brought the youth whom he loved so far away from those “who belonged to
him!” Lauderdale thought with a pang of the Mistress, and what she would
say if she could see the comfortless place to which she had sent her
boy. Meanwhile the patient who caused so much anxiety, was, for his own
part, very comfortable, and copied out his verses with a care that made
it very apparent he had no intention of coming to a speedy end, either
of life or its enjoyments. He had not written anything for a long time,
and the exercise was pleasant to him--and when it was done he lay back
on his pillows, and took the trouble to remark to Lauderdale upon the
decorations of the poor bare stony chamber which the philosopher was
cursing in his heart.--“We are before them in some things,” said Colin,
reflectively, “but they beat us in a great many. See how simply that
effect is obtained--just a line or two of colour, and yet nothing could
be more perfect in its way.” To which observation Lauderdale responded
only by an indescribable growl, which provoked the laughter of his
unruly patient. The next remark Colin made was, however, received with
greater favour, for he asked plaintively if it was not time for
dinner--a question more soothing to Lauderdale’s feelings than volumes
of remonstrances. He carried Colin’s portion into the room when that
meal arrived from the Trattoria, scorning female assistance, and
arranging everything with that exquisite uncouth tenderness which,
perhaps, only a woman could do full justice to; for the fact is, that
Colin, though ravenously hungry, and fully disposed to approve of the
repast, had a momentary thought that it would have been ever so much
pleasanter to have been served by the little housekeeper herself.

When the darkness had hushed and covered up the Campagna, and stilled
all the village sounds, Lauderdale himself, a little flushed from an
address he had just been delivering to Meredith, went in and looked at
the sleeping face which was so precious to him, and tortured himself
once more with questions whether it might be fever which gave colour to
the young man’s cheek. But Colin, notwithstanding his cold, was
breathing full long breaths, with life in every inspiration, and his
friend went not uncomforted to bed.

But while Colin lay thus at rest, Meredith had resumed his writing, and
was working into his current chapter the conversation which had just
taken place. “The worldly man asks if the afflictions of the just are
signs of favouritism on God’s part,” wrote the young author, “and
appeals to us whether a happy man is less beloved of his Father than I
am who suffer. He virtually contradicts scripture, and tells me that the
Lord does _not_ scourge every son whom He receiveth. But I say, and the
Holy Bible says with me, Tremble, oh ye who are happy--our troubles are
God’s tokens of love and mercy to our souls.” As he wrote this, the
young eyes, which were so soon to close upon life, brightened and
expanded with a wonderful glow. His mind was not broad nor catholic, nor
capable of perceiving the manifold diversity of those ways of God which
are beyond the comprehension of men. He could not understand how, upon
the last and lightest labourer, the Master of the vineyard might bestow
the equal hire; and--taking that as the hardest labour which fell to his
own share--was bent at least on making up for it by the most supreme
compensation. And, indeed, it was hard to blame him for claiming, by way
of balance to his afflictions, a warmer and closer share in the love of
God. At least, that was no vulgar recompense. As for the “worldly man”
of Arthur’s paragraph, he, too, sat a long while in his chamber, not
writing, but pondering--gazing into the flame of the tall Roman lamp on
his table as if some solution of the mysteries in his thoughts was to be
found in its smoky light. To identify Lauderdale in the character of a
worldly man would have been difficult enough to any one who knew him;
yet, to Meredith, he had afforded a perfect example of “carnal
reasoning,” and the disposition which is according to the flesh, and not
according to the Spirit. This worldly-minded individual sat staring into
the lamp, even after his young critic had ceased to write--revolving
things that he could see were about to happen, and things which he
dreaded without being able to see; and more than all wondering over that
awful mystery of Providence to which the young invalid gave so easy a
solution. “It wouldna be so hard to make out if a man could think he was
less loved than his fellows, as they thought lang-syne,” said Lauderdale
to himself, “or more loved, as, twisting certain scriptures, it’s the
fashion to say now; but its awfu’ ill to understand such dealings in Him
that is the Father of all, and makes nae favourites. Poor Callant! it’s
like he’ll be the first to find the secret out.” And, as he pondered, he
could not restrain a groan over the impending fate which threatened
Meredith, and on the complications that were soon to follow. To be sure,
he had nothing particular to do with it, however it might happen; but
every kind of Christian tenderness and charity lurked in the heart of
the homely Scotch philosopher who stood in Arthur Meredith’s last
chapter as the impersonation of the worldly man.

Next day Colin reappeared, to the astonishment of the brother and
sister. Let us not say, to their disappointment--and yet poor little
Alice, underneath her congratulations, said to herself with a pang, “He
has got well--they all get well but Arthur;” and, when she was aware of
the thought, hated herself, and wondered wistfully whether it was
because of her wickedness that her prayers for Arthur were not heard.
Anxiety and even grief are not the improving influences they are
sometimes thought to be--and it is hard upon human nature to be really
thankful for the benefits which God gives to others, passing over one’s
self. Meredith, who was the sufferer in his own person, could afford to
be more generous. He said, “I am glad you are better” with all his
heart; and then he added--“The Lord does not mean to leave you alone,
Campbell. Though He has spared you, He still continues His warnings. Do
not neglect them, I beseech you, my dear friend”--before he returned to
his writing. He was occupied now day and night with his “Voice from the
Grave.” He was less able to walk, less able to talk, than he had been,
and now, as the night came fast in which no man can work, was devoting
all his time and all his feeble strength to this last message to the
world.

It would have been pitiful enough to any indifferent spectator to note
the contrast between the sick man’s solemn labour apart, and the glow of
subdued pleasure in Colin’s face as he drew his seat in the evening
towards the table which Alice had chosen for herself. The great bare
room had so much space and so many tables, and there was so large a
stock of lamps among the movables of the house, that each of the party
had a corner for himself, to which (with his great-coat on or otherwise)
he could retire when he chose. The table of Alice was the central point;
and as she sat with the tall antique lamp throwing its primitive
unshaded light upon her, still and graceful with her needlework, the
sight of her was like that of a supreme _objet de luxe_ in the otherwise
bare apartment. Perhaps, under due protection and control, the presence
of womankind, thus calm, thus silent--letting itself, as the old maxim
commanded, be seen and not heard--is to men of sober mind and middle
age--such as Lauderdale, for example--the most agreeable ornament with
which a room could be provided. Younger individuals might prefer that
the tableau should dissolve, and the impersonation of womankind melt
into an ordinary woman. Such at least was the feeling of Colin. She was
very sweet to look at; but, if she had descended from her pedestal, and
talked a little and laughed a little, and even perhaps--but the idea of
anything like flirtation on the part of Alice Meredith was too absurd an
idea to be entertained for a moment. However, abstracted and preoccupied
as she was; she was still a woman young and fair--and Colin’s voice
softened and his eyes brightened as he drew his chair to the other side
of the lamp, and looked across the table at her soft, downcast face. “I
have something here I want you to look at,” said the young poet, who had
been used to Matty Frankland’s sympathy and curiosity; “not that it is
much worth your while; but Lauderdale told you that writing verses was a
weakness of mine,” he went on, with, a youthful blush and smile. As for
Alice, she took the paper he gave her, looking a little frightened, and
held it for a moment in her hand.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Campbell; am I to read it?” she said, with puzzled,
uncertain looks. Naturally enough she was perplexed and even frightened
by such an address; for, as Lauderdale said, her knowledge of poetry was
confined to hymns, over which hung an awful shadow from the “Paradise
Lost.” She opened Colin’s “copy of verses” timorously as she spoke, and
glanced at them, and stumbled at his handwriting, which, like most other
people’s in these, scribbling days, was careless and indistinct. “I am
sure it is very pretty,” faltered Alice as she got to the end of the
page; and then, more timidly still, “What am I to do with it, Mr.
Campbell?” asked the poor girl. When she saw the sudden flush that
covered his face, Alice’s slumbering faculties were wakened up by the
sharp shock of having given pain--which was a fault which she had very
seldom consciously committed in the course of her innocent life.

Colin was too much a gentleman to lose his temper; but it is impossible
to deny that the effort which he made to keep it was a violent one, and
required all his manhood. “Keep it if you like it,” he said, with a
smile which thinly covered his mortification; “or put it in the fire if
you don’t.” He said this as philosophically as was possible under the
circumstances. And then he tried a little conversation by way of proving
his perfect composure and command of his feelings, during which poor
Alice sat fluttered and uncomfortable and self-conscious as she had
never been before. Her work was at an end for that night at least. She
held Colin’s little poem in her hand, and kept her eyes upon it, and
tried with all her might to invent something gracious and complimentary
which could be said without offence; for, of course, carefully as he
imagined himself to have concealed it, and utterly unconscious of the
fact as Lauderdale remained, who was watching them, Alice was as
entirely aware of the state of Colin’s mind and temper at the moment as
he was himself. After a while he got up and went to Meredith’s table by
the fire; and the two began to talk, as Alice imagined, of matters much
too serious and momentous to leave either at leisure to remark her
movements. When she saw them thus occupied she left the room almost
stealthily, carrying with her the tall lamp with its four tongues of
flame. She set down her light in her own room when she reached that
sanctuary, and once more read and pored over Colin’s poem. There was
nothing about love in it, and consequently nothing improper or alarming
to Alice. It was all about the Pantheon and its vespers, and the echoes
in the dome. But then why did he give it to her? why did he look so much
disturbed when she in her surprise and unreadiness hesitated over it?
Such an offering was totally new to Alice: how could she be expected to
understand exactly how it ought to be received? But it is impossible to
describe how vexed and mortified she was to find she had failed of what
was expected of her, and inflicted pain when she might have given
pleasure. She had been rude, and to be rude was criminal in her code of
manners; and a flutter of other questions, other curiosities, awoke
without any will of her own in the young creature’s maiden bosom; for,
indeed, she was still very young, not nineteen, and so preoccupied by
one class of thoughts that her mind had been absolutely barred against
all others until now.

The end was that Alice put away Colin’s poem in the private pocket of
her writing-case, the very innermost of her sanctuaries. “How clever he
is,” she thought to herself; “how odd that such things should come into
any one’s head; and to think I had not even the civility to say that it
was beautiful poetry!” Then she went back very humbly into the
sitting-room, and served Colin with the last cup of tea, which was the
most excellent. “For I know you like strong tea, Mr. Campbell,” she
said, looking at him with appealing eyes. “It feels quite strange to
think that we should know you so well--you who can write such beautiful
poetry,”[1] she managed to say later in the evening. “I have always
supposed a poet so different.”

“With wings, perhaps?” said Colin, who was not displeased even with this
simple testimony.

“Oh no,” said Alice, “that is impossible, you know--but certainly very
different; and it was so very kind to think of giving it to me.”

Thus she made her peace with the young man--but it is doubtful how far
she promoted her own by so doing. It introduced a new element of wonder
and curiosity, if nothing more, into her watching life.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

“It would be a great satisfaction to me,” said Lauderdale, “to have some
understanding about their relations. There’s few folk so lonely in this
world but what they have some kin, be they kind or not. It’s awfu’ to
look at this poor bit thing, and think how forlorn she’ll be by and by,
when----”

“When?” said Colin--“what do you mean? Meredith is not worse that I can
see. Is _that_ what you are thinking of?”

“It’s an awfu’ gradual descent,” said Lauderdale; “nae precipices
there--and pitiful to behold; but he’s making progress on his way. I’m
no mistaken, callant; a man like me has seen such sights before. It
looks as if it could go on for ever, and nae great difference
perceptible from day to day; but the wheel’s aye turning and the thread
spinning off, and nobody can say for certain what moment it may break,
like glass, and the spinning come to an end. Ay, it’s an awfu’ mystery.
You may break your heart thinking, but you’ll come to no solution. I’ve
tried it as much as most men, and should ken;--but that’s no the matter
under consideration. I would be glad to know something about their
friends.”

“I don’t suppose they have any friends,” said Colin, who had by this
time forgotten the suggestion of his English acquaintances. “He would
never have brought his sister here with him if he had had anyone to
leave her with--that is, if he believed, as he says he does, that he was
going to die,” said the young man, with a pang of fellow-feeling and
natural pity, “which are terrible words to say.”

“I’m no so sure about either of your propositions,” said Lauderdale;
“I’ve very little objection to die, for my part. No to speak of hopes a
man has as a Christian--though I maybe canna see them as clear as that
poor callant thinks he does--it would be an awfu’ satisfaction to ken
what was the meaning of it all, which is my grand difficulty in this
life. And I cannot say I am satisfied, for that matter, that he brought
his sister here for want of somebody to leave her with; she’s a kind of
property that he wouldna like to leave behind. He was not thinking of
her when they started, but of himsel’; nor can I see that his mind’s
awakening to any thought of her even now, though he’s awfu’ anxious, no
doubt, about her soul, and yours, and mine. Whisht! it’s temperament,
callant. I’m no blaming the poor dying lad. It’s hard upon a man if he
cannot be permitted to take some bit female creature that belongs to him
as far as the grave’s mouth. She maun find her way back from there the
best way she can. It’s human nature, Colin, for a’ you look like a
glaring lion at me.”

