods of milkmaids, with shining milkpails dangling over their arms.Belinda wore the last costume, which was roguishly becoming to her fair bloom.There were toasts and speeches at the cold collation, appreciated by the seniors, and wished at the bottom of the river by the juniors of the party, eager to arrive at the final frolic of the day.At last the re-embarkation of the company was accomplished, the couple of miles farther was rowed, and Little Thornley was reached. The party were expected; two local fiddlers were in attendance to supplement the flutes and hautboys. Real pitchers of genuine milk and home-brewed ale flanked rude stalls on which the vendors of cakes displayed their wares. A gathering of village gaffers and gammers, together with young hopefuls just released from their day's work in the fields and in the kitchens of the nearest farms, were collected to see the fun. Even the parish clergyman, in rusty black, was present to smile blandly on the pleasure-makers, and to discover if it might be that any of his honoured patrons or patronesses were in these brilliant ranks.Soon the elder ladies and gentlemen were accommodated with benches provided for their use, and set in a semicircle round the green. The sun was low down in the west, the sickle of a young harvest moon was hovering on the brink of the horizon; there was no time to lose, though the air was still balmy with the day's subdued heat. Pair after pair were in their places on the green, not to dance minuets or corantos—those were hardly admissible under the circumstances, and were replaced, as a rule, by such old-fashioned country dances as 'Sir Roger,' or the 'Country Bumpkin.' Even these were suffered to degenerate into the infinitely simpler mere rounds or rings which children dance, in which men and women capered gracefully or ungracefully in a circle, either for sheer lightness of heart and exuberance of good fellowship, or from an assumption of those desirable frames of mind—which, while an affectation, came to very much the same thing. Only occasionally a couple possessed of the necessary knowledge and skill diverged from the primitiveness of the performance. Separating themselves from the others, they danced with entire gravity and dignity a 'High Dance' or 'Pas de Deux,' to the gaping admiration of the village spectators.'Who is that man dancing with Belinda Annesley?' Mistress Teresa inquired sharply of her sister.'Sure, I cannot tell,' answered MistressPatty, peering at the dancer in question; for her blue eyes were not so keen in detecting discrepancies and marvels as were Mistress Teresa's eyes, which nothing escaped. 'He is personating an ordinary peasant or yokel in his smock and tattered straw hat, yet he is not the Hon. Dick Compton nor Sir Thomas Metcalf.''No, indeed,' murmured Mistress Teresa emphatically; 'he does not belong to us. We did not bring him here. Can it be possible that any common villager has had the audacity, the insolence, to intrude into our set, and pass himself off as if he were our equal? If so, he would only have to open his mouth to betray himself. Then, what can Belinda mean by talking and laughing with him, as I have watched her doing for the last ten minutes?''If he is a labouring man,' chimed in Mistress Patty, who had a shrewdness of her own particular kind, 'his smock has never seen wind or weather before—no, nor the washerwoman's tub. The linen is green still, and, if I ain't mistaken, it is fresh out of the fold. I must say that it and his crimson neckerchief become the fellow's dark complexion mightily. And, sister, can't you perceive that, though he sports hobnailed shoes, he don't dance like a lout?Mayn't he be some acquaintance of Belinda's, though he is unknown to us?''Pshaw!' exclaimed Mistress Teresa impatiently; 'what acquaintance could she have here in London that I did not know of?'At the same time she started and gave a quick glance at the head of the interloper: for interloper he was, whether a real or a pretended rustic; he was not there by her invitation. No fiery locks met her eye; it was a dark head in keeping with the olive tint of the skin. Of course, in playing the part of a peasant, he wore neither powder nor periwig. Somewhat relieved, Mistress Teresa turned away to attend to her guests in general.Clarissa had noted Belinda's partner with extreme surprise and discomposure. Not that she was not aware of his identity, but how had he happened to come there, and what would be the result of his unwarranted presence? Little Thornley was not closed against the outside world, but neither was it a public garden. A stranger was not at liberty to join uninvited a set of quality who had secured the place for their private use. Clarissa could not contemplate the possibilities without trepidation. Mistress Teresa would be justly incensed by the trick played upon her, in thus smuggling into her charmed circle a young man she had refused to know, who, with his family, was under a cloud. If Ralph Bulmer's name and antecedents were discovered and bandied about, he would incur an amount of danger which could hardly be measured. At the date of the late rebellion, though he was then a mere boy, a warrant had been issued against him, as well as against the other members of his house, such as was in force in the case of every proscribed family. The proscribing attainder had not been rescinded in the course of the years which had intervened. He was liable at any moment to be arrested and tried for high treason. The Hanoverian Government had not shown itself vindictive in the punishment of such rebels as had in the interval fallen into the hands of justice. Examples had been made of the leaders; the smaller fry were not hunted down ruthlessly. But the temper of those in authority could not be safely relied upon. In the midst of considerable lenity there were recurring instances of exceptional harshness. How could Belinda for a frolic, a freak, expose Ellinor's brother to so grave a risk? The explanation was to be found in the fact that Belinda had always been daring and defiant, while she had been goaded on to her present prank by Mistress Teresa's uncompromising attitude towards the lad, who, as Belinda insisted on believing, had saved her from a ghastly danger and a tragic death.Clarissa had not much attention to spare even for so interesting and exciting a subject. Mr. Cyp King did not think it consistent with Holy Orders to dance—a strict view for his generation—but he did not disapprove of the exercise for the laity, especially for one innocent, gentle little girl, who would have been cut to the heart by his disapproval. She could see—glancing up from under her brown eyelashes—with what a pleasant smile he watched her first and last, as she stood up and played her part on the green with the partners Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty provided for her. What Clarissa called his generosity and his faith in her thrilled her with joy and content, and there he was quick to reclaim her, as if she were his assured property, at the end of each figure, and to carry her off to wander round with him in the gathering dusk, inspecting the rustic surroundings and listening to the country sounds—the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, the note of a belated bird, the bark of a faithful watch-dog. He would have her stroll as far as the little Norman church with its adjoining parsonage—a green, overgrown wilderness, because its master was a bachelor, and more of a hunting squire than a preaching parson. Then he told her how well ordered, with its beehives, its dovecot, its poultry-yard, its productive flowery garden, and its fruitful orchard, had been the similar home in which he and his brothers and sisters had grown up in health and happiness. He asked solicitously whether she did not think such a home, in its modesty, a peaceful and blessed abiding-place to those who did not ask for great worldly honour and abundance, who were satisfied with tender reverence and affection, with plain living and high thinking, with striving, in spite of their follies and errors, to go about their Master's business?In her agitated, fervid acquiescence, she could make no reply beyond the shy, eloquent glance of her blue eyes, which were averted the next instant because it felt to her too bold, too eagerly grasping the chief good life had to bestow, to spy upon the happiness which overspread the calm, manly face.The return of the water-party was by torchlight, which rendered it a more enchanted, picturesque spectacle than ever, and lent to its water music a still softer, mellower character, dying away in wistful, melodious echoes and lingering, pathetic strains which it had not exhibited in the garish light of day amidst its common, jarring noises. But these advantages were counterbalanced by serious disadvantages. In the flaming, flashing, smoky red light, only those who sat in the immediate vicinity