behind him countless centuries ago, when that mythical chief conducted his faithful Cymrians over the Hazy Sea to this happy Island of Honey.* Two days after his rencontre with Arabella in the Green Park, the soi-disant Hammond having, in the interim, learned that Darrell was immensely rich, and Matilda his only surviving child, did not fail to find himself in the Green Park again, and again, and again! Arabella, of course, felt how wrong it was to allow him to accost her, and walk by one side of her while Miss Darrell was on the other. But she felt, also, as if it would be much more wrong to slip out and meet him alone. Not for worlds would she again have placed herself in such peril. To refuse to meet him at all-she had not strength enough for that! Her joy at seeing him was so immense. And nothing could be more respectful than Jasper's manner and conversation. Whatever of warmer and more impassioned sentiment was exchanged between them, passed in notes. Jasper had suggested to Arabella to pass him off to Matilda as some near relation. But Arabella refused all such disguise. Her sole claim to self-respect was in considering him solemnly engaged to her the man she was to marry. And, after the second time they thus met, she said to Matilda, who had not questioned her by a word--by a look" I was to be married to that gentleman before my father died; we are to be married as soon as we have something to live upon." Matilda made some commonplace but kindly rejoinder. And thus she became raised into Arabella's confidence, so far as that confidence could be given, without betraying Jasper's real name, or one darker memory in herself. Luxury, indeed, it was to Arabella to find, at last, some one to whom she could speak of that betrothal in which her whole future was invested-of that affection which was her heart's sheet-anchorof that home, humble it might be, and far off, but to which Time rarely fails to bring the Two, if never weary of the trust to become as One. Talking thus, Arabella forgot the relationship of pupil and teacher; it was as woman to woman-girl to girl-friend to friend. Matilda seemed touched by the confidenceflattered to possess at last another's secret. Arabella was a little chafed that she did not seem to admire Jasper as much as Arabella thought the whole world must admire. Matilda excused herself. "She had scarcely noticed Mr Hammond. Yes; she had no doubt he would be considered handsome; but she owned, though it might be bad taste, that she preferred a pale complexion, with auburn hair; and then she sighed and looked away, as if she had, in the course of her secret life, encountered some fatal pale complexion, with never-to-be-forgotten auburn hair. Not a word was said by either Matilda or Arabella as to concealing from Mr Darrell these meetings with Mr Hammond. Perhaps Arabella could not stoop to ask that secresy; but there was no necessity to ask. Matilda was always too rejoiced to have something to conceal. Now, in these interviews, Jasper scarcely ever addressed himself to Matilda; not twenty spoken words could have passed between them; yet, in the very third interview, Matilda's sly fingers had closed on a sly note. And from that day, in each interview, Arabella walking in the centre, Jasper on one side, Matilda the other-behind Arabella's back-passed the sly fingers and the sly notes, which Matilda received and answered. Not more than twelve or fourteen times was even this interchange effected. Darrell was about to move to Fawley. All such meetings would be now suspended. Two or three mornings before that fixed for leaving London, Matilda's room was found vacant. She was gone. Arabella was the first to discover her flight, the first to learn its cause. Matilda had left on her writing-table a letter for Miss Fossett. It was very short, very quietly expressed, and it rested her justifica Mel Ynnys-Isle of Honey. One of the poetic names given to England in the language of the ancient Britons. tion on a note from Jasper, which she enclosed-a note in which that gallant hero, ridiculing the idea that he could ever have been in love with Arabella, declared that he would destroy himself if Matilda refused to fly. She need not fear such angelic confidence in him. No! Even "Had he a heart for falsehood framed, He ne'er could injure her." Stifling each noisier cry-but panting-gasping literally half out of her mind, Arabella rushed into Darrell's study. He, unsuspecting man, calmly bending over his dull books, was startled by her apparition. Few minutes sufficed to tell him all that it concerned him to learn, Few brief questions, few passionate answers, brought him to the very worst. Who, and what, was this Mr Hammond? Heaven of heavens! the son of William Losely-of a transported felon! Arabella exulted in a reply which gave her a moment's triumph over the rival who had filched from her such a prize. Roused from his first misery and sense of abasement in this discovery, Darrell's wrath was naturally poured, not on the fugitive child, but on the frontless woman, who, buoyed up by her own rage and sense of wrong, faced him, and did not cower. She, the faithless governess, had presented to her pupil this convict's son in another name; she owned it she had trepanned into the snares of so vile a fortunehunter, an ignorant child-she might feign amaze-act remorse-she must have been the man's accomplice. Stung, amidst all the bewilderment of her anguish, by this charge, which, at least, she did not deserve, Arabella tore from her bosom Jasper's recent letters to herself-letters all devotion and passion-placed them before Darrell, and bade him read. Nothing thought she then of name and fame. Nothing but of her wrongs and of her woes. Compared to herself, Matilda seemed the perfidious criminal she the injured victim. Darrell but glanced over the letters; they were signed "your loving husband." "What is this?" he exclaimed, are you married to the man?" "Yes," cried Arabella, "in the eyes of heaven! !" To Darrell's penetration there was no mistaking the significance of those words, and that look; and his wrath redoubled. Anger in him, when once roused, was terrible; he had small need of words to vent it. His eye withered, his gesture appalled. Conscious but of one burning firebrand in brain and heart-of a sense that youth, joy, and hope were for ever gone, that the world could never be the same again-Arabella left the house, her character lost, her talents useless, her very means of existence stopped. Who henceforth would take her to teach ? forth place their children under her Who hencecharge? ing-she shut herself up alone with She shrank into a gloomy lodgher despair. Strange though it may seem, her anger against Jasper