“I prefer your ordinary manner of expounding human nature,” said Colin.
“Don’t talk like this; if Miss Meredith is left so helpless and
solitary, at all events, Lauderdale, she can rely on you and me.”

“Ay,” said the philosopher shortly; “and grand protectors we would be
for the like of her. Two men no her equals in the eye of the world--I’m
no heeding your indignant looks, my freend; I’m a better judge than you
of some things--and one of us no of an age to be over and above
trusted. A lad like you can take care of a bit thing like her only in
one way; and that’s out of the question under present
circumstances--even if either of you were thinking of such vanities, of
which I see no sign.”

“None whatever,” said Colin, with momentary heat. “She is not in my way;
and, besides, she is greatly too much occupied to think of any such
vanities, as you say.”

Lauderdale cast a half-amused, suspicious look at his companion, whose
face was flushed a little. Colin was thinking only of Alice’s want of
comprehension and sympathy on the previous night; but the touch of
offence and mortification was as evident as if she had been unkind to
him in more important particulars.

“Being agreed on that point, it’s easier to manage the rest,” Lauderdale
resumed, with the ghost of a smile; “and I dinna pretend, for my own
part, to be a fit guardian for a young leddy. It’s a’ very well for
Telle-machus to wander about the world like this, but I’m no qualified
to keep watch and ward over the princess. Poor thing!” said the
philosopher, “it’s awfu’ early to begin her troubles; but I would be
easy in my mind, comparatively, if we could find out about their
friends. She’s no so very communicative in that particular; and she has
her bit woman’s whiles, innocent as she looks. She’ll give me no
satisfaction, though I’m awfu’ cunning in my questions. What was it yon
silly woman said about some Meredith of some place? I’m no without
suspicions in my own mind.”

“What sort of suspicions?” said Colin. “She said Meredith of Maltby. I
wrote it down somewhere. There was a row about him in the papers--don’t
you remember--a few years ago.”

“Oh ay, I remember,” said Lauderdale; “one of them that consume widows’
houses, and for a pretence make long prayers. The wonder to me is how
this callant, if he should happen to be such a man’s son, did not take a
sickening at religion altogether. That’s the consequence in a common
mind. It gives me a higher notion of this poor lad. He has his faults,
like most folk I ken,” said Lauderdale. “He’s awfu’ young, which is the
chief of all, and it’s one that will never mend in his case in this
life; but, if he’s yon man’s son, no to have abandoned a’ religion, no
to have scorned the very name of preaching and prayer, is a clear token
to me that the root of the matter’s in him; though he may be a wee
unrighteous to his ain flesh and blood”--the philosopher went on
philosophically--“that’s neither here nor there.”

“If religion does not make us righteous to our own flesh and blood, what
is the good of it?” said Colin. “To care for souls, as you say, but not
to care for leaving his sister so helpless and desolate, would be to me
as bad as his father’s wickedness. Bah! his father!--what am I saying?
He is no more his father than the Duke is mine. It is only a coincidence
of name.”

“I’m making no assertions,” said Lauderdale. “It may be or it may not
be; I’m no saying: but you should aye bear in mind that there’s an awfu’
difference between practice and theory. To have a good theory--or, if ye
like, a grand ideal--o’ existence, is about as much as a man can attain
to in this world. To put it into full practice is reserved, let us aye
hope, for the life to come. However, I wouldna say,” said Colin’s
guardian, changing his tone, “but that kind of practical paradox might
run in the blood. Our friend Arthur, poor man! has no meaning of neglect
to his sister. Do no man injustice. Maybe the other had as little
intention of cheating them that turned out his victims. An awfu’
practical accident like that might be accompanied by a beautiful theory.
Just as in the case of his son--”

“Stuff!” said Colin, who thought his friend prosy. “Why will you insist
on saying ‘his son?’ Meredith is not an uncommon name. You might as well
say Owen Meredith was his brother.”

“There’s nothing more likely,” said the philosopher, composedly;
“brothers aye take different roads, especially when they come out of
such a nest; but listen now to what I’ve got to say----”

What Lauderdale had to say was still upon the subject of which Colin by
this time had got tired--the supposed connexion of the brother and
sister with the famous, or rather notorious Meredith of Maltby, who was
one of the great leaders of that fashion of swindling so prevalent a few
years ago, by means of which directors of banks and joint-stock
companies brought so many people to ruin. Of these practitioners Mr.
Meredith of Maltby had been one of the most successful. He had passed
through one or two disagreeable examinations, it is true, in Insolvent
Courts and elsewhere; but he had managed to steer clear of the law, and
to retain a comfortable portion of his ill-gotten gains. He was a pious
man, who subscribed to all the societies, and had, of course, since
these unpleasant accidents occurred, been held up to public admiration
by half the newspapers of Great Britain as an instance of the natural
effect produced upon the human mind by an assumption of superior piety;
and more than one clever leading article, intended to prove that lavish
subscriptions to benevolent purposes, and attendance at prayer meetings,
were the natural evidences of a mind disposed to prey on its
fellow-creatures, had been made pointed and emphatic by his name.
Lauderdale’s “case” was subtle enough, and showed that he, at least, had
not forgotten the hint given in the Pantheon. He told Colin that all his
cunning inquiries could elicit no information about the father of the
forlorn pair. Their mother was dead, and, so far as she was concerned,
Alice was sufficiently communicative; and she had an aunt in India whom
Lauderdale knew by heart. “A’ that is so easy to draw out that the other
is all the more remarkable,” said the inquisitor; “and it’s awfu’
instructive to see the way she doubles out when I think I’ve got her in
a corner--no saying what’s no true, but fencing like a little Jesuit;
that is, speaking proverbially, and no vouching for my premises, for I
ken nothing about Jesuits in my ain person. I would like to be at the
bottom of a woman’s notions on such subjects. The way that bit thing
will lift up her innocent face, and give me to understand a lee without
saying it--”

“Be civil,” interrupted Colin; “a lie is strong language, especially as
you have no right whatever to question her so closely.”

“I said nothing about lies,” said Lauderdale; “I say she gives me to
understand a _lee_ without saying a word that’s no true; which is not
only an awfu’ civil form of expression on my part, but a gift of
womankind that, so far as I ken, is just unparalleled. If it werna
instinct it would be genius. She went so far as once to say, in her bit
fine way, that they were not quite happy in a’ their connexions--‘There
are some of our friends that Arthur can’t approve of,’ said she, which
was enough to make a man laugh or cry--whichever he might be most
disposed to. A bonnie judge Arthur is, to be believed in like that. But
the end of the whole matter is that I’m convinced the hot-headed callant
has carried her off from her home without anybody’s knowledge, and that
it’s an angry father you and me will have to answer to when we are left
her protectors, as you say.”

“I hope I am not afraid to meet anybody when I have justice on my side,”
said Colin, loftily. “She is nothing more to me than any other helpless
woman; but I will do my best to take care of her against any man
whatsoever, if she is trusted to me.”

Lauderdale laughed with mingled exasperation and amusement. “Bravo,” he
said; “the like of that’s grand talking; but I’ll have no hand, for my
part, in aiding and abetting domestic treason. I’m far from easy in my
mind on the subject altogether. It’s ill to vex a dying man, but it’s
worse to let a spirit go out of the world with guilt on its head. I’m in
an awfu’ difficulty whether to speak to him or no. If you would but come
down off your high horse and give me a little assistance. It’s a braw
business, take it all together. A young woman, both bonnie and good, but
abject to what her brother bids her, even now when he’s living--and us
two single men, with nae justification for meddling, and an indignant
father, no doubt, to make an account to. It’s no a position I admire,
for my part.”

“It was I that drew you into it,” said Colin, with some resentment.
“After all, they were my friends to begin with. Don’t let me bring you
into a responsibility which is properly mine.”

“Ay, ay,” said Lauderdale, calmly, “that’s aye the way with you
callants. If a man sees a difficulty in anything concerning you, off you
fling, and will have no more to do with him. I’m no one to be dismissed
in that fashion--no to say that it would be more becoming to consider
the difficulty, like reasonable creatures, and make up our minds how it
is to be met.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Colin, repentant; “only, to be sure, the
imprudence, if there was any imprudence, was mine. But it is hard to be
talking in this manner, as if all was over, while Meredith lives, poor
fellow. Such invalids live for ever, sometimes. There he is, for a
miracle, riding! When summer comes he may be all right.”

“Ay,” said Lauderdale, “I make no doubt of that; but no in your way.
He’ll be better off when summer comes.” Meredith turned a corner close
upon them as he spoke. He was riding, it is true, but only on a mule,
jogging along at a funeral pace, with Alice walking by his side. He
smiled when he met them; but the smile was accompanied by a momentary
flush, as of shame or pain.

“The last step but one,” he said. “I have given up walking for ever. I
did not think I should ever have come to this; but my spirit is proud,
and needs to be mortified. Campbell, come here. It is long since we have
had any conversation. I thought God was dealing with your soul when I
last talked to you. Tell me, if you were as far gone as I am--if you
were reduced to _this_”--and the sick man laid his thin white hand upon
the neck of the animal he was riding--“what consolation would you have
to keep you from sinking? It may come sooner than you think.”

“It is not easy to imagine how one would conduct oneself under such
circumstances,” said Colin; “let us talk of something else. If it were
coming--and it may be, for anything I can tell--I think I should prefer
not to give it too much importance. Look at that low blaze of sunshine,
how it catches St. Peter’s. These sunsets are like dramas--but nobody
plans the grouping beforehand,” said the young man, with an involuntary
allusion which he was sorry for the next moment, but could not recall.

“That is an unkind speech,” said Meredith; “but I forgive you. If I
could plan the grouping, as you say, I should like to collect all the
world to see me die. Heathens, papists, Mahometans, Christians of every
description--I would call them to see with what confidence a Christian
could traverse the dark valley, knowing Him who can sustain, and who has
preceded him there.”

“Yes, that was Addison’s idea; but his was an age when people did things
for effect,” said Colin: “and everything I have heard makes me believe
that people generally die very composedly upon the whole. The best and
wisest are scarcely superior in that respect to the ignorant and
stupid--scarcely even to the wicked. Either people have an infinite
confidence in themselves and their good fortune; or else absolute faith
in God is a great deal more general than you think it. I should like to
believe that last was the case. Pardon me for what I said. You who
realize so strongly what you are going to, should certainly die, when
that time comes, a glorious and joyful death.”

At these words a cloud passed over the eager, hectic countenance which
Meredith had turned to his friend. “Ah, you don’t know,” he said, with a
sudden depression which Colin had never seen in him before. “Sometimes
God sees fit to abandon His servants even in that hour; what, if after
preaching to others I should myself be a castaway?” This conversation
was going on while Alice talked to Lauderdale of the housekeeping, and
how the man at the Trattoria had charged a scudo too much in the last
weekly bill.

“Meredith,” said Colin, laying his hand on his friend’s arm, and
forgetting all the discussion with Lauderdale which had occupied the
afternoon, “when you say such words as Father and Saviour you put some
meaning in them, do you not? You don’t think it depends upon how you
feel to-day or to-morrow whether God will stand by his children or not?
I don’t believe in the castaway as you understand it.”

“Ah, my dear friend, I am afraid you don’t believe in any castaways;
don’t fall into that deadly error and snare of the devil,” said the sick
man.

“We must not discuss mysteries,” said Colin. “There are men for whom no
punishment is bad enough, and whom no amount of mercy seems to benefit.
I don’t know what is to become of them. For my own part I prefer not to
inquire. But this I _know_, that my father, much less my mother, would
not altogether abandon their son for any crime; and does not God love us
better than our fathers and our mothers?” said Colin, with a moisture
gathering in his brown eyes and brightening his smile. As for Meredith,
he snatched his hand away, and pushed forward with a feverish impulse. A
sound, half sigh, half groan, burst from him, and Colin could see that
this inarticulate complaint had private references of which he knew
nothing. Then Lauderdale’s suggestion returned to his mind with singular
force; but it was not a time to make any inquiries, even if such had
been possible. Instinctively, without knowing it, Meredith turned from
that subject to the only other which could mutually interest men so
unlike each other; and what he said betrayed distinctly enough what had
been the tenor of his thoughts.

“_She_ has no mother,” said Meredith, with a little wave of his hand
towards his sister. “Poor Alice! But I have no doubt God has gracious
purposes towards her,” he continued, recovering himself. “_This_ is in
the family, and I don’t doubt she will follow me soon.”

It was thus he disposed of the matter which for the strangers to whose
care he was about to leave her, was a matter of so much anxious thought.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

After this Meredith’s malady made gradual but rapid progress. When Colin
and his friend returned from Rome in the evenings, after their
expeditions there, they thought they could see a difference in his looks
even from the morning. He ceased to move about; he ceased to go out;
finally he ceased to get up from his bed. All these changes were
accomplished very gradually, with a heart-breaking regularity of
succession. Alice, who was constantly engaged about him, doing every
kind of office for him, was fortunately too much occupied to take full
cognizance of that remorseless progress of decay; but the two friends,
who watched it with eyes less urgent than those of love, yet almost more
painfully pitiful, could trace all the little advances of the malady.
Then there came the time, the last stage of all, when it was necessary
to sit up with him all night--an office which Colin and Lauderdale
shared between them, to let the poor little sister have a little
reluctant rest.