of the torches could be clearly distinguished; the mass of the company remained in deep shadow. It was impossible for Mistress Teresa, peer as she might, to be certain that her party was composed of the same individuals who had started from the steps leading down from the Mall to the river. There might have been straggling deserters from the ranks at Little Thornley, making their way home by some other mode; or, what was a graver consideration, there might have been fresh recruits undreamt of by the givers of the gala. It was one of the objections, accentuated by some recent scandal, to the public gardens, ridottos and masquerades so freely patronized at the period, that it was difficult to keep strangers at a distance, to prevent intruders even into the box-bordered boxes which the more select of the guests appropriated for themselves and their friends. A water-party was less liable to such liberties taken by the audacious and unscrupulous. Only when it lasted till a late hour, and the night was dark, was there any danger of such offences.Mistress Teresa had kept up the ball longer than she intended, and she had miscalculated the age and size of the moon. Where was Belinda Annesley? It was hard to pick her out among the different dusky groups in the crowded boat. It was rendered the harder because, while the mock farmers, watermen, and shepherds had not altered their rustic garb, the shepherdesses and milkmaids had been less loyal to their parts. The ladies had cast aside their crooks and milking-pails, and wrapped themselves in shrouding boat-cloaks to protect themselves from the night air. Was that Mistress Belinda's blooming, sparkling face hid in the depths of a great cloth hood which had swallowed up her cotton hood? If so, who was her companion, with whom she was in continuous animated converse? Could it be the fellow in the greeny-white linen smock? Sure, there was a gleam of light clothes about him. He was not there at Mistress Teresa's bidding. Yet she could not tell; she dared not take it for granted in the obscurity. Nothing was commoner in these ruralizing parties than attempts to play off small bits of mystification. Somebody who had not taken up a rôle in the earlier part of the day might have had a peasant dress sent out to Little Thornley to await his arrival there. He might have donned it in secret, and worn it subsequently to the perplexity and confusion of his companions. The wearer might, after all, be Sir Thomas or the Hon. Dick, with his looks altered by powder and rouge and a new wig, and Mistress Teresa's interference might put a stop to a promising confidential talk.At the landing-stage on the Mall Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty took leave of their company, some of whom remained in the boat to be rowed cityward; others dispersed to their homes in the vicinity. The man in the linen smock was not among the guests who bowed low over their hostess's hands and uttered a wellturned compliment on the success of the day's merry-making, together with a polite assurance of gratitude for being included in it. He must either have gone on in the boat, or he must have slunk away without a word of good-night or of thanks, under cover of the dusk.This conclusion was more than Mistress Teresa could stand. She felt it to be her duty to get to the bottom of it. She waved the girls into the river-parlour, and there, by the faint light of a single wax candle which had been brought into the room, she turned upon the culprit.'Now, miss, you will be so good as to tell me the name of the man you have been colloguing with ever since we got to Little Thornley. You danced all the dances with him on the green, and you might have put your two heads under one hat on the way back. Yet I wot he was not one of our people. Who was he?'There was a slight gurgling sound, which might have been made by the incorrigible Belinda's struggling with a peal of uncontrollable laughter, before she answered:'La, Mistress Teresa! didn't you see he was in the smock of an ordinary Hodge of the fields?''He was nothing of the kind—I mean, he was no ploughman or hedger and ditcher—however he might have been dressed up,' retorted Mistress Teresa, with a stamp of her daintily-shod foot. 'None of them would have been guilty of such gross presumption. I insist on hearing the fellow's name.''Then you shall hear it, madam,' answered Belinda calmly. 'It is Ralph Bulmer—no, I forget—Brereton. That is the name of the man who saved me from being burned alive in my chair by the Bucks, though you did not see fit to acknowledge him as an acquaintance afterwards,' she finished with proud reproach.Clarissa, who was listening in trepidation, interposed:'Not the man who saved you—the boy, though he is well instructed enough to act as an usher.''An usher indeed!' repeated Mistress Teresa disdainfully; 'it is like how one might expect a beggarly usher to behave. No gentleman would have played such a trick.''And no lady would have abetted him in it—I suppose you mean that, madam?' said Belinda, firing up in her turn.And again Clarissa had to plead for forbearance.'Oh, Mistress Teresa, neither gentleman nor lady—just a boy and a girl playing a rude, foolish trick. It was nothing worse, and they are no better than big children, I know, for I am one myself. Pray, pray forgive them this once, ma'am. Say you are sorry, Belinda, as you are bound to be.'Mistress Teresa was dubious, and Belinda threatened to mount her high horse. But a temporary truce was brought about by the lateness of the hour and by the fatigue of the combatants. Who could enter on a vigorous quarrel after a long day's excursion, with the small hours approaching? Then, again, there was Clarissa's piteous pleading for an amnesty.Long before morning, having Belinda at her mercy, Clarissa urgently represented the liberty taken with Mistress Teresa, the slight to her authority, and still more the danger to the lad by the angry revelation of his true position, when the chief offender was brought to a properly penitent frame of mind. She repaired to Mistress Teresa's dressing-closet before breakfast, and humbly implored pardon for the enormity of introducing an uninvited guest to the Blounts' dance on the green, adding wistfully:'And you will not betray him, Mistress Teresa, when the consequences may be the loss of his head. If so, I can never close an eye again, since it was I who put him up to the silly piece of mischief. Besides, when it comes to that, he is more of your political opinions than of mine, the more's the pity!'CHAPTER XVIIIA FIREAs it happened—whether at the dance on Little Thornley Green or elsewhere—Ralph Bulmer's true name and antecedents leaked out, and to avoid reprisals, since the Bulmers had been Tories of the Tories, and might not receive the blotting out of their offences dealt to lesser rebels, the pair at Wright's Buildings had to shift their tent. In the end it was thought better the brother and sister should part, however reluctantly. An opportunity had presented itself for Ellinor to join her father and sister, and to be their main stay in a dreary and poverty-stricken exile in a remote haven in France. She had become long ago reconciled to what was to be her part in life: never to be foremost, never to consult her own taste and go her own way, but to be the strong support of others among those near and dear to her—their guardian angel in human form. And nobody could look in Ellinor Bulmer's brave, peaceful face and fail to see that the part she was destined to play in life was no mean, inferior part. There was a special blessing attached to it; for hers was one of the cases when she had, in a scriptural sense, lost her life only to save it, and to possess it a hundredfold more abundantly.It was not so easy to say what was to be done with Ralph. He was loath to leave his country though he was under its Government's ban. The only thing certain was his resignation of his post before he would have to endure the indignity of a dismissal, his quitting London and seeking employment elsewhere. Probably it would be down in the depth of the country, where nothing would be known of his origin or of his former history; or where the knowledge would be a recommendation rather than the reverse with the Tory gentry, so that he might find another post as an usher or a tutor in a private family.The parting of the twin brother and sister was a cruel wrench, but without funds it could not be prevented. Ellinor's comfort was that Ralph was not entirely without friends and recom-mendations, while he was young, strong and of a buoyant temper.Mistress Teresa, duly informed, did not pretend to regret the exodus from Wright's Buildings, while, in view of the speedy departure of the Bulmers, she was disposed to relax her vigilance and allow the girls to enjoy the little that was left of their friends' society before they went. Indeed, it would have been a hard struggle to prevent it. Belinda had been very much her own mistress from childhood, and it was with difficulty she could be brought to submit to the interference and overruling even of her elders.Familiarity with the household of her cousins the Blounts had broken down the first formality of their intercourse, and the spice of awe in her admiration for the elegant Paris-bred sisters. She was now more tempted to use her youthfully sharp eyes in descrying their foibles than in dwelling on their attractions. But, with all her girlish folly, she had a good and honest heart, and was far from ungenerous. It was in a measure due to this warmth of heart that she clung to the Bulmers in their misfortunes. Whether from attachment to the sister or to a commendable desire to turn the brother from the error of his ways, Belinda was disposed to take advantage to the utmost of Mistress Teresa's concession with regard to the two girls being suffered to see the last of their friends, who would soon be out of their way and beyond reach of doing them harm.Thus, it befell that Belinda and Clarissa were with Ellinor and her brother in Wright's Buildings on an August afternoon. The day had been very close and sultry, and when a thunderstorm broke out, the lightning got on Belinda's nerves and sent her into a panic, as it always did. For it does not at all follow that the more high-spirited a girl is the more likely she will be to preserve her calmness and presence of mind in sudden danger, or when a terror to which her temperament renders her liable overtakes her. The Bulmers took their visitors up to a dark garret of the old inn, where, ensconced among moth-eaten beds, broken tables and chairs, the blinding light found no admission. The storm raged for a time, crashing overhead, winning a succession of trembling shudders from Belinda, while the other girls strove to soothe her in vain, and Ralph, lad-like, effected a diversion from fright to anger in the sufferer by laughing callously, as she considered, at her agitation and alarm.Time passed; the storm seemed dying away. Belinda was sufficiently recovered to assert herself indignantly, while her face, still flushed and stained by the anguish which had drawn from her irrestrainable tears, was hidden in the gloom. It was then that Ellinor and Clarissa, who were not engaged in the lively argument occupying the two others, became conscious of the commotion, the echo of feet running wildly to and fro, the tumult of raised voices which filled the lower quarters of the house.'Had we not better—some of us—go down and see what is happening? It sounds as if something was wrong,' faltered Ellinor, her white face, like Belinda's red one, unseen.She had leapt to the conclusion that it was the officers with a warrant to arrest Ralph—possibly herself—though why they should excite such an uproar—arrests were not so uncommon—she could not guess.While Ralph and Belinda were still too busy bandying reproaches and defences to take much notice, Ellinor and Clarissa descended the steep, narrow stair only to find the door—a stout oaken door—at the foot locked and bolted. Whoever had shut it must have been unaware that the lodgers and their friends had taken refuge from the thunder-storm in the garret.'Perhaps we had better stay where we are till they find we are here, and come and let us out,' suggested Ellinor. For it had flashed across her mind that the accident might be Providential. The officers, told that neither of the Bulmers was at home in their rooms, having doubtless gone out with some visitors, might withdraw without proceeding to search the house, and thus the imminent danger might be averted.Clarissa acquiesced without understanding Ellinor's reasoning, and the two returned to the garret with their story, which received little attention from the couple who were prosecuting a war of words.The prolongation of the play of a quarrel half in jest, half in earnest, continued some time longer. Then ominous signs forced themselves on the careless and misled prisoners. Not only did the noise below wax louder and louder: the four in the garret became sensible that, though the thunder-storm was over, the closeness of the air, instead of diminishing, was growing almost unbearable. Just as the dispute between the boy and the girl died out with startling suddenness, a fierce crackling sound was plainly heard, and a unanimous cry burst forth from the victims:'Lord save us! the house is on fire!'The old inn had been burning—unobserved at first—for the better part of an hour. Part of the roof was thatch, and this the lightning had caught, while the many beams and much woodwork of the sixteenth-century building were as dry as touchwood.Ralph rushed down the garret stair, shook the door at the foot, knocked and shouted with all his might; but the roar of the fire—now near at hand—together with the noise and confusion of those striving in vain to extinguish it, drowned all other sounds and destroyed any chance of his voice being heard. He put his shoulder against the door and sought, with the strength of desperation, to force it. It did not yield to his first heave, but at the next the rusty lock and bolts gave way and the impediment flew open. Alas! it was only to admit volumes of smoke, amidst which the licking tongues of flame wound and curled. The whole landing, with the staircase below, was a mass of fire, so that he was fain to fling the door to again in order that it might afford a brief protection from certain and instant destruction.He remounted the stairs two steps at a time, muttering to himself, 'There must be some other way,' to rejoin the three scared young women huddled together in the darkness and the suffocating air of the garret. They were all in the fresh ardour of their youth; till a moment ago they had apprehended no evil except what Ellinor had feared, and that was but a mild version of their present deadly peril, a problematical danger which might have been combated and overcome. Why, it was not five minutes since Ralph Bulmer and Belinda had been deep in laughing accusations and pouting retorts at the height of a mock quarrel. And in the twinkling of an eye they were face to face with an awful death, whose ghastliness was increased by the fact that its terrible details were more or less familiar to every member of the quaking group. For in the earlier half of the eighteenth century, far more frequently and destructively than in the present day, fires were the recurring tragedies of London, with little or nothing to mitigate their horrors. There were no fire-engines, no fire-escapes, no gallant firemen, only water hard to procure in any quantity, and, when got, wastefully dispersed—however willing the hands that poured it—without method or discipline. There was only the choice of leaping from dizzy heights of third and fourth floor windows frequently to miss the blankets or sheets held out by quivering fingers to intercept the fall, and drop a crushed and maimed heap on the stones of the street.Through the darkness Ralph's keen young eyes descried a trap-door in the ceiling. With a bound he was climbing and crashing among a heap of worn-out and broken furniture, and swinging himself up to reach the low roof and thrust open the trap-door. He clung to it for an instant before he flung himself out on that part of the roof which was moss-grown stone, and, though hot to the touch, was not red embers like the thatch.'I am going to fetch help,' he called back. 'Don't be frightened, Mistress Belinda. Ellinor, don't let them lose hope;' and he was gone.Clarissa looked up, saw the glare of the fire reflected in the sky lighting up the surrounding darkness, and hid her face in her hands. Was she going at once to the little dead brother she had mourned in her childhood? Oh! might God forgive her sins for Christ's sake and grant her a short shrift! Would Mr. Cyp be very, very sorry? Would he enter on his country parsonage without the mistress he had sought for it? Would he give it another mistress in course of time, or would he stay on in the college till he was one of those spare, gray, bachelor Fellows—such as she had known in plenty? Madam Masham would miss her—ah! what was she doing considering only herself? She must think of poor dear Belinda, who had been so frightened at the white and blue lightning, which had not touched her, while she was about to be plunged into a sea of such glowing red and yellow fire, whose reflection Clarissa had seen thrown up into the sky.By one of those marvels which human nature exhibits at times, Belinda was comparatively calm; the greatness and nearness of the threatened danger lifted her up in a fashion above nervous weakness and defects of temperament. It was not that she pinned her faith to Ralph Bulmer's being able to accomplish her rescue; she regarded herself as irrevocably doomed.'I was fated to perish by fire,' she said, 'and I shall. I escaped my fate once before, when my dress, my very hair, was singed; and you can see 'twas no good, for the ravaging flames have met me afresh. 