The season had warmed into May, of all seasons the sweetest in Italy. To
see the sun shine, it seemed impossible to think that he would not shine
for ever; and, when the window of the sick room was opened in the early
morning, such a breath of life and happiness came in--such a sweet gust
of air, wild from the great breadth of the Campagna, breathing of dews
and blossoms--as felt to Colin’s lips like an elixir of life. But that
breathing balm imparted no refreshment to the dying man. He was not
suffering much; he was only weary to the bottom of his soul--languid and
yet restless, eager to be moved, yet unable to bear any motion. While
Alice withdrew behind them by times to shed the tears that kept always
gathering, and say a prayer in her heart for her dying brother--a prayer
in which, with a child’s simplicity, she still left room for his
restoration, and called it possible--the two others watched with the
profoundest interest that which was not only the dying of a friend, but
the waning of a life. To see him so individual and characteristic, with
all the notable features and even faults of his mind as distinct and
apparent as if he had been in the strongest health, and yet so near the
end, was the strangest spectacle. What was it the end of? He directed
them all from his deathbed, and, indeed, controlled them all, with a
will stronger than ever before, securing his own way in face of all
their remonstrances, and, indeed, seemed to grow more and more strong,
absolute, and important, as he approached the final stage of
weakness--which is a sight always wonderful to see. He kept on writing
his book, propped up upon pillows, as long as he had strength enough to
hold the pen; but, when that power too failed him, the unyielding soul
coerced itself into accepting the pen of another, and dictated the last
chapter, at which Alice laboured during the day, and which occasionally,
to beguile the tedium of the long night-watches, his other attendants
were permitted to carry on.

The nights grew shorter and shorter as the season advanced, and
sometimes it was by the lovely light of the dawning morning, instead of
the glimmer of the lamp, that these solemn sentences were written. At
other moments, when the patient could not sleep, but was content to
rest, wonderful scraps of conversation went on in that chamber of death.
Meredith lay gaunt and wasted among his pillows--his great eyes filling
the room, as the spectators sometimes thought; and by his bedside rose,
sometimes the gigantic figure of Lauderdale, dimly visible by means of
the faint night-light--sometimes Colin’s young softened face and air of
tender compassion. It did not occur to any of the three to ask by what
right they came together in relations so near and sacred. The sick man’s
brothers, had he possessed them, could not have watched him with more
care, or with less doubt about his claim upon all their ministrations:
but they talked with him as perhaps no brother could have
talked--recognising the reality of his position, and even discussing it
as a matter in which they too had the profoundest interest. The room was
bare enough, and contained little comfort to English eyes--uncarpeted,
with bare tiles underneath the feet, and scantily furnished with an old
sofa, a chair or two, and a table. There were two windows, which looked
out upon the Campagna which the dying man was to see no more, nor cared
to see. But that great living picture, of no benefit to him, was the
only one there; for poor Meredith had himself caused to be taken down
from the wall a print of the Madonna, and the little cross with its
basin for holy water underneath, which had hung at the head of his bed.
He had even sent away a picture of the Crucifixion--a bad, yet not
unimpressive copy. “I want no outward symbols,” said the sick man;
“there will be none where I am going,” and this was the beginning of one
of those strange talks by night.

“It’s awfu’ difficult to ken,” said Lauderdale. “For my part it’s a
great wonder to me that there has never been any revelation worthy of
credit out of that darkness. That poor fellow Dives, in the parable, is
the only man I mind of that takes a Christian view of the subject. He
would have sent one to tell. The miracle is, that nae man was ever
permitted to come.”

“Don’t say so,” said Meredith. “Oh, my dear friend! if you could but
know the joy it would give me to bring you to Christ before I die--to
see you accept and receive Him. Has not He come to seek and to save?”

“Callant,” said the watcher, with a long drawn breath, “I’ve longer
acquaintance with Him than you can have; and if I dinna believe in Him I
would hang myself, and get to an explanation of all things. If it was
not for Him, wherefore should I, that have nobody dependent on me,
endure the mystery? But that’s no answer to my question. He came to put
a meaning in the world that has little enough signification without Him,
but no to answer a’ the questions that a human spirit can put to heaven
and earth. I’ve heard of bargains made between them that were to die and
them that had to live--”

“You put it in a strange way, Lauderdale,” said the dying man; “most
people would say, those who had to die. But what can any one want beyond
what is revealed--Jerusalem the golden? How strange it is to think that
a worm like me shall so soon be treading those shining streets, while
you--you whom the world thinks so much better off--”

“Whisht,” said Lauderdale, with a husky voice. “Do you no think it would
be an awfu’ satisfaction to us that stay behind if we could have but a
glint of the shining streets you speak of? Many a long day we’ll strain
our eyes and try hard to see you there, but a’ to little purpose. I’m no
saying I would not take it on trust for myself, and be content with what
God pleased; but it’s hard to part with them that belong to us, and ken
nothing about them--where they are, or how they are--”

“They are in Heaven! If they were children of God they are with Him,”
said the sick man, anxiously. “Lauderdale, I cannot bear to think that
you do not believe--that perhaps I may not meet you there.”

“Maybe no,” said the philosopher; “there’s the awfu’ question. A man
might go ranging about the shining streets (as you say) for ever, and
never find them that belonged to him; or, if there’s no geographical
limits, there may be others harder to pass. It’s awfu’ little comfort I
can get for my own mind out of shining streets. How am I to picture you
to myself, callant, when I take thoughts of you? I have the fancy in my
mind to give you messages to friends I have away yonder; but how can I
tell if you’ll ever see them? It’s no a question of believing or not
believing; I put little faith in Milton, and none in the good books,
from which two sources we draw a great part of our talk about Heaven.
It’s no even to ken if they’re happy or no happy that troubles me. I’ve
nae hesitation to speak of in leaving _that_ in God’s hand. It’s but to
have an inkling ever so slight where ye are, and how you are,” said
Lauderdale, unconsciously changing his pronouns, “and that ye keep
thought of us that spend so many thoughts on you.”

After this there was a little pause, which fell into the perfect
stillness of the night outside, and held the little dim-lighted chamber
in the midst of all the darkness, like the picture of a shadowy
“interior,” with two motionless figures, the living and the dying,
painted upon the great gloom of night. Meredith, who, notwithstanding
the superior intensity of his own thoughts, had been moved by
Lauderdale’s--and who, used as he was to think himself dying, yet
perhaps heard himself thus unconsciously reckoned among the dead with a
momentary thrill--was the first to speak.

“In all this I find you too vague,” said the patient. “You speak about
Heaven as if you were uncertain only of its aspect; you have no anxiety
about the way to get there. My friend, you are very good to me--you are
excellent, so far as this world goes; I know you are. But, oh,
Lauderdale, think! Our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Before you
speculate about Heaven, ask yourself are you sure to get there?”

“Ay,” said Lauderdale, vaguely, “it’s maybe a wee like the question of
the Sadducees--I’m no saying; and it’s awfu’, the dead blank of wisdom
and knowledge that’s put forth for a response--no any information to
you; nothing but a quenching of your flippant questions and impudent
pretensions. No marrying nor giving in marriage there, and the curious
fools baffled, but nae light thrown upon the darkness! I’ll have to wait
like other folk for my answer; but, if it’s according to your new nature
and faculties--which surely it must be--you’ll not forget to give us a
thought at times? If you feel a wee lonely at the first--I’m no profane,
callant; you’re but a man when a’s done, or rather a laddie, and you’ll
surely miss your friends--dinna forget how long and how often we’ll
think of you.”

“Shall you?” said the dying man. “I have given you nothing but trouble
ever since I knew you, and it is more than I deserve. But there is One
who is worthy of all your thoughts. When you think of me, O love Him, my
dear friend, and so there will be a bond between us still.”

“Ay,” said Lauderdale once more. It was a word he used when his voice
could not be trusted, and his heart was full. “Ay,” he repeated, after a
long pause, “I’ll no neglect that grand bond. It’s a bargain between you
and me no to be broken. If ye were free for such an act, it would be
awfu’ friendly to bring me word how things are”--he continued, in a low
tone, “though it’s folly to ask, for if it had been possible it would
have been done before now.”

“It is God who must teach and not me,” said the dying man. “He has other
instruments--and you must seek Him for yourself, and let Him reveal His
will to you. If you are faithful to God’s service, He will relieve you
of your doubts,” said Arthur, who did not understand his friend’s mind,
but even at that solemn moment looked at him with a perplexed mixture of
disapproval and compassion. And thus the silence fell again like a
curtain over the room, and once more it became a picture faintly painted
on the darkness, faintly relieved and lighted up by touches of growing
light, till at length the morning came in full and fair, finding out as
with a sudden surprise the ghostly face on the pillow, with its great
eyes closed in disturbed sleep, and by the bedside another face scarcely
less motionless, the face of the man who was no unbeliever, but whose
heart longed to know and see what others were content, in vague
generalities to tell of, and say they believed.

This was one of the conversations held in the dead of night in
Meredith’s room. Next evening it was Colin, reluctantly permitted by his
faithful guardian to share this labour, who took the watcher’s place;
and then the two young men, who were so near of an age, but whose
prospects were so strangely different, talked to each other after a
different fashion. Both at the beginning of their career, and with
incalculable futures before them, it was natural they should discuss the
objects and purposes of life, upon which Meredith, who thought himself
matured by the approach of death, had, as he imagined, so much advantage
over his friend, who was not going to die.

“I remember once thinking as you do,” said the dying man. “The world
looked so beautiful! No man ever loved its vanities and its pomp more
than I. I shudder sometimes to think what would have become of me if God
had left me to myself--but He was more merciful. I see things in their
true light now.”

“You will have a great advantage over us,” said Colin, trying to smile;
“for you will always know the nature of our occupations, while yours
will be a mystery to us. But we can be friends all the same. As for me,
I shall not have many pomps and vanities to distract me; a poor man’s
son, and a Scotch minister does not fall in the way of such
temptations.”

“There are temptations to worldliness in every sphere,” said Meredith.
“You once spoke eagerly about going to Oxford, and taking honours. My
dear friend, trust a dying man. There are no honours worth thinking of
but the crown and the palm, which Christ bestows on them that love Him.”

“Yes,” said Colin; “but we are not all chosen for these. If I have to
live, I must qualify myself the best I can for my work. I should like to
be of a little use to Scotland, if that was possible. When I hear the
poor people here singing their vespers----”

“Ah, Campbell! one word--let me speak,” said his friend. “Alice showed
me the poem you gave her. You don’t mean it, I know; but let me beg you
not to utter such sentiments. You seem to consent to the doctrine of
purgatory, one of the worst delusions of the Church of Rome. There are
no spirits in prison, my dear, dear friend. When I leave you, I shall be
with my Saviour. Don’t give your countenance to such inventions of the
devil.”

“That was not what I intended to say,” said Colin, who had no heart for
argument. “I meant that to see the habit of devotion of all these
people, whom we call so ignorant, and to remember how little we have of
that among our own people, whom we think enlightened, goes to my heart.
I should like to do a priest’s duty----”

“Again!” said Meredith. “Dear Campbell, you will be a minister; there is
but one great High Priest.”

“Yes,” said Colin, “most true, and the greatest of all consolations. But
yet I believe in priests inferior--priests who need be nothing more than
men. I am not so much for teaching as you are, you know; I have so
little to teach any man. With you who are going to the Fount of all
knowledge it will be different. I can conceive, I can imagine how
magnificent may be _your_ work,” the young man said, with a faltering
voice, as he laid his warm young hand upon the fingers which were almost
dead.

Meredith closed his hand upon that of his friend, and looked at him with
his eyes so clear and awful, enlarged and lighted up with the prescience
of what was to come. “If you do your work faithfully it will be the same
work,” he said. “Our Master alone knows the particulars. If I might have
perhaps to supplement and complete what you do on earth!--Ah, but I must
not be tempted into vain speculations! Enough that I shall know His will
and see Him as He is. I desire no more.”

“Amen,” said Colin; “and, when you are in your new career, think of me
sometimes, worried and vexed as I know I shall be. We shall not be able
to communicate then, but I know now beforehand what I shall have to go
through. You don’t know Scotland, Meredith. A man who tries for any new
reformation in the Church will have to fight for trifles of detail which
are not worth fighting for, and perhaps get both himself and his work
degraded in consequence. You can know no such cares. Think of me
sometimes when you are doing your work ‘with thunders of acclaim.’ I
wonder--but you would think it a profanity if I said what I was going to
say.”

“What was it?” said Meredith, who, indeed, would not have been sorry had
his friend uttered a profanity which might give him occasion to speak,
for perhaps the last time, “faithfully” to his soul.

“I wonder,” said Colin, whose voice was low, “whether our Master, who
sees us both, though we cannot see each other, might tell you sometimes
what your friend was doing. He, too, is a man. I mean no irreverence,
Meredith. There were men for whom, above His tenderness for all, He had
a special love. I should like to think it. I can know nothing of you;
but then I am less likely to forget you, staying behind in this familiar
world.”

And the two youths again clasped hands, tears filling the eyes of the
living one, but no moisture in the clear orbs of him who was about to
die.

“Let us be content to leave it all in His hands,” said Meredith. “God
bless you, Colin, for your love; but think nothing of me; think of Him
who is our first and greatest Friend.”

And then again came silence and sleep, and the night throbbed silently
round the lighted chamber and the human creatures full of thought; and
again there took place the perennial transformation, the gradual rising
of the morning light, the noiseless entrance of the day, finding out,
with surprised and awful looks, the face of the dying. This is how the
last nights were spent. Down below in the convent there was a good
friar, who watched the light in the window, and pondered much in his
mind whether he should not go thither with his crucifix, and save the
poor young heretic in spite of himself; but the Frate was well aware
that the English resented such interruptions, and did better for Arthur;
for he carried the thought of him through all his devotions, and
muttered under his breath the absolution, with his eyes fixed upon the
lighted window, and prayed, if he had any credit in heaven, through the
compassionate saints, the Blessed Virgin, and by the aid of Him whose
image he held up towards the unseen sufferer, that the sins which God’s
servant had thus remitted on earth might be, even without the knowledge
of the penitent, remitted in heaven. Thus Colin’s belief in priests was
justified without his knowing it; and perhaps God judged the
intercession of Father Francisco more tenderly than poor Arthur would
have done. And with these private proceedings, which the world was
unaware of, night after night passed on until the night came which was
to have no day.

They had all assembled in the room, in which it seemed before morning so
great an event was to happen--all worn and tired out with watching; the
evidences of which appeared upon Colin and Alice, though Lauderdale,
more used to exertion, wore his usual aspect. As usual, Meredith lay
very solemnly in a kind of pathetic youthful state in his bed;
struggling for every breath, yet never forgetting that he lay there
before heaven and earth, a monument as he said of God’s grace, and an
example of how a Christian could die. He called Alice, and the others
would have withdrawn; but this he would not permit. “We have no secrets
to discuss,” he said. “I am not able to say much now. Let my last words
be for Christ. Alice, you are the last. We have all died of it. It is
not very hard; but you cannot die in peace, as I do, unless you give
yourself to Christ. These are my last words to my sister. You may not
live long--you have not a moment to spare. Give yourself to Christ, my
little Alice, and then your death-bed will be as peaceful as mine.”

“Yes,” said the docile sister, through her sobs, “I will never, never
forget what you have said to me. Oh, Arthur, you are going to them all!”

“I am going to God,” said the dying man; “I am going to my Lord and
Saviour--that is all I desire to think of now.”

And there was a momentary breathless pause. She had his hand in both of
hers, and was crying with an utter despair and abandonment to which she
had never given herself up before. “Oh, Arthur--papa!” the poor girl
said, under her breath. If they had been less interested, or if the
stillness had been a degree less intense, the voice was so low that the
two other watchers could not have heard her. But the answer was spoken
aloud.

“Tell him I forgive him, Alice. I can say so now. Tell him to repent
while there is time. If you wish it, you can tell Colin and
Lauderdale--they have been brothers to us. Come here, all of you,” said
Meredith. “Hear my last words. Nothing is of any importance but the love
of Christ. I have tried everything in the world--its pleasures and its
ambitions--and--But everything except Christ is vanity. Come to Him
while it is called to-day. And now come and kiss me, Alice, for I am
going to die.”

“Oh, no, Arthur. Oh, Arthur, do not leave me yet!” cried the poor girl.
Lauderdale drew her gently away, and signed to Colin to take the place
by the bed. He drew her hand through his arm and led her softly into the
great empty _salone_, where there was no light except that of the moon,
which came in in broad white bars at the side windows. “Whisht! it’ll no
be yet,” said the kind guardian who had taken possession of Alice. No
mother or lover could have been tenderer with the little forlorn
creature in this hour which was the most terrible of all. He made her
walk softly about with him, beguiling her awful suspense a little with
that movement. “A little more strength, for his sake,” said Lauderdale;
“another trial--and then nobody shall stop your tears. It’s for his
sake; the last thing you can do for him.”

And then the poor little sister gave utterance to a bitter cry, “If he
would say something kind for papa, I could bear it,” she said,
smothering her painful sobs; and Lauderdale drew her closer on his arm,
supporting and soothing her, and led her about, slowly and noiselessly,
in the great empty room, lighted with those broad bars of moonlight,
waiting till she had regained a little composure to return to the
chamber of death.

Meredith lay silent for some time, with his great eyes gazing into the
vacancy before him, and the last thrill of fever in his frame. He
thought he was thus coming with all his faculties alert and vivid to a
direct conscious encounter with the unknown might of death. “Get the
book, Colin,” he said, with a voice which yet possessed a certain
nervous strength; “it is now time to write the conclusion”--and
he dictated with a steady voice the date of his last
postscript:--“Frascati, midnight, May 16th.--The last hour of my
life----”

CHAPTER XXXV.

Meredith died the next day, after a struggle longer and harder than
could have been anticipated, and very differently from the manner in
which, when he dictated his last message to the world, he expected to
die. Few human creatures are strong enough, except in books, to march
thus solemnly and statelily to the edge of the grave. The last event
itself was twenty-four hours later than the anxious watchers expected
it to be, and wore them all out more utterly than any previous part of
their patient’s lingering illness. He dictated his postscript, lying in
great exhaustion, but solemn calm, not without a certain pomp of
conscious grandeur, victorious over death and the grave. “That great
angel whom men call the last enemy is standing by my bedside,” the dying
man said, giving forth his last utterance slowly word by word. “In an
hour I shall be clay and ashes. I send you, friends, this last message.
Death is not terrible to those who love Christ. I feel a strength in me
that is not my own. I had fears and doubts, but I have them no longer.
The gates of heaven are opening. I close my eyes, for I can no longer
see the lights of this world; when I open them again it will be to
behold the face of my Lord. Amen. This I say to all the world with my
last breath. For those who love Christ it is not hard to die.”

Colin, who wrote the words, trembled over them with a weakness like a
woman’s; but Meredith’s broken and interrupted voice was shaken only by
the last pangs of mortality, not by any faltering of the spirit. “I tell
you, Colin, it is not hard,” he said, and smiled upon his friend, and
composed himself to meet the last encounter; but such was not the end.
The long night lingered on, and the dying man dozed a little, and woke
again less dignified and composed. Then came the weary morning, with its
dreadful daylight which made the heart sick, and then a long day of
dying, terrible to behold, perhaps not so hard to bear. The two who were
his brothers at this dreadful moment exercised all their power to keep
Alice out of the room where this struggle was going on, but the gentle
little girl was a faithful woman, and kept her place. He had had his
moment of conscious victory, but now in its turn the human soul was
vanquished. He became unconscious of their consoling presence, conscious
of nothing but the awful restlessness, the intolerable languor and yet
more intolerable nervous strength which kept him alive in spite of
himself; and then the veiled and abstracted spirit awoke to matters of
which, when in full possession of his faculties, Arthur had made no
mention. He began to murmur strange words as he lay tossing in that last
struggle. “Tell my father,” he said once or twice, but never finished
the message. That death so clear and conscious, for which he had hoped,
was not granted to him; and, when at last the deliverance came, even
Alice, on her knees by the bedside, felt in her desolation a moment’s
relief. It was almost dawn of the second morning when they raised her
up and led her tenderly away to Sora Antonia, the kind Italian woman,
who waited outside. Colin was scarcely less overwhelmed than she. The
young man sank down by the table where, on the previous night, he had
been Arthur’s secretary, and almost fainting dropped his head upon the
book which still lay open there. Twenty-four hours only of additional
hard labour added on to the ending life; but it looked as many years to
the young inexperienced spirit which had thus, for the first time,
followed another, so far as a spectator can, through the valley of the
shadow of death.

Lauderdale, who knew better, and upon whose greater strength this
dreadful strain of watching had made a less visible impression, had to
do for Colin what the kind peasant woman was doing for the desolate
sister--to take him away from the chamber of death, and make him lie
down, and put aside altogether his own sensations on behalf of the
younger and more susceptible sufferer. All that had to be done fell on
Lauderdale; he made the necessary arrangements with a self-command which
nothing disturbed, and, when he could satisfy himself that both the
young worn-out creatures, who were his children for the moment, had got
the momentary solace of sleep, as was natural, he threw himself into
poor Arthur’s arm-chair and pondered with a troubled countenance on all
that might follow. There he too slept and dozed, as Sora Antonia went
softly to and fro, moved with pity. She had said her rosary for Arthur
many a morning, and had done all she could to interest in his behalf
that good St. Antonio of Padua, who was so charitable, and perhaps might
not be so particular about a matter of doctrine as St. Paul or St.
Peter; for Sora Antonia was kind to the bottom of her heart, and could
not bear to think of more than a thousand years or so of Purgatory for
the poor young heretic. “The Signorino was English and knew no better,”
she said to her patron saint--and comforted herself with the thought
that the blessed Antonio would not fail to attend to her recommendation,
and that she had done the best she could for her lodger. From the room
where Alice slept the deep sleep of exhaustion the good woman made many
voyages into the silent _salone_, where the shutters were closed upon
the bare windows, though the triumphant sun streamed in at every
crevice. She looked at Lauderdale, who dozed in the great chair, with
curious looks of speculation and inquiry. He looked old and grey, thus
sleeping in the daylight, and the traces of exhaustion in such a face as
his were less touching than the lines in Alice’s gentle countenance or
the fading of Colin’s brightness. He was the only member of the party
who looked responsible to the eyes of Sora Antonia; and already she had
a little romance in hand, and wondered much whether this uncle, or elder
brother, or guardian, would be favourable to her young people. Thus,
while the three watchers found a moment’s sad rest after their long
vigil, new hopes and thoughts of life already began to play about them
unawares. The world will not stand still even to see the act of death
accomplished; and the act of death itself, if Arthur was right in his
hopes, had not that already opened its brighter side upon the solitary
soul which had gone forth alone?

The day after everything was finally over was Sunday--the gayest and
brightest of summer festal days. Colin and Lauderdale, who had on the
day before carried their friend to his grave, met each other sadly at
the table, where it was so strange to take up again the common thread of
life as though Arthur Meredith had never had any share in it. It was
Sunday under its brightest aspect; the village was very gay outside, and
neither of them felt capable of introducing their sombre shadows into
the flowery and sunny festa, the gaiety of which jarred upon their
sadness; and they had no heart to go about their usual occupations
within. When they had swallowed their coffee together, they withdrew
from each other into different corners, and tried to read, which was the
only employment possible. Lauderdale, for his part, in his listlessness
and fatigue, went to rummage among some books which a former occupant
had left, and brought from among them--the strangest choice for him to
make--a French novel, a kind of production utterly unknown to him. The
chances are, he had forgotten it was Sunday; for his Scotch prejudices,
though he held them lightly in theory, still held him fast in practice.
When, however, he had pored over it vaguely for half an hour (for
reading French was a laborious amusement to the imperfectly instructed
scholar), Colin was roused out of studies which he, too, pursued with a
very divided attention, by a sudden noise, and saw the little yellow
volume spin through the air out of his friend’s vigorous fingers, and
drop ignominiously in a corner. “Me to be reading stuff like that!” said
Lauderdale, with grim accents of self disgust; “and him maybe near to
see what a fool is doing!” As he said this, he got up from his chair,
and began to pace about the quiet, lonely room, violently endeavouring
to recover the composure which he had not been able to preserve. Though
he was older and stronger than the others, watching and grief had told
upon his strength also; and, in the glory of the summer morning which
blazed all round and about, the soul of this wayfaring man grew sick
within him. Something like a sob sounded into the silence. “I’m no
asking if he’s happy,” Lauderdale burst forth; “I cannot feel as if I
would esteem him the same if he felt nothing but joy to get away. You’re
a’ infidels and unbelievers alike, with your happiness and your heaven.
I’m no saying that it’s less than the supreme joy to see the face he
hoped to see--but joy’s no inconsistent with pain. Will you tell me the
callant, having a heart as you know he had, can think of us mourning for
him and no care? Dinna speak of such inhuman imaginations to me.”

“No,” said Colin, softly. “But worst of all would be to think he was
here,” the young man continued, after a pause, “unable to communicate
with us anyhow, by whatsoever effort. Don’t think so, Lauderdale; that
is the most inhuman imagination of all.”