'Twould be needless to flee from them even if I could. They will rise up and confront me wherever I go, whatever I do—though it were a hundred years hence—until they hold me in the agony of their embrace, and consume the body which people have called comely, till it is reduced to a handful of ashes.'Then, as she crouched on the floor, a shadowy figure, with her voice the chief indication of who she was and where she was, she began to deliver a series of messages which a survivor might convey to the persons indicated—for she did not condemn her companions to share her lamentable end. She spoke with the absolute quietness of one of those to whom certain death—appalling in its character—has come so close that it has acquired a kind of familiarity which robs it of the shock that would otherwise have either stunned or maddened the dying man or woman. On the contrary, it rather causes him or her to recognise the inevitable, and to accept it with a sort of sad, uncomplaining dignity and pathetic resignation. Who would have known the gay, imperious belle and toast of the Oxford balls and coffee-houses in this calmed and subdued woman?'Ellinor Bulmer, you will tell your brother Ralph that I thank him for remembering and naming me when he started on his undertaking—though it will not profit me, I shall not be saved. And you will say that I was not in earnest in our dispute; I knew all the time that he meant no unkindness in his ridicule of my silly, cowardly behaviour. He would not laugh at me now, for you can witness that I have overcome my silliness and cowardice, and that I am consenting to die as God wills me to die; and may He have mercy on my soul! Clary, if you survive, you will carry my duty and my love to my poor father and mother, and tell them we will meet in heaven. Bid them give you my pearl necklace—I should like you to have it; and, if you can call it to mind, bring to their recollection that I had promised our maid Phyllis a new riband for St. Giles's Fair. It does not follow it should be black—lavender will do.''Bell, Bell, why will you break our hearts? You have as good a chance of being rescued as any of us, if by God's mercy he—young Ralph—raises an alarm, cries out where we are, and we are reached in time! You are nimbler-footed than I. You have a stronger head—if we are to be pulled out on the roof as he went.''No, no,' Belinda declined the suggestion. 'Not me, Clary; I'm to be burnt without fail.''Oh, my dears,' besought Ellinor, 'leave it to God who is to be taken and who left. Trust that and everything else to His goodness. Even when He sends a grievous calamity, He will vindicate it in the next world, if 'tis not His will to justify it in this. And the passage between the two worlds is short—ay, shortest when sharpest—and is it not written for the attentive reader at all seasons, "There is but a step betwixt thee and death"? Oh, little did I think, in welcoming you here, that I was enticing you to your latter end! But 'tis God's doing; He is at the back of it all. Ah! let us be silent before His awful, loving will.'For a few more minutes they remained huddled together in their misery, and in the faith which, happily, stretched beyond their misery, crying a little—softly enough, poor young souls!—praying a little, sometimes speaking their prayers aloud, only dimly conscious of the sound of their own changed voices, grown shrill or hoarse in the speaker's anguish. Occasionally their thoughts wandered—as thoughts will wander at the most solemn moments in our lives—to quite grotesquely incongruous scenes and acts. It occurred to Clarissa that, if Madam Masham wished to draw on her best clocked silk stockings, she would not know where to find them, as she (Clarissa) had forgotten to tell or write to Madam that they were laid away on the highest shelf of her wardrobe.As for Belinda, she saw in a sudden flash the expression on the face of the last suitor she had dismissed. She had not cared a straw for him, but, as he was a man of position whose attentions other women coveted, her vanity had led her to bring him to her feet. Would he think her justly served, or would he have pity for her, and be brought to regard her punishment as tremendously out of proportion to her offence, though he had resented that bitterly at the time?Then Ellinor had a moment's consternation at the thought of a dress she had just finished for a worthy dame of Wright's Buildings. It had not been sent home, so had doubtless been burnt among more valuable articles in the fire, and who was there to repair its loss?The strangest, most piteous detail of all followed. Exhausted by the various emotions she had gone through and by the heavily-laden air, Belinda must either sleep or swoon or die, and she dropped down and sank into a fitful child's sleep, with her head tenderly pillowed on Clarissa's knees.The crackling of the burning wood was waxing louder and nearer, when the patch of red light seen through the open trap-door was obscured by the body of a man, who sprang into the room, crashing through every obstacle till his feet alighted on the floor. He was succeeded by a second and a third man, who leapt after him, trampling recklessly through the rubbish of worn-out furniture. The first man was Ralph Bulmer, the smell of burning strong upon him, one sleeve of his coat shrivelled up, the side of his face scorched, a coil of rope round his neck and shoulders. The second was Mr. Cyp, arrested on a leave-taking visit to the Bulmers by the spectacle of the fire in the terror of its beauty, and driven wellnigh to distraction when he learnt in a word from Ralph who was one of its victims. The third man was a gallant volunteer unacquainted with any one of them, but who could not hear of women in direst peril, and see two devoted men risking their lives to save the women, without casting in his lot with the rescue-party.'I am come back for you,' panted Ralph. 'There is a way, and though it is over the roof, it is but a few steps till you can be let down to an out-house which is within reach of a ladder. There is not a moment to lose. Will you show the way, sister, or will you convince her that, if there is danger, it is nothing to what, sure, awaits her here? It is but to be wrapped and roped in my coat, Belinda, to cling to me and shut your eyes, and in a trice you will be delivered, you will have left the blinding, burning light and the belching smoke clean behind you.''Clarissa, I am here; please God all will be well. You will trust yourself to me.'She would have trusted him to pass through, at his bidding, the weird shades of Hades, the profound gloom and the lurid glare of Pluto's domain in the infernal regions.Ralph's voice roused Belinda, but did not shake her conviction of her doom. With her old imperiousness, she made the others go first, hoisted on men's shoulders to the trap-door, supported in the five or six staggering, tottering steps across a portion of the roof where if one slipped two would perish. Then followed the giddy lowering to the out-house, still spared in the general ruin, where there was no lack of willing hands to grasp and stay the ladder and to receive the human waifs, more dead than alive, wrested from destruction.Belinda even implored Ralph to save himself, to go with the others, and leave her to her fate, not to let his death lie at her door, for assuredly the fire which had twice come for her would not be cheated a second time of its prey.But when he paid no heed to what he viewed as her raving, but folded and bound her in what was left of his coat to shelter her from the showers of live sparks, to make her—as she maintained afterwards, when she had recovered her spirits—as like a bale of goods as possible, she offered no farther resistance. She was the stillest of them all, putting out her hands and clasping tightly the arm which was guarding and guiding her.Fortunately, the old inn was low-roofed and widespread, instead of emulating the Tower of Babel in rising to the skies. Three times the critical passage was surmounted, till the three women and their champions stood together in the herb-garden of what would be in another day nothing better than roofless, bulging out, rent walls, a heap of crumbling, scarred and blackened masonry. The crowd from all quarters cheered lustily the successful performance, and Mr. Cyp raised his hat reverently, and said briefly and modestly, 'God be praised.' They were all there, and he understood that not a life had been lost, though a considerable amount of property had perished in the catastrophe. Mercifully, it had not been suffered to swallow up his friends and him.CHAPTER XIXTHE GREAT SIR ROBERTTOGETHER with their old mother, Mistress Teresa and Mistress Patty were horrified when they got tidings of the fire in Wright's Buildings which had so nearly carried off their charges. In