“I’m no so clear of that,” said the philosopher, subduing his hasty
steps; “nae doubt there would be a pang in it, especially when there was
information like that to bestow; but it’s hard to tell, in our leemited
condition, a’ the capabilities of a soul. It might be a friend close by,
and no yoursel’, that put your best thought in your head, though you saw
him not. I wouldna say that I would object to that. It’s all a question
of temperament, and, maybe, age,” he continued, calming himself entirely
down, and taking a seat beside Colin in the window. “The like of you
expects response, and has no conception of life without it; but the like
of me can be content without response,” said Colin’s guardian; and then
he regarded his companion with eyes in which the love was veiled by a
grave mist of meditation. “I would not object to take the charge of you
in such a manner,” he said, slowly. “But it’s awfu’ easy to dream
dreams,--if anything on this earth could but make a man _know_;”--and
then there followed another pause. “He was awfu’ pleased to teach,”
Lauderdale resumed, with an unsteady smile. “It’s strange to think what
should hinder him speaking now, when he has such news to tell. I never
could make it out, for my part. Whiles my mind inclines to the thought
that it must be a peaceable sleep that wraps them a’ till the great day,
which would account for the awfu’ silence; but there’s some things that
go against that. This is what makes me most indignant at thae idiots
with their spirit-rapping and gibberish. Does ony mortal with a heart
within his bosom dare to think that, if Love doesna open their sealed
lips, any power in the world can?” cried the philosopher, whose emotion
again got beyond his control. He got up again, and resumed his
melancholy march up and down the room. “It’s an awfu’ marvel, beyond my
reach,” he said, “when a word of communication would make a’ the
difference, why it’s no permitted--if it were but to keep a heart from
breaking here and there.”

“Perhaps it is our own fault,” said Colin; “perhaps flesh and blood
shrinks more than we are aware of from such a possibility; and
perhaps--” here the young man paused a little, “indeed, it is not
perhaps. Does not God Himself choose to be our comforter?” said the
youthful pre-destined priest; upon which the older and sadder man once
more composed himself with a groan.

“Ay,” said Lauderdale, “I can say nothing against that argument. I’m no
denying it’s the last and the greatest. I speak the voice of a man’s
yearning--but I’ve no intention of contravening the truth. He’s gone
like many a one before him. You and me must bide our time. I’ll say no
more of Arthur. The best thing you can do is to read a chapter. If we
canna hear of him direct, which is no to be hoped for, we can take as
good a grip as possible of the Friend that stands between us. It’s
little use trying to forget--or trying no to think and inquire and
question. There is but one thing in the world, so far as I can see, that
a man can feel a kind of sure of. Callant, read a chapter,” said
Lauderdale, with a long sigh. He threw himself back, as he spoke, in the
nearest chair, and Colin took his Bible dutifully to obey. The contrast
between this request, expressed as any Scotch peasant would have
expressed it, and the speculations which preceded it, did not startle
Colin, and he had opened the book by instinct in the latter part of St.
John’s Gospel, when he was disturbed by the entrance of Alice, who came
in softly from her room without any warning. Her long attendance on her
brother had withdrawn the colour from her cheeks and the fulness from
her figure so gradually, that it was only now in her mourning dress that
her companions saw how pale and thin she had grown. Alice was not
speculative, nor fanciful, nor addicted to undue exercise of the
faculties of her own mind in any way. She was a dutiful woman, young and
simple, and accepted God’s will without inquiry or remonstrance. Though
she had struggled long against the thought of Arthur’s death, now that
he _was_ dead she recognized and submitted to the event which it was no
longer possible to avert or change, with a tender and sweet resignation
of which some women are capable. A more forlorn and desolate creature
than Alice Meredith did not exist on the earth, to all ordinary
appearance, at this moment; but, as she was not at all thinking of
herself, that aspect of the case did not occur to her.

She came out of her room very softly, with a faint smile on her face,
holding some Prayer-books in her hands. Up to this sad day it had been
their custom to read prayers together on the Sundays, being too far off
Rome to make it practicable even for the stronger members of the party
to go to church. Alice came up to Colin with her books in her hands--she
said to him in a wistful whisper, “You will take his place,” and pointed
out to him silently the marks she had placed at the lessons and psalms.
Then she knelt down between the two awed and astonished men, to say the
familiar prayers which only a week ago Arthur himself had read with his
dying voice. Though at times articulation was almost impossible to
Colin, and Lauderdale breathed out of his deep chest an Amen which
sounded like a groan, Alice did not falter in her profound and still
devotions. She went over the well-known prayers word by word, with eye
and voice steadfast and rapt in the duty which was at the same time a
consolation. There are women of such sweet loyalty and submission of
spirit, but neither Lauderdale nor Colin had met with them before.
Perhaps a certain passiveness of intellect had to do with it, as well as
Alice’s steady English training and custom of self-suppression; but it
made a wonderful impression upon the two who were now the sole
companions and guardians of the friendless young woman, and gave her
indeed for the moment an absolute empire over them, of which Alice was
altogether unconscious, and of which, even had she known it, she could
have made no further use. When the Morning Prayer was almost concluded
it was she who indicated to Colin another mark in the Prayer-book, at
the prayer for Christ’s Church militant on earth; and they could even
hear the whisper of her voice broken by an irrestrainable sob at the
thanksgiving for all “Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and
fear,” which Colin read with agitation and faltering. When they rose
from their knees, she turned from one to the other with her countenance
for the first time disturbed. “You were very very good to him,” she
said, softly. “God will bless you for it,” and so sank into sobbing and
tears, which were not to be subdued any longer, yet were not passionate
nor out of accordance with her docile looks. After that, Alice recovered
her calm, and began to occupy herself with them as if she had been their
mother. “Have you been out?” she said. “You must not stay in and make
yourself ill.” This was addressed specially to Colin. “Please go out
and take a walk; it will do you a great deal of good. If it had not have
been a great festa it would not have been so bad; but, if you go up to
the Villa Conti, you will find nobody there. Go up behind the terrace,
into the alleys where it is shady. There is one on the way to the
Aldobrandini; you know it, Mr. Campbell. Oh go, please; it is such a
beautiful day, it will do you good.”

“And you?” said Colin, who felt in his heart an inclination to kneel to
her as if she had been a queen.

“I shall stay at home to-day,” said Alice. “I could not go out to-day;
but I shall do very well. Sora Antonia will come in from mass presently.
Oh, go out, please, and take a walk. Mr. Lauderdale, he will go if you
tell him to go--you are both looking so pale.”

“Come, Colin,” said Lauderdale, “she shall have her pleasure done this
day, at least, whatsoever she commands. If there was anything within my
power or his--” said the philosopher, with a strange discord that
sounded like tears in his voice; but Alice stopped him short.

“Oh yes,” she said, softly, “it is very good of you to do it because I
ask you. Mr. Campbell, you did not read the right lesson,” she added,
turning her worn face to Colin with a slight reproach.

“I read what I thought was better for us all, mourning as we are,” said
Colin, startled; upon which the sad little representative of law and
order did her best to smile.

“I have always heard it said how wonderful it was how the lesson for the
day always suited everybody’s case,” said Alice. “Arthur never would
make any change for circumstances. He--he said it was as if God could
ever be wanting,” the faithful sister said, through her sobs; and then,
again, put force upon herself:--“I shall be here when you come back,”
she said, with her faint smile; and so, like a little princess, sent
them away. The two men went their way up the slope and through the
little town, in their black coats, casting two tall, sombre shadows into
the sunshine and gaiety of the bright piazza. There had been a
procession that morning, and the rough pavement was strewed with sprigs
of myrtle and box, and the air still retained a flavour of the candles,
not quite obliterated by the whiff of incense which came from the open
doors of the Cathedral, where even the heavy leathern curtain, generally
suspended across the entrance, had been removed by reason of the crowd.
People were kneeling even on the steps; peasants in their laced
buskins, and Frascati women, made into countesses or duchesses, at the
least, by the long white veils which streamed to their feet. The windows
were all hung with brilliant draperies in honour of the morning’s
procession and the afternoon’s Tombola. It was one of the very chief of
Italian holydays, a festal Sunday in May, the month of Mary. No wonder
the two sad Protestant Scotchmen, with mourning in their dress and in
their hearts, felt themselves grow sick and faint as they went dutifully
to the gardens of the Villa Conti, as they had been commanded. They did
not so much as exchange a word with each other till they had passed
through all that sunshine and reached the identical alley, a close
arcade, overarched and shut in by the dense foliage of ilex-trees, to
which their little sovereign had directed them. There was not a soul
there as she had prophesied. A tunnel scooped out of the damp, dewy soil
could scarcely have been more absolutely shut in from the sunshine,
scarcely could have been stiller or cooler, or more withdrawn from the
blazing noonday, with its noises and rejoicings, than this narrow sombre
avenue. They strayed down its entire length, from one blue arch of
daylight to the other, before they spoke; and then it was Lauderdale who
broke the silence, as if his thoughts, generally so busy and so vagrant,
had never got beyond Alice Meredith’s last words.

“Another time, Colin,” said the philosopher, “you’ll no make ony changes
in the lesson for the day. Whiles it’s awfu’ hard to put up with the
conditions o’ a leemited intellect; but whiles they’re half divine. I’m
no pretending to be reasonable. She kens no more about reason than--the
angels, maybe--I admit it’s a new development to me; but a woman like
yon, callant, would keep a man awfu’ steady in the course of his life.”

“Yes,” said Colin; and then with a strange premonition, for which he
himself could not account, he added--“She would keep a man steady, as
you say; but he would find little response in her--not that I regard her
less respectfully, less reverentially than you do, Lauderdale,” he went
on, hurriedly, “but--”

“It wasna your opinion I was asking for,” said the philosopher somewhat
morosely. “She’s like none of the women you and me ken. I’m doubtful in
my own mind whether that dutiful and obedient spirit has ever been our
ideal in our country. Intellect’s a grand gift, callant, baith to man
and woman; but you’ll no fly in my face and assert that it’s more than
second best.”

“I am not up to argument to-day,” said Colin; and they walked back
again the whole length of the avenue in silence. Perhaps a certain
irritability, torn of their mutual grief, was at the bottom of this
momentary difference; but somehow, in the stillness, in the subdued
leafy shade, which at first sight had been so congenial to his feelings,
an indescribable shadow stole over Colin’s mind--a kind of indistinct
fear and reluctance, which took no definite shape, but only crept over
him like a mist over the face of the sun. His heart was profoundly
touched at once by the grief and by the self command of Alice, and by
her utter helplessness and dependence upon himself and his friend. Never
before had he been so attracted towards her, nor felt so much that
dangerous softening sentiment of pity and admiration, which leads to
love. And yet--; the two walked back silently under the dark ilex-trees,
and across the piazza, which was now thronged with a gay and
many-coloured crowd. The brighter the scene grew around them, the more
they shut themselves up in their own silence and sorrow, as was natural;
and Colin at length began to recognise a new element, which filled him
with vague uneasiness--an element not in the least new to the perplexed
cogitations of his guardian and anxious friend.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

When they entered the _salone_ on their return, the first object which
met their eyes was the stately figure of Sora Antonia in full holiday
costume, lately returned from mass. She had still her fan and her rosary
depending from her wrist--adjuncts almost equally necessary to devotion,
as that is understood at Frascati--and was still arrayed in the full
splendours of the veil, which, fastened over her hair, fell almost to
her feet behind, and gave grace and dignity to her tall and stately
person. Sora Antonia was a dependent of the family Savvelli; scarcely a
servant, though she had once belonged to the prince’s household. She had
charge of the palace at Frascati, which was never occupied except by a
solitary ecclesiastic, the prince’s brother, for whom the first-floor
was kept sacred. Even this sanctity, however, was sometimes invaded when
a good chance offered of letting the _piano nobile_ to some rich
foreigner, which was the fate of all the other apartments in the house.
Sora Antonia had charge of all the interests of the Savvelli in their
deserted mansion. When the tenants did any damage she made careful note
of it, and did not in any respect neglect the interests of her master;
nor was she inconsiderate of her own, but regarded it as a natural duty,
when it proved expedient, to make a little money out of the Forestieri.
“They give one trouble enough, the blessed Madonna knows,” the good
woman said piously. But, notwithstanding these prudent cares, Sora
Antonia was not only a very sensible woman according to her lights, but
had a heart, and understood her duty to her neighbours. She made her
salutations to the two friends when they entered with equal suavity, but
addressed her explanations to Colin, who was not only her favourite in
right of his youth and good looks, but made out her meaning more easily
than his companion. The crisis was an important one, and Sora Antonia
conducted herself accordingly; as soon as she had made her salutations
she resumed her seat, which in itself was an act requiring explanation,
especially as the table had been already arranged for dinner, and this
was the last day in the world on which the strangers were likely to
desire society. Sora Antonia took matters with a high hand, and in case
of opposition secured for herself at least the first word.

“Pardon, caro Signore mio,” she said, “you are surprised to find me
here. Very well; I am sorry to incommode the gentlemen, but I have to do
my duty. The Signorina is very young, and she has no one to take care of
her. The Signori are very good, very excellent, and kind. Ah yes, I know
it--never was there such devotion to the poor sick friend; nevertheless,
the Signori are but men, _senza complimenti_, and I am a woman who has
been married and had children of my own, and know my duty. Until some
proper person comes to take charge of the poor dear young lady, the
Signori will pardon me, but I must remain here.”

“Does the Signorina wish it?” asked Colin, with wondering looks, for the
idea of another protector for Alice confounded him, he scarcely knew
why.

“The Signorina is not much more than a child,” said Sora Antonia,
loftily. “Besides, she has not been brought up like an Italian young
lady, to know what is proper. Poverina! she does not understand anything
about it; but the Signori will excuse me--I know my duty, and that is
enough.”