the ladies' mingled horror at the danger, and gratitude at the girls being saved, they were gracious and hospitable, and pressed on Ellinor and her brother the shelter of the house on the Mall till she sailed for Dunkirk and he quitted London.Nay, farther, when the news reached Oxford of the narrow escape of Belinda and Clarissa, the Annesleys and the Mashams, in a panic, wrote requiring the speedy return of the pair to Oxford. There fires were fewer and less disastrous—ever since the conflagration which swept away a portion of the city in King Charles's time.The Blounts could only submit. They had achieved none of the great deeds they had proposed for themselves. Their young cousin, the beauty and 'fortune,' was about to return home as she had left it, with no great marriage in prospect, not even with a so-and-so engagement in the air. She was worse off, instead of better. She had gone and contrived to entangle herself with a beggarly rogue of a Tory boy, who, if he had the wit to rescue her, was destitute of a single other claim to her favour. For shame's sake, and to save appearances, they were driven to entertain him and his sister, while they—the ladies of the house—would take care that no further opportunity for plotting mischief and philandering should occur beneath their roof between the irresponsible boy and girl.Mistress Clarissa, considering that her face was her fortune, and that she was no more than companion to Madam Masham, was not doing so very badly, only she might have had the fellow without any to-do down in Oxford; she need not have had the trouble of coming up to London to find and fetch him.'L' homme propose, mais Dieu dispose.' Mistress Teresa fell back on her dévote side.'Belinda may remain unmarried. She may join the true Church, and bequeath her fortune to its charities. I have been promising special offerings to my own St. Teresa for the child's conversion. What do you think of that, sister? Will you not petition your St. Marthe for the same purpose? We should have liked Belinda to marry well, and to have promoted our interest in this world, as she would have been bound to do; but what if her rôle is to advance our cause in the kingdom of heaven?''She has no vocation,' murmured Mistress Patty uneasily. 'I would not sentence her to the life of a convent without a vocation.''Who said I would?' demanded Mistress Teresa sharply. 'But vocations are not ready-made for us at our birth. They come generally when the world has disappointed us, when we are wearied with its illusions. I have had thoughts more than once of entering a convent, taking the veil, and devoting the rest of my life to meditation and prayer.'Mistress Patty was not so deeply impressed with these sentiments as to be thrown into a fit of consternation with regard to how she was to maintain herself and her aged mother on a diminished income, when Mistress Teresa should withdraw her portion of goods, as she certainly would, and retire with it into a convent, leaving mother and sister to shift for themselves, while she said a prayer for their spiritual progress. She was in the habit of making such speeches when the mood took her, and doubtless she meant what she said; but before the sun went down or rose again she would be as keen as ever in her ambition to be a leader of society in the thick of whatever fashionable dissipation was going forward. Once her old friend, Mr. Alexander Pope, had caught her in one of these exalted frames of mind, and had seriously counselled her to do as she proposed. The man was as wayward and erratic as she was. Very likely if she had taken his advice he would have repented the result sooner than she would, and have persistently mourned her loss. And yet, and yet, it might have been otherwise. He was bound and fettered by his own passion for manoeuvring and scheming, and by his ineradicable duplicity. But if he had been freed from one of the many shackles he had forged for himself, the consequences to him and to Mistress Patty might have been the alteration of what remained of the course of their lives. Youth is mercurial. Down in the depth of their natures, none of those who shared in that awful vigil which distinguished the last hour of their stay in the old inn at Wright's Buildings would ever forget it, would ever cease to be influenced by it. But not only did Mr. Cyp and Ralph Bulmer succeed in talking of the affair when it belonged to the past—the recent past—with perfect coolness: even Belinda and Clarissa got used to the topic, and not only discussed it without flinching, calmly and quietly, they began to see little humorous incidents and high lights of absurdity in it, over which the girls could actually jest and laugh. Both the calmness and the jesting were superficial to the utmost degree, and they were only useful in serving to hide what English men and women, boys and girls, seek to conceal—all the more sensitively if at a crucial moment they have laid bare for their neighbours' inspection the inmost core of their hearts. To have heard the girls two days after the ghastly performance, you would have been tempted to believe it had been a piece of play. Thus, Clarissa slyly twitted Belinda for her bequest of a half-mourning ribbon as a fairing to her handmaiden Phyllis.'While, no doubt, she counts on a whole set of white ribbons to sport on the occasion of your marriage, when that great event comes off. And your pearl necklace—which you are going to wear as long as your throat is round and white—how sad it would be if I had set my heart upon having it now! As to your leaving it to me when your hair is gray and your neck is scraggy, we are of an age, you know, and by the time you come to die of the weight of years, I must be long past pearl necklaces, unless I mean to wear one in my coffin.'And Belinda retorted:'Have you counted, miss, that this is the third time Mr. Cyp has come to your aid, and extricated you from the horns of a tremendous dilemma? You are undone. There is not a loophole by which you can creep out of your destiny. I don't suppose you wish to creep out; but 'tis sad to think there is not so much as a mouse's hole by which you could get away, and snap your fingers at his right to you.''You had better look to yourself, Belinda. If I am not a bad hand at counting, sure, Ralph Bulmer has come to your rescue twice. If he does it a third time, where are you?''Oh, Ralph Bulmer is a mere youth, a schoolboy teaching schoolboys,' pronounced Belinda with great disdain. 'Why, Clarissa, you know that he is twin-brother to Ellinor, and you are acquainted with the fact that she is little older than we are, and men-boys are always ever so much younger than women-girls of the same age. I could never reverence a fellow who was my contemporary. I should be inclined to sit him down on a stool, and give him a slice of bread and honey to munch, or a handful of nuts to crack and eat.'This was being too hard, even in jest, on one of their deliverers.'It was a man and not a boy, though I have called him so on occasions, who went through yon garret roof to get help for his friends and himself—caught in a trap. It was a man, and not a boy, who took you over the bit of sloping roof, and let you down to the shed below,' Clarissa reminded her friend reproachfully.'Well,' answered Belinda carelessly,' I mean to pay him back in his own coin. I shall do something for him before I let him do anything more for me—that is, if he should ever again have the inclination.'The truth was, Belinda was full of a deep secret project to repay, as far as she could, the good offices of Ralph Bulmer, who, as she firmly believed, had twice preserved her from an appalling death. Her heart bled for the merry lad with whom she had exchanged so much gay badinage. He was without a home when his sister was gone. He was without a near friend in whom he could confide. He was suffering for the offences of his kindred, whom—though he was at odds with some of them, though their creed went against the grain of his personal views—he did not feel free to repudiate. He was next to penniless, yet he was putting so brave a front on the position. Sure, anyone who was seriously indebted to him might well exert herself to the utmost, might even take a daring step which some people would think too bold, unjustifiable in a girl like her, in order to befriend him. She meant no harm, she would do none; and if she tampered with appearances, there, too, with a little care, the mischance might be guarded against.Belinda had heard Mr. Cyp tell Ralph that Oxford was the best place for him; that, even if he had to fall back into the ranks of the servitors or poor scholars, the position was not untenable for a resolute youth who could practise self-restraint and self-denial, and with his acquirements he would soon rise above the ordeal.She had seen Ralph's eyes glow with the anticipation, for, poor or rich, he was a born scholar: not of the type which has