“Oh yes, certainly,” said Colin; “but then, in England, as you say, we
have different ideas; and if the Signorina does not wish----”

Here, however, he was interrupted by Lauderdale, who, having tardily
apprehended the purport of Sora Antonia’s communication, took it upon
himself to make instant response in the best Italian he could muster.
“_Avete molto buono, molto buono!_” cried Lauderdale, intending to say
that she was very kind, and that he highly approved, though a chronic
confusion in his mind, as to which was which of the auxiliary verbs,
made his meaning cloudy. “_Grazie, Abbiamo contento! Grazie_,” he added,
with a little excitement and enthusiasm. Though he had used the wrong
verb, Sora Antonia graciously comprehended his meaning. She was used to
such little eccentricities of diction on the part of the Forestieri. She
bowed her stately head to him with a look of approbation; and it would
be vain to deny that the sense of having thus expressed himself clearly
and eloquently in a foreign language conveyed a certain satisfaction to
the mind of the philosopher.

“Bravo! The Signore will talk very well if he perseveres,” said Sora
Antonia, graciously; “not to say that his Excellency is a man of
experience, and perceives the justice of what I but propose. No doubt,
it will occupy a great deal of my time, but the other Forestieri have
not arrived yet, and how can one expect the Madonna Santissima and the
blessed St. Antonio to take so much trouble in one’s concerns if one
will not exert one’s self a little for one’s fellow-creatures? As the
Signorina has not left her room yet, I will take away the
inconvenience[2] for a few minutes. Scusa Signori,” said Sora Antonia,
and she went away with stately bearing and firm steps which resounded
through the house, to take off her veil and put aside her rosary. She
had seated herself again in her indoor aspect, with the “Garden of the
Soul” in her hand, before Alice came into the room; and, without doubt,
she made a striking addition to the party. She was a Frascati woman
born, and her costume consequently, was perfect--a costume not so
brilliant in any of its details as that scarlet jacket of Albano, which
is the most generally known of contadina dresses; but not less
calculated to do justice to the ample bust and stately head of the Roman
peasant. The dress itself, the actual gown, in this as in other Italian
costumes, was an indifferent matter. The important particulars were the
long and delicate apron of embroidered muslin, the _busto_ made of rich
brocade and shaped to the exact Frascati model, and the large, soft,
snowy kerchief with embroidered corners, which covered her full
shoulders--not to speak of the long heavy gold ear-rings and coral
necklace which completed and enriched the dress. She sat apart and
contemplated, if not the “Garden of the Soul,” at least the little
pictures in borders of lace-paper which were placed thickly between the
leaves, while the melancholy meal was eaten at the table--for Sora
Antonia had _educazione_, and had not come to intrude upon the privacy
of her lodgers. Alice, for her part, made no remark upon the presence of
this new guardian; she accepted it as she accepted everything else, as a
matter of course, without even showing any painful sense of the
circumstances which in Sora Antonia’s opinion made this last precaution
necessary. Her two companions, the only friends she seemed to have in
the world, bore vicariously on her account the pain of such a visible
reminder that she was here in a false position and had no legitimate
protector; but Alice had not yet awaked to any such sense on her own
behalf. She took her place at the table and tried to swallow a morsel,
and interested herself in the appetite of the others as if she had been
their mother. “Try to eat something; it will make you ill if you do
not,” poor Alice said, in the abstraction and dead calm of her grief.
Her own feeling was that she had been lifted far away from them into an
atmosphere of age and distance and a kind of sad superiority; and to
minister to some one was the grand condition under which Alice Meredith
lived. As to the personal suffering, which was confined to herself, that
did not so much matter; she had not been used to much sympathy, and it
did not occur to her to look for it. Consequently, the only natural
business which remained to her was to take a motherly charge of her two
companions, and urge them to eat.

“You are not to mind me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile, after
dinner. “This is Sunday, to be sure; but, after to-day, you are just to
go on as you used to do, and never mind. Thank you, I should like it
better. I shall always be here, you know, when you come back from Rome,
or wherever you wish to go. But you must not mind for me.”

Lauderdale and Colin exchanged looks almost without being aware of it.
“But you would like--somebody to be sent for--or something done?” said
Lauderdale. He was a great deal more confused in having to suggest this
than Alice was, who kept looking at him, her eyes dilated with weariness
and tears, yet soft and clear as the eyes of a child. He could not say
to her, in so many words, “It is impossible for you to remain with us.”
All he could do was to falter and hesitate, and grow confused, under
the limpid, sorrowful look which she bent upon him from the distant
heaven of her resignation and innocence. “You would like your
friends--somebody to be written to,” said Lauderdale; and then, afraid
to have given her pain by the suggestion, went on hurriedly: “I’m old
enough to be your father, and no a thought in my mind but to do you
service,” he said. “Tell me what you would like best. Colin, thank God!
is strong, and has little need of me. I’ll take you home, or do whatever
you please; for I’m old enough to be your father, my poor bairn!” said
the tender-hearted philosopher, and drew near to her, and put out his
hand with an impulse of pitiful and protecting kindness which touched
the heart of Alice, and yet filled her with momentary surprise. She, on
her own side, was roused a little, not to think of herself, but to
remember what appeared to her a duty unfulfilled.

“Oh, Mr. Lauderdale, Arthur said I might tell you,” said Alice. “Papa!
you heard what he said about papa? I ought to write and tell him what
has happened. Perhaps I ought to tell you from the beginning,” she
continued, after composing herself a little. “We left home without his
consent--indeed, he did not know. For dear Arthur,” said the poor girl,
turning her appealing eyes from one to the other, could not approve of
his ways. “He did something that Arthur thought was wrong. I cannot tell
you about it,” said Alice through her tears; “it did not make so much
difference to me. I think I ought to write and tell him, and that Arthur
forgave him at the last. Oh, tell me, please, what do you think I should
do?”

“If you would like to go home, I’ll take you home,” said Lauderdale. “He
did not mean ony harm, poor callant, but he’s left an awfu’ burden on
you.”

“Go home!” said Alice, with a slight shudder. “Do you think I ought--do
you think I must? I do not care for myself; but Mrs. Meredith, you
know--” she added with a momentary blush; and then the friends began to
perceive another unforeseen lion in the way.

“Out of my own head,” said Lauderdale, who took the whole charge of this
business on himself, and would not permit Colin to interfere, “I wrote
your father a kind of a letter. If you are able to hear the--the
event--which has left us a’ mourning--named in common words, I’ll read
you what I have written. Poor bairn, you’re awfu’ young and awfu’ tender
to have such affairs in hand! Are you sure you are able to bear it, and
can listen to what I have said?”

“Ah, I have borne it,” said poor Alice. “I cannot deceive myself, nor
think Arthur is still here. What does it matter then about saying it?
Oh, yes, I can bear anything--there is only me to be hurt now, and it
doesn’t matter. It was very kind of you to write. I should like to know
what you have said.”

Colin, who could do nothing else for her, put forward the arm-chair with
the cushions towards the table, and Sora Antonia put down the “Garden of
the Soul” and drew a little nearer with her heavy, firm step, which
shook the house. She comprehended that something was going on which
would tax the Signorina’s strength, and brought her solid, steady
succour to be in readiness. The pale little girl turned and smiled upon
them both, as she took the chair Colin had brought her. She was herself
quite steady in her weakness and grief and loneliness. Sora Antonia was
not wanted there; and Colin drew her aside to the window, where she told
him all about the fireworks that were to be in the evening, and her
hopes that after a while the Signorina would be able to “distract
herself” a little and recover her spirits; to which Colin assented
dutifully, watching from where he stood the pale looks of the friendless
young woman--friendless beyond disguise or possible self-deception, with
a stepmother whom she blushed to mention reigning in her father’s house.
Colin’s thoughts were many and tumultuous as he stood behind in the
window, watching Alice and listening to Sora Antonia’s description of
the fireworks. Was it possible that perhaps his duty to his neighbour
required from him the most costly of all offerings, the rashest of all
possible actions? He stood behind, growing more and more excited in the
utter quiet. The thought that had dawned upon him under the ilex-trees
came nearer and grew more familiar, and as he looked at it he seemed to
recognise all that visible machinery of Providence bringing about the
great event which youth decides upon so easily. While this vision grew
before his mind, Alice was wiping off the tears which obliterated
Lauderdale’s letter even to her patient eyes; for, docile and dutiful as
she was, it was yet terrible to read in calm distinct words, which put
the matter beyond all doubt, the announcement of “what had happened.”
This is what Lauderdale had said:--

     “SIR,--It is a great grief to me to inform you of an event for
     which I have no way of knowing whether you are prepared or not.
     Your son, Arthur Meredith, has been living here for the last three
     months in declining health, and on Thursday last died in great
     comfort and constancy of mind. It is not for me, a stranger, to
     offer vain words of consolation, but his end was such as any man
     might be well content to have, and he entered upon his new life
     joyfully, without any shadow on his mind. As far as love and
     friendship could soothe the sufferings that were inevitable, he had
     both; for his sister never left his bedside, and myself and my
     friend Colin Campbell were with him constantly, to his
     satisfaction. His sister remains under our care. I who write am no
     longer a young man, and know what is due to a young creature of her
     tender years; so that you may satisfy yourself she is safe until
     such time as you can communicate with me, which I will look for as
     soon as a reply is practicable, and in the meantime remain,

                               “Your son’s faithful friend and mourner,

                                                       “W. LAUDERDALE.”

Alice lingered over this letter, reading it, and crying, and whispering
to Lauderdale a long time, as Colin thought. She found it easier,
somehow, to tell her story fully to the elder man. She told him that
Mrs. Meredith had “come home suddenly,” which was her gentle version of
a sad domestic history,--that nobody had known of her father’s second
marriage until the stepmother arrived, without any warning, with a train
of children. Alice’s mild words did not give Lauderdale any very lively
picture of the dismay of the household at the unlooked-for apparition,
but he understood enough to condemn Arthur less severely than he had
been disposed to do. This sudden catastrophe had happened just after the
other misery of the bank failure, which had ruined so many; and poor
Meredith had no alternative between leaving his sister to the tender
mercies of an underbred and possibly disreputable stepmother, or
bringing her with him when he retired to die; and Alice, though she
still cried for “poor papa,” recoiled a little from the conclusion of
Lauderdale’s letter. “I have enough to live upon,” she said, softly,
with an appealing glance at her companion. “If you were to say that I
was quite safe, would not that be enough?” and it was very hard for
Lauderdale to convince her that her father’s judgment must be appealed
to in such a matter. When she saw he was not to be moved on this point,
she sighed and submitted; but it was clearly apparent that as yet,
occupied as she was by her grief, the idea that her situation here was
embarrassing to her companions or unsuitable for herself had not
occurred to Alice. When she retired, under the escort of Sora Antonia,
the two friends had a consultation over this perplexing matter; and
Lauderdale’s sketch--filled in, perhaps, a little from his
imagination--of the home she had left, plunged Colin into deeper and
deeper thought. “No doubt he’ll send some answer,” the philosopher said.
“He may not be worthy to have the charge of her, but he’s aye her
father. It’s hard to ken whether it’s better or worse that she should be
so unconscious of anything embarrassing in her position; which is a’ the
more wonderful, as she’s a real honest woman, and no way intellectual
nor exalted. You and me, Colin,” said Lauderdale, looking up in his
young companion’s face, “must take good care that she does not find it
out from us.”

“Of course,” said Colin, with involuntary testiness; “but I do not see
what her father has to do with it,” continued the young man. “She cannot
possibly return to such a home.”

“Her father is the best judge of that,” said Lauderdale; “she canna
remain with you and me.”

And there the conversation dropped--but not the subject. Colin was not
in love with Alice; he had, indeed, vague but bright in the clouds
before him, an altogether different ideal woman; and his heart was in
the career which he again saw opening before him--the life in which he
meant to serve God and his country, and which at the present moment
would admit of no rashly formed ties. Was it in consequence of these
hindrances that this new thing loomed so large before Colin’s
inexperienced eyes? If he had longed for it with youthful passion, he
would have put force on himself and restrained his longing; but the
temptation took another shape. It was as if a maiden knight at the
outset of his career had been tempted to pass by a helpless creature and
leave her wrongs unredressed. The young Bayard could do anything but
this.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

In the meantime at least a fortnight must pass before they could expect
an answer to Lauderdale’s letter. During that time they returned to all
their old habits, with the strange and melancholy difference, that
Arthur, once the centre of all, was no longer there. Every day of this
time increased the development of Colin’s new thoughts, until the
unknown father of Alice had grown, in his eyes, into a cruel and
profligate tyrant, ready to drag his daughter home and plunge her into
depraved society without any regard for either her happiness or her
honour. Colin had, indeed, in his own mind, in strictest privacy and
seclusion of thought, indited an imaginary letter, eloquent with
youthful indignation, to inform this unworthy parent that his deserted
daughter had found a better protector; but he was very silent about
these cogitations of his, and did not share them even with Lauderdale.
And there were moments when Colin felt the seriousness of the position,
and thought it very hard that such a necessity should meet him in the
face at the beginning of his career. Sometimes in the sudden darkening,
out of the rosy clouds which hung over the Campagna, the face of the
impossible woman, the ideal creature--she who could have divined the
thoughts in his mind and the movements in his heart before they came
into being, would glance suddenly out upon him for an instant, and then
disappear, waving a shadowy farewell, and leaving in his mind a strange
blank, which the sight of Alice rather increased than removed. That
ineffable mate and companion was never to be his, the young man thought.
True, he had never met her, nor come upon any trace of her footsteps,
for Matty Frankland at her best never could have been she. But yet, as
long as he was unbound by other tie or affection, this vision was the
“not impossible She” to Colin as to all men; and this he had to give
up--for Alice, dutiful and sweet Alice, forsaken by all friends and yet
so steadfast in her gentle self-possession, whom it was not in the heart
of man to be otherwise than tender of; she who had need of him, and whom
his very nature bound him to protect and cherish--was not that woman. At
other moments he thought of his own life, for which still so much
training was necessary, and which he should have entered in the full
freedom of his youth; and was profoundly aware of the incumbered and
helpless trim in which he must go into the battle, obliged to take
thought not of his work only, and the best means of doing it, but of
those cares of living which lie so lightly on a young man alone.

There may be some of Colin’s friends who will think the less of him for
this struggle in his mind; and there may be many who will think with
justice that, unless he could have offered love to Alice, he had no
right to offer her himself and his life--an opinion in which his
historian fully agrees. But then this gift though less than the best,
was a long way superior to anything else which, at the present moment,
was likely to be offered to the friendless girl. If he could have laid
at her feet the full heart, which is the only true offering under such
circumstances, the chances are that Alice, in her simplicity and
gentleness, would have been sadly puzzled what to do with that
passionate and ungovernable thing. What he really could offer
her--affection, tenderness, protection--was clearly comprehensible to
her. She had no other idea of love than was included in those attributes
and phases of it. These considerations justified Colin in the step which
he contemplated--or rather in the step which he did not contemplate, but
felt to be necessary and incumbent upon him. It sometimes occurred to
him how--if he had been prudent and taken Lauderdale’s advice, and
eschewed at the beginning that close connexion with Meredith and his
sister, which he had entered into with his eyes open, and with a
consciousness even that it might affect his life--this embarrassing
situation might never have come into being; and then he smiled to
himself, with youthful superiority, contemplating what seemed so plainly
the meaning of Providence, and asking himself how he, by a momentary
exercise of his own will, could have overthrown that distinct celestial
intention? On the whole, it was comforting to think that everything had
been arranged beforehand by agencies so very clear and traceable; and
with this conclusion of the argument he left off, as near contented as
possible, and not indisposed to enjoy the advantages which were palpably
before him; for, though they were not the eyes he had dreamed of, there
was a sweetness very well worthy of close study in Alice Meredith’s
eyes.

The days passed very quietly in this time of suspense. The society of
the two strangers, who were more to her in her sorrow than all her
kindred, supported the lonely girl more than she was aware of--more than
any one could have believed. They were absent during the greater part of
the day, and left her unmolested to the tears that would come,
notwithstanding all her patience; and they returned to her in the
evening with attention and cares to which she had never been accustomed,
devoting two original and powerful minds, of an order at once higher and
more homely than any which she had ever encountered, to her amusement
and consolation. Alice had never known before what it was to have
ordinary life and daily occurrences brightened by the thick-coming
fancies, the tender play of word and thought, which now surrounded her.
She had heard clever talk afar off, “in society,” and been awe-stricken
by the sound of it; and she had heard Arthur and his friends uttering
much fine-sounding language upon subjects not generally in her way; but
she was utterly unused to that action of uncommon minds upon common
things which gives so much charm to the ordinary intercourse of life.
All they could think of to lighten the atmosphere of the house in which
she sat in her deep mourning, absorbed for hours together in those
thoughts of the dead to which her needlework afforded little relief,
they did with devotion, suspending their own talk and occupations to
occupy themselves with her. Colin read _In Memoriam_ to her till her
heart melted and relieved itself in sweet abundant tears; and Lauderdale
talked and told her many a homely history of that common course of
humanity, full of sorrows sorer than her own, which fills young minds
with awe. Between them they roused Alice to a higher platform, a
different atmosphere, than she had known before; and she raised herself
up after them with a half-bewildered sense of elevation, not
understanding how it was; and so the long days which were so hard, and
which nothing in the world could save from being hard, brightened
towards the end, not certainly into anything that could be called
pleasure, but into a sad expansion and elevation of heart, in which
faintly appeared those beginnings of profound and deep happiness which
are not incompatible with grief, and yet are stronger and more inspiring
than joy.

While this was going on, unconsciously to any one concerned, Sora
Antonia, in her white kerchief and apron, sometimes knitting, sometimes
with her distaff like a buxom Fate, sat and twisted her thread and
turned her spindle a little behind yet not out of reach, keeping a wary
eye upon her charge. She too interposed, sometimes with her own comments
upon life and things in general, and took part in the conversation; and,
whether it was that Sora Antonia’s mind was really of a superior order,
or that the stately Roman speech threw a refining colour upon her
narratives, it is certain that the interpellations of the Italian
peasant fell without any sensible derogation into the strain of lofty
yet familiar talk which was meant to wean Alice from her special grief.
Sora Antonia told them of the other Forestieri who had lived like
themselves in the Savelli palace; who had come for health and yet had
died, leaving the saddest mourners--helpless widows and little children,
heart-broken fathers and mothers, perhaps the least consolable of all.
Life was such, she said solemnly, bowing her stately head. She herself,
of a hardy race, and strong, as the Signori saw, had not she buried her
children, for whom she would have gladly died? But the good God had not
permitted her to die. Alice cried silently as she heard all this; she
kissed Sora Antonia, who, for her part, had outlived her tears, and with
a natural impulse turned to Colin, who was young, and in whose heart, as
in her own, there must live a natural protest against this awful
necessity of separation and misery; and thus it came to be Colin’s turn
to interpose, and he came on the field once more with _In memoriam_, and
with other poems which were sweet to hear, and soothed her even when she
only partially entered into their meaning. A woman has an advantage
under such circumstances. By means of her sympathy and gratitude, and
the still deeper feeling which grew unconsciously in her heart towards
him who read, she came to believe that she too understood and
appreciated what was to him so clear and so touching. A kind of
spiritual magnetism worked upon Alice, and, to all visible appearance,
expanded and enlarged her mind. It was not that her intellect itself
grew, or that she understood all the beautiful imaginations, all the
tender philosophies thus unfolded to her; but she was united in a
singular union of affectionate companionship with those who did
understand, and even to herself she appeared able to see, if not with
her own eyes, at least with theirs, the new beauties and solemnities of
which she had not dreamt before.

This strange process went on day by day without any one being aware of
it; and even Lauderdale had almost forgotten that their guardianship of
Alice was only for the moment, and that the state of affairs altogether
was provisionary and could not possibly continue, when an answer reached
him to his letter. He was alone when he received it, and all that
evening said nothing on the subject until Alice had retired with her
watchful attendant; then, without a word of comment, he put it into
Colin’s hand. It was written in a stilted hand, like that of one
unaccustomed to writing, and was not quite irreproachable even in its
spelling. This was what Lauderdale’s correspondent said:--

     “SIR,--Your letter has had such a bad effect upon the health of my
     dear husband, that I beg you won’t trouble him with any more such
     communications. If it’s meant to get money, that’s vain--for
     neither him nor me knows anything about the friends Arthur may have
     picked up. If he had stayed at home he would have received every
     attention. As for his ungrateful sister, I won’t have anything to
     say to her. Mr. Meredith is very ill, and, for anything I know, may
     never rise from a bed of sickness, where he has been thrown by
     hearing this news so sudden; but I take upon me to let her know as
     he will have nothing to say to one that could behave so badly as
     she has done. I am always for making friends, but she knows she
     cannot expect much kindness from me after all that has happened.
     She has money enough to live on, and she can do as she pleases.
     Considering what her ingratitude has brought her dear father to,
     and that I may be left alone to manage everything before many days
     are past, you will please to consider that here is an end of it,
     and not write any more begging letters to me.

                                                      “JULIA MEREDITH.”

This communication Colin read with a beating heart. It was so different
from what he expected, and left him so free to carry out the dawning
resolution which he had imagined himself executing in the face of
tyrannical resistance, that he felt at first like a man who has been
straining hard at a rope and is suddenly thrown down by the
instantaneous stoppage of the pressure on the other side. When he had
picked himself up, the facts of the case rushed on him distinct and
unmistakeable. The time had now come when the lost and friendless maiden
stood in the path of the true knight. Was he to leave her there to fight
her way in the hard world by herself, without defence or protection,
because, sweet and fair and pure as she was, she was not the lady of his
dreams? He made up his mind at once with a thrill of generous warmth;
but at the same time felt himself saying for ever and ever farewell to
that ideal lady who henceforward, in earth or heaven, could never be
his. All this passed through his mind while he was looking at the letter
which already his rapid eye had read and his mind comprehended. “So
there is an end of your hopes,” said Colin. “Now we are the only friends
she has in the world--as I have always thought.”

“Softly,” said Lauderdale. “Callants like you aye run away with the half
of an idea. This is an ignorant woman’s letter, that is glad to get rid
of her. The father will mend, and then he’ll take her out of our hands.”

“He shall do nothing of the kind,” said Colin, hotly. “You speak as if
she was a piece of furniture; I look upon her as a sacred charge. We are
responsible to Meredith for his sister’s comfort and--happiness,” said
the young man, who during this conversation preferred not to meet his
companion’s eye.

“Ay!” said Lauderdale drily, “that’s an awfu’ charge for the like of you
and me. It’s more that I ever calculated on, Colin. To see her safe
home, and in the hands of her friends----”

“Lauderdale, do not be so heartless; cannot you see that she has no
friends?” cried Colin; “not a protector in the world except----”

“Callant, dinna deceive yourself,” said Lauderdale; “it’s no a matter
for hasty judgment; we have nae right to pass sentence on a man’s
character. He’s her father, and it’s her duty to obey him. I’m no
heeding about that silly woman’s letter. Mr. Meredith will mend. I’m
here to take care of you,” said Colin’s guardian. “Colin, hold your
peace. You’re no to do for a moment’s excitement, for pity and ruth and
your own tender heart, what you may regret all your life. Sit down and
keep still. You are only a callant, too young to take burdens on
yourself; there is but one way that the like of you can protect the like
of her--and that is no to be thought of, as you consented with your own
mouth.”

“I am aware of that,” said Colin, who had risen up in his excitement.
“There is but one way. Matters have changed since we spoke of it first.”

“I would like to know how far they have changed,” said Lauderdale.
“Colin, take heed to what I say; if it’s love I’ll no speak a word; I
may disapprove a’ the circumstances, and find fault with every step ye
take; but if it’s love----”

“Hush!” said Colin, standing upright, and meeting his friend’s eye; “if
it should happen to be my future wife we are speaking of, my feelings
towards her are not to be discussed with any man in the world.”

They looked at each other thus for a moment, the one anxious and
scrutinizing, the other facing him with blank brightness, and a smile
which afforded no information. Perhaps Lauderdale understood all that
was implied in that blank; at all events, his own delicate sense of
honour could not refuse to admit Colin’s plea. He turned away, shaking
his head, and groaning privately under his breath; while Colin, struck
with compunction, having shut himself up for an instant, unfolded again,
that crisis being over, with all the happy grace of apology natural to
his disposition. “You are not ‘any man in the world,’” he said with a
short laugh, which implied emotion. “Forgive me, Lauderdale; and now you
know very well what I am going to do.”

“Oh ay, I ken what you are going to do; I kent three months ago, for
that matter,” said the philosopher. “A man acts no from circumstances,
as is generally supposed, but from his ain nature.” When he had given
forth this oracular utterance, Lauderdale went straight off to his room
without exchanging another word with Colin. He was satisfied to a
certain extent with such a mate for his friend, and belonged to too
lowly a level of society to give profound importance to the inexpediency
of early marriages--and he was fond of Alice, and admired her sweet
looks and sweet ways, and respected her self-command and patience;
nevertheless, he too sighed, and recognised the departure of the ideal
woman, who to him as little as to Colin resembled Alice;--and thus it
was understood between them how it was to be.