only the heavy forehead and the hollow chest for its attributes, not of the sort which is shy and retiring, morose and self-absorbed, yet a scholar in the very essence of his sunny nature. Presently she had seen his face fall, and the glad, eager light die out of it. No, he could not bring suspicion on those who harboured him. The simple reason that Oxford was known to have strong Tory proclivities would render it the sooner and the more certainly suspected. Moreover, he would be a wolf in sheep's clothing; while his patrons were running risks for him, he would be dissimulating, and secretly nourishing in his heart of hearts principles and opinions with which his benefactors could not agree. Neither did Belinda agree with them. But what of that when he had twice saved her life? And, sure, it was cruel hard that he should be twice blamed, twice punished—blamed and punished with loss of love and trust by those of his former friends who knew he had seceded from their views, and persecuted for his antecedents by the opposite side, which ought to have welcomed him as a promising recruit to their cause.The man reckoned the most powerful among the Whigs, though he did not happen to be now in the Ministry—on the contrary, he posed as a formidable figure in the opposition to King George's Government in office—was Sir Robert Walpole—' the great Sir Robert,' who in the latter days of Queen Anne, and in those of the first and second Georges, largely steered the national barque through the early difficulties of the Hanoverian succession. His own career had been already a curiously chequered one. A Norfolk squire, he had come up and declared himself for the liberty of the subject and for the Electress Sophia, as the Protestant heir to the crown. He had entered Parliament, had rapidly gained a reputation as a speaker and statesman, and had filled offices under Government.The next phase of his life was an accusation of corruption in the discharge of the duties of one of those offices, his expulsion from Parliament, and his being thrown into the Tower. But the cloud soon passed, his humiliation endeared him to his party, he was re-elected to Parliament, and on the accession of George I. received marked promotion. His inability to agree with his colleagues, in spite of the cynical tolerance which was a marked feature in his character, had again occasioned his resignation from high office and his comparative exclusion from power. But he was only biding his time. A man of a coarse, gross nature in his very gifts, without faith in man or woman or in God Himself, Sir Robert possessed to a wonderful extent two or three qualities which made friend and foe, Whig and Tory, alike turn to him at every crisis to extricate the nation from its difficulties. He was eminently practical, long-sighted, shrewd, and by very right of his callous indifference to principles and persons he achieved what is now called 'level-headedness,' moderation, a disposition to temporize in his course of action as Prime Minister. Violence and vindictiveness were not in him; without a particle of faith in the nation, broken up into individuals, the mass of the nation long entertained great faith in him. He could realize in the middle of his unbridled self-indulgence and unblushing selfishness what was necessary for the country's prosperity. He could put down his heavy finger on every abuse which threatened England's credit and success within her own bounds and among the nations, and not because he waged war for the sake of righteousness, but because he conducted a campaign in the light of expediency, he fought, and frequently put an end to, the abuses. No other man of his time could do it, according to the conviction of many of his fellow-countrymen, who had no particular reason to love him, whom he consistently snubbed and ignored.Queen Caroline, no mean judge of character, devoted to the interests of her husband and her adopted country, was well aware that Walpole detested her, and was in the habit of rudely opposing her, and of speaking of her with almost inconceivable brutality. She was not a woman to sit down meekly under such treatment, yet so persuaded was she that Sir Robert, and only Sir Robert, could deal sagaciously and success fully with the manifold troubles of the time, that it was at her urgent entreaty, and by the exercise of the influence she always possessed over George II., he was induced to retain Walpole as Prime Minister on the death of George I. If left to himself, the King would have set aside the cool, clear-headed, worldly-wise statesman, and would have substituted for him an incompetent royal favourite.It was to Sir Robert Belinda was minded to appeal. She would confide to him the secret of Ralph Bulmer's Whig notions, and beseech the great Whig to right the wrong of continuing to hold him accountable for his family's misdeeds in the late rebellion, by making an exception in his favour by removing from him the disabling sentence of outlawry and attainder passed upon proscribed men.Belinda had a dim sense of Sir Robert's ascendancy over his party, and of his being able, though not in office, to move his former colleagues to an act of bare justice. Without breathing a syllable of her intention to Clarissa or anybody else—least of all to the object of her mission—she manœuvred, on the plea of visiting one of Mistress Patty's pensioners, attended only by Betty, the still-room-maid, to go abroad on a cloudy August afternoon.The pensioner, who was bedridden, lived at a little distance, and Belinda had taken the precaution of going to see her once or twice before, and of undertaking to give the old woman's young grand-daughter a lesson in netting, in order that she might net and sell to the owners of gardens protection from the birds for the strawberry-beds and the wall-fruit. The young lady had declared herself a proficient in such netting, and had already bestowed preliminary instruction on her pupil. But, although she was certainly bent on a charitable errand this afternoon, it was not for the benefit of garden-beds and walls and their owners, or for the better equipment of the young grand-daughter of a bedridden old pensioner.At the first turning out of the Mall a hackney coach stood ready waiting round the corner.'We are to get into this coach, Betty,' Belinda said in her off-hand, commanding way; 'I have a little errand near town which I wish as few people as possible to know of. We must make great haste, for we must not be away more than a couple of hours. The summer residence I am going to is in this direction out of town, and, if we are only fortunate in finding the master at home, I think we may manage it. Did you notice whether we took about two hours last Friday, both in going and coming, and in the lesson I gave to Lucky Grote's granddaughter?''Oh, miss, I cannot say!' cried Betty in a great flurry and alarm. 'But, excuse me, miss, what wild trick be you up to? Young misses are main rash and masterful. You bean't going to elope and get me as well as yourself into trouble?—for Mistress Teresa won't never for-give me for aiding and abetting you in wrongdoing. I lay I'll lose my place, as sure as eggs is eggs; and it ain't a bad place, as I've held for nine year, though Mistress Teresa can be worriting, and wages ain't always paid so reg'lar as one could wish. But, indeed and indeed, miss, them fine gentlemen are gay deceivers—take warning in time!''Elope!' cried Belinda indignantly; 'what put such folly into your head? How can you be so stupid and—and impertinent? I am no more going to elope than you are. I only wish to do a good turn for a friend—a poor young soul who stood by me when I wanted standing by. I thought you were a good-hearted woman, Betty, and would be willing to help me.'Betty was partly reassured by Belinda's words and manner; besides, she had got time for second thoughts; she had made her observations and come to her conclusion. Mistress Annesley was dressed in her plainest clothes, and shrouded in a light cloak, which might be a kind of disguise; on the other hand, Betty could not believe that the young lady would do such despite to her young gentleman, if so be there was a young gentleman in the case, as not to have added in his honour some furtive smart touches—in a bright bow of ribbon neckerchief—to her apparel.Then, if Mistress Annesley were bound on some imprudent errand, it would be much better that she should be accompanied—as it were, chaperoned—by Betty, who could keep an eye on her movements and report them afterwards to Mistress Teresa, than that the young lady should go alone—she was capable of attempting it—and nobody know what steps she was taking or what risks she was running.After no very long interval—for the country house to which Belinda had alluded was well within the vicinity—the coach stopped, in obedience to previous directions given to the coachman, at a lodge gate, and Belinda sprang out.'You stay here, Betty, and keep the coach waiting for me,' she told Betty, and, somewhat to the servant's consternation and disappointment, entered by a side-gate and disappeared, walking quickly up a short avenue of beeches.Fortunately for the visitor, the master of the house was at home, at leisure, and not inaccessible to strangers. Sir Robert was too bluff and too stolid in the middle of his astuteness to apprehend danger in the freedom with which interviews were granted to unknown applicants.It was long before the interview between Charlotte Corday and Marat supplied an ominous precedent by which prominent statesmen might regulate their reception of visitors. In addition Sir Robert, in his broad common-sense, his cool unscrupulousness, his cynicism and his scepticism, was not the man to arouse a passion of hatred. Human enough as he was, alike in his faults and vices, and in his better attributes, the very Jacobites whom he had occasion to ruin regarded him more as an instrument of government constrained to act against them than as a deliberate deadly enemy. Some of them, doubtless, had the wit to recognise that they might have fared worse at the hands of a better man, a man who, while he might be a fanatic in politics as in religion, was in grim earnest, and would give them credit for being as single-hearted as he himself was single-hearted.Belinda was shown by a slovenly servant up a slovenly staircase, and ushered into an untidy library, where a big man, bullet-headed, red-faced, and bloated, sat still, in a riding suit and jack-boots, at a table littered with papers, looking over a pile of letters, and drinking glass after glass of port wine. Women entertained and amused him, and he liked their society with a different sort of liking from that of his son Horace, who professed fantastically to be their abject slave. But Sir Robert could not be said to respect the gentler sex—what did that big brain and cold, shallow heart respect?—therefore, though he bid the servant give Belinda a chair, he did not rise, or do more than look keenly at her with the deep-set eyes under the beetle-brows, and ask with gruff civility:'What is your will with me, madam?'He even held his pen poised—the ink about to drop from its point on the slopped table—as if in haste to resume his reading and the notes he was taking. He was warranted in being niggardly of his time, since, whether he was in office or out of office, it was of the utmost importance to his party and his country. But he was not altogether sincere; he was seeking cunningly to enhance the boon of the audience he had granted, by seeming to grudge it. He judged her to be a pretty young sprig of Torydom come to plead with artless desperation for father, or brother, or lover. As a student of human nature, and a rough-and-ready admirer of womankind, he had, unless under stress of business, when he could growl and scowl, and keep intruders at a distance, no great objection to receiving such petitioners and listening to their petitions.Belinda did not know what fear of man was; neither, though she had been guilty of a stratagem to elude her friends, was she any better acquainted with falsehood. She began frankly. She was come to speak up for a falsely-accused person, one Ralph Bulmer.'I have you, madam—Bulmer of the North, the right-hand man of Derwentwater and Kenmure,' Sir Robert interrupted her dryly. 'I heard he was forth of the country. Has he ventured back, and is he lying in hiding anywhere within the three kingdoms? If so, I would just drop a polite hint that, though King George is not bloodthirsty, and we've had about enough of headings and hangings, this confident gentleman, when found, will without doubt be made an example of.''You are labouring under a mistake, Sir Robert Walpole,' Belinda corrected the great man, old enough to be her father, without faltering. 'I am not putting in a word for Colonel Bulmer, who is, as far as I have learnt, in French territory. I mean a son of the same, who has never held the family opinions, yet has been proscribed, and what goods he has attainted with the rest, because he could not testify against his people.''Phew!' Sir Robert, not standing on ceremony, gave a short, incredulous whistle. 'If all tales be true, there were many strange birds in the old nests before Kings changed seats. Only the birds did not take to flight till George sat in James's chair. Permit me to say, young madam, we heard nothing of them before then.'Belinda's breast heaved, and she did not conceal that she was highly offended. It would have been all one to her if she had been holding the colloquy with dapper King George instead of his burly statesman.'I have told you,' she said resentfully, 'young Ralph Bulmer was on the Whig side before the rebellion. Perhaps he was too young to have an opinion of his own, but he had.''And perhaps the young lady before me had something to do with his conversion, and we Whigs ought to thank the fair advocate for having won us a recruit—I hope he is sound and trustworthy—from the ranks of the most inveterate of our opponents.'He was mocking her, and at the same time he was feeling his way. He imagined he had been under a false impression—that she belonged to some Whig, and not Tory, family. He saw she was one of the quality—from her dauntlessness and independence, it might be the highest Whig quality—and he must behave with more circumspection than if she had been allied to crushed Tory rebels.But Belinda dispelled the illusion with hot wrath.'I had nothing to do with Ralph Bulmer's conversion or perversion. My King is over the water. There, sir, you may send me to the Tower if you choose!''Heyday! here is a puzzle that would tax another Daniel,' cried Sir Robert, flinging down his pen and rubbing his large hands. 'A Tory miss pleading for amnesty to a Whig renegade from the Steuart cause! There must be a mighty strong motive at work to bring about such a miracle.''He saved my life, not once, but twice,' Belinda declared solemnly, in the desperate necessity of accounting to Sir Robert for the inconsistency which struck him as so strange.'And, as a fitting reward, you are going to bestow your hand on the lucky gentleman?' suggested Sir Robert, wagging his huge bewigged head, and speaking, not with profound respect, but with exasperating jocoseness.'Sir,' protested Belinda, with immense scorn, 'he is no more than a youth, hardly older than I am.''And you are a female Methuselah. Your—ahem!—friend, too, must not be destitute of precocity, since he has had the wit to differ from his seniors, and to frame a political creed of his own. Let me caution you a little, old and experienced as you are. Pretty youths, even when their grandmothers—bless 'em!—ain't their Mentors, are dangerous toys to play with.''Sir!' exclaimed Belinda, in such haughty disgust that, thick-skinned as Sir Robert was, and in spite of his intellectual sharpness, obtuse where any delicacy of feeling was concerned, he was sufficiently provoked to be tempted to tease the saucy young baggage, and take down her pride still farther.He tilted his chair till it was poised on the back legs, turned his insolent, rubicund face full upon her, and aired a version of his famous brutal aphorism, 'Every man has his price.''Now that you have taken it upon you, madam, to come uninvited and interrupt the busiest man within a hundred miles of London, putting a stop to his business for the moment, how, if he exert himself to get an amnesty printed and published for this Whig novice, do you propose to indemnify the pestered, over-burdened man for the waste of his time and energy? Will you give him a buss to make up for his trouble?'Belinda stared aghast. Then she did what she had never thought to do—burst into a passion of tears and flew out of the room, sobbing the sentence as she flew, 'I believed I was speaking to a gentleman, who would know a lady when he saw her,' followed by the rude, sardonic chuckles of Sir Robert.In a trice she was down the stair, out of the house and grounds, stumbling into the lap of Betty, only too glad to see the young lady, in whatever plight, after the ten minutes of perturbed speculation the maid-servant had spent while she waited.Belinda smarted under what she regarded as the gross insult offered to her. And she believed that she had worked harm, rather than good, to Ralph. Sir Robert would either do nothing, or he would spitefully bring to light, and put into effect, the old sentence against the Bulmers, root and branch. But here she was wrong. Sir Robert, with all his faults, was too big a man to be spiteful, while he was politic as long as policy would serve his ends. It would be good policy to detach young Bulmer from his former associates, and enlist him to use his influence among them and induce them to follow his example. The statesman did not let grass grow beneath his feet. Within a few days the paper was in the astonished traitor's hands. It assured