All this, it may be imagined, was little compatible with that
reverential regard for womankind in general which both the friends
entertained, and evidenced a security in respect to Alice’s inclinations
which was not altogether complimentary to her. And yet it was highly
complimentary in a sense; for their security arose from their
appreciation of the spotless unawakened heart with which they had to do.
If Colin entertained little doubt of being accepted when he made his
proposal, it was not because he had an overweening idea of himself, or
imagined Alice “in love” with him according to the vulgar expression. A
certain chivalrous, primitive sense of righteous and natural necessity
was in his confidence. The forlorn maiden, knowing the knight to be
honest and true, would accept his protection loyally and simply, without
bewildering herself with dreams of choice where no choice was; and
having accepted would love and cleave as was her nature. To be sure
there were types of woman less acquiescent; and we have already said
that Alice did not bear the features of that ideal of which Colin had
dreamed; but such was the explanation of his confidence. Alice showed
little distress when she saw her stepmother’s letter except on account
of her father’s illness; though even that seemed rather consolatory to
her than otherwise, as a proof of his love for Arthur. As for Mrs.
Meredith’s refusal to interfere on her behalf, she was clearly relieved
by the intimation; and things went on as before for another week or two,
until Sora Antonia, who had now other tenants arriving and many
occupations in hand, began to murmur a little over the watch which she
would not relinquish. “Is it thus young ladies are left in England?” she
asked, with a little indignation, “without any one to take care of them
except the Signori, who, though amiable and excellent, are only men? or
when may the lady be expected from England who is to take charge of the
Signorina?” It was after this question, had been put to him with some
force one evening, that Colin proposed to Alice, who was beginning to
lift her head again like a flower after a storm, and to show symptoms of
awaking from the first heaviness of grief, to go out with him and visit
those ilex avenues, which had now so many associations for the
strangers. She went with a faint sense of pleasure in her heart through
the slanting sunshine, looking wistfully through her black veil at the
many cheerful groups on the way, and clinging to Colin’s arm when a kind
neighbour spoke to her in pity and condolence. She put up her veil when
they came to the favourite avenue, where Lauderdale and Colin walked so
often. Nothing could be more silent, more cool and secluded than this
verdant cloister, where, with the sunshine still blazing everywhere
around, the shade and quiet were profound and unbroken. They walked once
or twice up and down, remarking now and then upon the curious network of
branches, which, out of reach of the sun, were all bare and stripped of
their foliage--and upon the blue blaze of daylight at either opening,
where the low arch of dark verdure framed in a span of brilliant Italian
sky. Then they both became silent, and grew conscious of it; and it was
at that moment, just as Alice for the first time began to remember the
privileges and penalties of her womanhood, that Colin spoke,--

“I brought you here to speak to you,” he said. “I have a great deal to
say. That letter that Lauderdale showed you did not grieve you, did it?
You must tell me frankly. Arthur made me one of your guardians, and,
whatever you may decide upon, that is a sacred bond.”

“Yes, oh yes,” said Alice, with tears, “I know how kind you both are.
No, it did not grieve me, except about papa. I was rather glad, if I may
say so, that she did not send for me home. It is not--a--home--like what
it used to be,” said Alice; and then, perhaps because something in
Colin’s looks had advertised her of what was coming; perhaps because of
the awakening sense of her position sprang up in a moment, after long
torpor--a sudden change came upon her face. “I have given you a great
deal of trouble,” she said; “I am like somebody who has had a terrible
fall--as soon as I come to myself I will go away. It is very wrong of me
to detain you here.”

“You are not detaining us,” said Colin, who, notwithstanding, was a
little startled and alarmed; “and you must not talk of going away.
Where would you go? Are not we your friends--the friends you know best
in Italy? You must not _think_ of going away.”

But even these very words thus repeated acted like an awakening spell
upon Alice. “I cannot tell what I have been thinking of,” she said. “I
suppose it is staying indoors and forgetting everything. I do not seem
to know even how long it is. Oh yes, you are my kindest friends. Nobody
ever was so good to me; but, then, you are only--gentlemen!” said Alice,
suddenly withdrawing her hand from Colin’s arm, and blushing over all
her pallid face. “Ah! I see now how stupid I have been to put off so
long. And I am sure I must have detained you here.”

“No,” said Colin, “do not say so; but I have something more to say to
you. You are too young and too delicate to face the world alone, and
your people at home are not going to claim you. I am a poor man now, and
I never can be rich, but I would protect you and support you if you
would have me. Will you trust me to take care of you, Alice, not for
this moment, but always? I think it would be the best thing for us
both.”

“Mr. Campbell, I don’t understand you,” said Alice, trembling and
casting a glance up at him of wistful surprise and uncertainty. There
was an eager, timid inquiry in her eyes beside the bewilderment. She
seemed to say, “What is it you mean? Is _that_ what you mean?” and Colin
answered by taking her hand again and drawing it through his arm.

“Whether you will have me or not,” he said, “there is always the bond
between us which Arthur has made sacred, and you must lean on me all the
same. I think you will see what I mean if you consider it. There is only
one way that I can be your true protector and guardian, and that is if
you will consent to marry me, Alice. Will you? You know I have nothing
to offer you; but I can work for you, and take care of you, and with me
you would not be alone.”

It was a strange way of putting it, certainly--very different from what
Colin had intended to say, strangely different from the love-tale that
had glided through his imagination by times since he became a man; but
he was very earnest and sincere in what he said, and the innocent girl
beside him was no critic in such matters. She trembled more and more,
but she leaned upon him and heard him out with anxious attention. When
he had ended, there was a pause, during which Colin, who had not
hitherto been doubtful, began himself to feel anxious; and then Alice
once more gave a wistful, inquiring look at his face.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she said; “it is so hard to know what to
answer. If you would tell me one thing quite truly and frankly--Would it
not do you a great deal of harm if this was to happen as you say?----”

“No,” said Colin. When he said the word he could not help remembering,
in spite of himself, the change it would make in his young prospects,
but the result was only that he repeated his negative with more warmth.
“It can do me only good,” said Colin, yielding to the natural
temptations of the moment, “and I think I might do something for your
happiness too. It is for you to decide--do not decide against me,
Alice,” said the young man; “I cannot part with you now.”

“Ah!--” said Alice with a long breath. “If it only would not do you any
harm,” she added a moment after, once more with that inquiring look. The
inquiry was one which could be answered but in one way, and Colin was
not a man to remain unmoved by the wistful, sweet eyes thus raised to
him, and by the tender dependence of the clinging arm. He set her doubts
at rest almost as eloquently, and quite as warmly, as if she had indeed
been that woman who had disappeared among the clouds for ever; and led
her home to Sora Antonia with a fond care, which was very sweet to the
forlorn little maiden, and not irksome by any means to the magnanimous
knight. Thus the decisive step was taken in obedience to the necessities
of the position, and the arrangements (as Colin had decided upon them)
of Providence. When he met Lauderdale and informed him of the new event,
the young man looked flushed and happy, as was natural in the
circumstances, and disposed of all the objections of prudence with great
facility and satisfaction to himself. It was a moonlight night, and
Colin and his friend went out to the _loggia_ on the roof of the house,
and plunged into a sea of discussion, through which the young lover
steered triumphantly the frailest bark of argument that ever held water.
But, when the talk was over, and Colin, before he followed Lauderdale
downstairs, turned round to take a parting look at the Campagna, which
lay under them like a great map in the moonlight, the old apparition
looked out once more from the clouds, pale and distant, and again seemed
to wave to him a shadowy farewell. “Farewell! farewell! not in heaven
nor in earth shall you ever find me,” sighed the woman of Colin’s
imagination, dispersing into thin white mists and specks of clouds; and
the young man went to rest with a vague sense of loss in his heart. The
sleep of Alice was sweeter than that of Colin on this first night of
their betrothal; but at that one period of existence, it often happens
that the woman, for once in her life, has the advantage. And thus it was
that the event, foreseen by Lauderdale on board the steamer at the
beginning of their acquaintance, actually came to pass.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

This important decision, when at last finally settled, necessitated
other steps more embarrassing and difficult than anything that could be
discussed in the ilex avenue. Even Sora Antonia’s protection ceased to
be altogether satisfactory to the suddenly-awakened mind of Alice, who
at the same time was so unaccustomed to think or act for herself that
she knew not what to do in the emergency. If Colin had been the kind of
man who would have decided for her at once, and indicated what he
thought she ought to do, Alice was the kind of woman to act steadily and
bravely upon the indication. But, unfortunately, Colin did not
understand how to dictate to a woman, having known most intimately of
all womankind his mother, who was treated after an altogether different
fashion; and Lauderdale, though sufficiently aware of the embarrassing
nature of their position, belonged, notwithstanding his natural
refinement, to a class which sets no great store by punctilio. Now that
everything was settled between the “young folk,” Alice’s unprotected
state did not distress him so much as formerly. The marriage, which must
take place immediately, was already in his eyes a sufficient shelter for
the solitary girl; and the indecorum of the whole business no longer
occurred to him. As for Colin, he, as was natural, regarded with a
certain excitement the strange step he was about to take, not knowing
what anybody would think of it, nor how he was to live with his bride,
nor what influence an act so unsuitable to his circumstances would have
upon his prospects and position. It was of a piece with the rashness and
visionary character of the whole transaction, that Alice’s money, which
she had herself recurred to as “enough to live upon,” never entered into
the calculations of the young man who was going to marry on his
scholarship, without being at all convinced in his own mind that his
scholarship could be held by a married man. A married man!--the title
had an absurd sound as applied to himself, even in his own ears. He was
just over one-and-twenty, and had not a penny in the world. But these
considerations, after all, had not half so much effect upon him as the
thought of his mother’s grave countenance when she should read his next
letter, and the displeasure of his father, who perhaps already regarded
with a not altogether satisfied eye the spectacle of a son of his gone
abroad for his health. If Colin could but have made sure of the nature
of the reception he was likely to meet with at Ramore, prudential
considerations of any other character would have had but a momentary
weight; but at present, amid his other perplexities, the young man felt
a certain boyish confusion at the thought of asking his mother to
receive and recognise his wife. However, the important letter had been
written, and was on its way, and he could only hope that his previous
letters had prepared the household for that startling intimation. Apart
from Ramore, the matter had a less serious aspect; for Colin, who had
been poor all his life, no more believed in poverty than if he had been
a prince, and had a certain instinctive certainty of getting what he
needed, which belonged to his youth. Besides, he was not a poor
gentleman, hampered, and helpless, but knew, at the worst, that he could
always work for his wife.

At the same time, in the midst of all the seriousness of the
position--with all his tender affection for Alice, and reverence for her
helplessness, and even notwithstanding that inexpressible blank and
sense of disappointment in his heart which even his affection could not
quite neutralize,--a curious sense of humour, and feeling that the whole
matter was a kind of practical joke on a grand scale, intruded into
Colin’s ideas from time to time, and made him laugh, and then made him
furious with himself; for Alice, to be sure, saw no joke in the matter.
She was, indeed, altogether wanting in a sense of humour, if even her
grief would have permitted her to exercise it, and was sufficiently
occupied by the real difficulties of her position, secluding herself in
Sora Antonia’s apartments, and wavering in an agony of timidity and
uncertainty over the idea of leaving that kind protector and going
somewhere else, even though among strangers, in order to obey the
necessary proprieties. She had not a soul to consult about what she
should do except Sora Antonia herself and Lauderdale, neither of whom
now thought it necessary to suggest a removal on the part of either of
the young people; and though thoughts of going into Rome, and finding
somebody who would give her shelter for a week or two till Colin’s
arrangements were complete, hovered in the mind of Alice, she had no
courage to carry out such an idea, being still in her first grief, poor
child, although this new excitement had entered into her life.

As for Colin, affairs went much less easily with him when he betook
himself to the English clergyman to ask his services. The inquiries
instituted by this new judge were of a kind altogether unforeseen by the
thoughtless young man. To be sure, a mourning sister is not usually
married a few weeks after her brother’s death, and the questioner was
justified in thinking the circumstance strange. Nor was it at all
difficult to elicit from Colin a story which, viewed by suspicious and
ignorant eyes, threw quite a different colour on the business. The young
lady was the daughter of Mr. Meredith of Maltby, as the clergyman, who
had laid Arthur in his grave, was already aware. She was young, under
age, and her father had not been consulted about her proposed marriage;
and she was at present entirely in the hands and under the influence of
this young Scotchman, who, though his manners were considered
irreproachable by Miss Matty Frankland, who was a critic in manners,
still lacked certain particulars in his general demeanour by which the
higher class of Englishmen are distinguished. He took more interest in
things in general, and was more transparent, more expressive than he
would probably have been had he been entirely Alice’s equal; and he was
slightly wanting in calmness and that soft haze of impertinence which
sets off good breeding--in short, he had not the full ring of the
genuine metal; and a man who lived in Rome, and was used to stories of
adventurers and interested marriages, not unnaturally jumped at the
conclusion that Colin (being a Scotchman beside, and consequently the
impersonation, save the mark! of money-getting) was bent upon securing
to himself the poor little girl’s fortune. Before the cross-examination
was done Colin began somehow to feel himself a suspicious character; for
it is astonishing what an effect there is in that bland look of superior
penetration and air of seeing through a subject, however well aware the
person under examination may be that his judge knows nothing about it.
Then the investigator turned the discussion upon pecuniary matters,
which after all was the branch of examination for which Colin was least
prepared.

“Miss Meredith has some fortune, I presume?” he said. “Is it at her own
disposal? for on this, as well as on other matters, it appears to me
absolutely necessary that her father should be consulted.”

“I have already told you that her father has been consulted,” said
Colin, with a little vexation, “and you have seen the answer to my
friend’s letter. I have not the least idea what her fortune is, or if
she has any. Yes, I recollect she said she had enough to live upon; but
it did not occur to me to make any inquiries on the subject,” said the
young man; which more than ever confirmed his questioner that this was
not a member of the higher class with whom he had to deal.

“And you?” he said. “Your friends are aware, I presume--and your means
are sufficient to maintain--”

“I?” said Colin, who with difficulty restrained a smile, “I have not