him of free pardon for supposititious offences.CHAPTER XXWHAT GREAT TOM CLASHED AND CLANGED FROM HIS TOWERCLARISSA and Belinda were back in their Oxford homes. They returned, as they had come, by the stage coach, under the direct care of a couple of Oxford Professors and their ladies who had been making a sojourn in town, and under the indirect but more sedulous guardianship of Mr. Cyp King. And on this journey the whole company had reason to congratulate themselves on escaping any encounter with footpads.The girls' visit to London and all they had seen and done there had been a great event—long to be talked over—never to be entirely lost sight of, in the course of their lives. Because the new experience they had gone through, the incidents which had occurred during their stay, would more or less colour their existence and help to mould their destinies thenceforth. Clarissa especially could never forget that a compact—the most important she was fated to enter into, though it might have been foreshadowed before she left Oxford—was signed and sealed during these summer and autumn weeks in London. Much that the travellers had accomplished in town had been exciting, interesting, delightful, had made the two girls more of young women than they had been when they set out on their adventures, and yet it was sweet to find themselves back among the old friends and the old surroundings. The pair were eagerly questioned as to what had befallen them—cross-examined on the fashions, the parks, the theatre, the opera—on what was the rule for routs and drums—on how the fine ladies and gentlemen conducted themselves—and what was their opinion at first or second hand on the looks and manners of the Princess of Wales. Was she very German? Were the young Princes and Princesses like English boys and girls, as they ought to be?Then, when the highly-informed young women, tired of being raconteuses, turned for information as to what had been going on in Oxford during the couple's absence, it was pleasant and restful to hear the old local topics—whose essay had been spoken about—who had taken a First—what had been the prevailing joke among the freshmen at Commemoration—who had held high holiday in defiance of their tutors, been caught by the proctors, and brought each before his Dean.How quiet it was after London, even contrasted with Chiswick Mall! The June roses were withered, the June birds were silent, even the water-lilies and the yellow nenuphar were gone from the Cherwell and the Isis, and the honeysuckle and the hawthorn bushes had red berries instead of straw-coloured and white flowers. But it was still sweet as sweet could be to walk by the bowery Cherwell and watch the yellowing leaves drop into the water, and feel it almost lonesome—lonesome enough for a solitary heron to rise with a great whirr of its wings from the bank. Or it was vastly pleasant to be rowed down to Iffley with its old church and its yews, or to Godstow with its ruined priory, to pause at the spot where the crest and crown of towers and pinnacles marked the most loyal, learned, and lovely city in England.Madam Masham had missed Clarissa at every turn, and had wished her back continually, while she had been so good as not to shorten the child's holiday prematurely. There were added to this wearying for the sound of the light, willing step, and the cheery voice always ready to sympathize and suggest, other influences. This included the horror and dismay with which Madam had received the information that—quite outside of her knowledge, Clarissa—the child she had reared, the girl she had depended upon to save her the cares of middle life, and to soothe the infirmities of her declining years—had been within a hair's breadth of a dreadful death. Then the elder woman not only welcomed the younger with open arms: she clung to Clarissa as if she could not let her go, and besought her never to leave Oxford again.In this mind, Madam was ready to catch at any chance of keeping her treasure—with regard to which she had become nervously apprehensive of losing it—if not in Dr. Masham's college for the natural term of the lives of all concerned, at least as near it as could be contrived. Therefore she began to change her mind with reference to an old antipathy, and to lend a favourable ear to Mr. Cyp's addresses to her adopted daughter and ward. Of course Clarissa could not marry him while he was a Fellow of the college and while he stayed on in his former quarters; but, most opportunely, one of the old city churches, which, while it was a city church, stood also on the border and brink of the fresh, green country, became vacant. The patronage of the living belonged to Mr. Cyp's college, and he was the next Fellow in rotation to receive the offer of the parish. This was probably better—alike in relation to his usefulness and his happiness—than burying himself in the depth of the country, resigning his cherished pursuits, and confining his talents to the rustic round of duties of an obscure country clergyman. In that case he might as well, or perhaps better, have been moderately illiterate than vexed with the tastes and instincts of a student and scholar. And what could be simpler than for Mr. Cyp to accept the living, resign his Fellowship, and do his Master's work as faithfully, and with even a more congenial relish, in the town as in the country—for he could be likewise a man of letters as well as a reverend and devout divine? It was of more moment to Madam Masham that the programme included his marriage with Clarissa Hill, and his establishing her within a stone's-throw of her old home, the gray college of which Dr. Masham was the Head and Madam the Head's lady. So it was settled to the satisfaction of all parties.It was remarked that Belinda Annesley's visit to London, and all the fine things she had seen and done there, had left her, strange to say, less self-asserting and self-complacent, less ambitious and restless, than before she had strayed from her native place. She was still the belle and toast of the coffee-houses and the public gardens, but she was a more unassuming and a more sober belle at the zenith of her beauty, wit and growing fortune than she had been of old. Nevertheless, she had started on a career which was peculiarly hers. It lasted for the years which were required to advance the cleverest and pleasantest of the poor scholars of his day, Ralph Bulmer, of the Bulmers of the North, from a servitor's table to a Professor's chair. The discipline ranged from a bright, encouraging comradeship which raised him far above this world's cares, cuts and grievances, and seated him among the clouds, to a process of careless neglect and ignoring of his very existence which reduced him to the lowest depths of despair. The depths would have swallowed him up if it had not been that always at the critical moment, which was when his spirits were lowest and his cares most pressing, she lifted the yoke from his shoulders with such tenderly comprehending smiles and kind wags of her finger, that on the instant he was at her feet again, her willing slave. By the time he was a full-blown Professor she would be ready to act as his enthusiastically appreciative and dutiful wife. He would have grown old enough and wise enough for her to defer to him implicitly. She would no longer be tempted to set him down to eat, not mild bread-and-honey, but that pungent leek against which his man's stout stomach rebelled.Clarissa and Belinda had been strolling, unattended for a wonder, along Merton Walks, and had sat down on a bench to rest and hold intimate confabulation. All at once Great Tom's mellow, resounding voice rang out from the dome of Christ Church and filled the air.The girls stopped their conversation to listen to the grand bell and speak of it—how it had belonged to the famous Abbey of Oseney, of which little more than a name remained, and was wellnigh the oldest of men's creations in Oxford, unless it were St. Michael's rugged brown tower, and the Saxon mound to keep back the Danes.'When Great Tom was the abbey bell,' said Clarissa, in her dreamy, meditative way, 'he would peal out night and day to the monkish figures stealing about like ghosts beneath him, "Watch and pray," "Watch and pray."''And what does he say now?' inquired Belinda.'Much the same thing,' answered Clarissa unhesitatingly; 'for without watching and praying his second orders will not be obeyed. I think he says: "Be good, strong men and simple women, mortals of a day, and be happy as you may and can. It is the goodness, and not the happiness, which is of consequence, since if you are good you must be happy, whether with the higher or the lower happiness—that of heaven, which is the happiness of serving God and man, in which self is not; or that of earth when it was young and innocent, when self adored its Maker, and loved its neighbour as it loved itself."' 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