was sity of her hate to Matilda. slight as compared with the intenstranger still it may seem, that as And her thoughts recovered from their first chaos, she felt more embittered against the world, more crushed by by a no less keen sense of injustice, a sense of shame, and yet galled in recalling the scorn with which Darrell had rejected all excuse for her conduct in the misery it had occasioned her, than she did by the consciousness of her own lamentable errors. was something that, to those who As in Darrell's esteem there could appreciate it, seemed invaluable, so in his contempt to those who had cherished that esteem there was had pronounced a sentence that outa weight of ignominy, as if a judge laws the rest of life. Arabella had not much left out of her munificent salary. had hitherto laid by had passed to What she Jasper-defraying, perhaps, the very cost of his flight with her treacherous rival. When her money was gone, she pawned the poor relics of her innocent happy girlhood, which she had been permitted to take from her father's home, and had borne with her wherever she went, like household gods,-the prize-books, the lute, cage, all which the reader will rethe costly work-box, the very birdmember to have seen in her later life, the books never opened, the lute broken, the bird long, long, long vanished from the cage! Never did she think she should redeem those pledges from that Golgotha, which takes, rarely to give back, so many hallowed tokens of the dreamland called "better days," the trinkets worn at the first ball, the ring that was given with the earliest love-vow --yea, even the very bells and coral that pleased the infant in its dainty cradle, and the very Bible in which the lips that now bargain for sixpence more, read to some grey-haired father on his bed of death! Soon the sums thus miserably raised were as miserably doled away. With a sullen apathy the woman contemplated famine. She would make no effort to live-appeal to no relations, no friends. It was a kind of vengeance she took on others, to let herself drift on to death. She had retreated from lodging to lodging, each obscurer, more desolate than the other. Now, she could no longer pay rent for the humblest room; now, she was told to go forth-whither? She knew not-cared not-took her way to wards the river, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends towards self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns, in health, towards self-preservation. Just as she passed under the lamp light at the foot of Westminster Bridge, a well-dressed man looked at her, and seized her arm. She raised her head with a chilly, melancholy scorn, as if she had received an insult-as if she feared that the man knew the stain upon her name, and dreamed, in his folly, that the dread of death might cause her to sin again. "Do you not know me?" said the man; "more strange that I should recognise you! Dear, dear-and what a dress!-how you are altered! Poor thing! At the words "poor thing" Arabella burst into tears; and in those tears the heavy cloud on her brain seemed to melt away. "I have been inquiring, seeking for you everywhere, Miss," resumed the man. Surely you know me now! Your poor aunt's lawyer ! She is no more died last week. She has left you all she had in the world; and a very pretty income it is, too, for a single lady.' Thus it was that we find Arabella installed in the dreary comforts of Podden Place. "She exchanged," she said, "in honour to her aunt's memory, her own name for that of Crane, which her aunt had borne-her own mother's maiden name." She assumed, though still so young, that title of " Mrs" which spinsters, grown venerable, moodily adopt when they desire all mankind to know that henceforth they relinquish the vanities of tender misses-that, become mistress of themselves, they defy and spit upon our worthless sex, which, whatever its repentance, is warned that it repents in vain. Most of her aunt's property was in houses, in various districts of Bloomsbury. Arabella moved from one to the other of these tenements, till she settled for good into the dullest of all. To make it duller yet, by contrast with the past, the Golgotha for once gave up its buried treasuresbroken lute, birdless cage! Somewhere about two years after Matilda's death, Arabella happened to be in the office of the agent who collected her house-rents, when a well-dressed man entered, and, leaning over the counter, said-"There is an advertisement in to-day's Times about a lady who offers a home, education, and so forth, to any little motherless girl; terms moderate, as said lady loves children for their own sake. Advertiser refers to your office for particulars - give them!" The agent turned to his books; and Arabella turned towards the inquirer. "For whose child do you want a home, Jasper Losely?" Jasper started. "Arabella! Best of creatures! And can you deign to speak to such a vil "Hush-let us walk. Never mind the advertisement of a stranger. I may find a home for a motherless child-a home that will cost you nothing." She drew him into the street. "But can this be the child of-ofMatilda Darrell?" "Bella!" replied, in coaxing ac cents, that most execrable of ladykillers, "can I trust you-can you be my friend in spite of my having been such a very sad dog? But money-what can one do without money in this world? Had I a heart for falsehood framed, it would ne'er have injured you'-if I had not been so cursedly hard up! And indeed now, if you would but condescend to forgive and forget, perhaps some day or other we may be Darby and Joan-only, you see, just at this moment I am really not worthy of such a Joan. You know, of course, that I am a widower-not inconsolable." "Yes; I read of Mrs Hammond's death in an old newspaper." "And you did not read of her baby's death, too-some weeks afterwards?" "No; it is seldom that I see a newspaper. Is the infant dead {" "Hum-you shall hear." And Jasper entered into a recital, to which Arabella listened with attentive interest. At the close she offered to take, herself, the child for whom Jasper sought a home. She informed him of her change of name and address. The wretch promised to call that evening with the infant; but he sent the infant, and did not call. Nor did he present himself again to her eyes, until, several years afterwards, those eyes so luridly welcomed him to Podden Place. But though he did not even condescend to write to her in the meanwhile, it is probable that Arabella contrived to learn more of his habits and mode of life at Paris than she intimated when they once more met face to face. And now the reader knows more than Alban Morley, or Guy Darrell perhaps ever will know, of the grim woman in iron grey. CHAPTER X. "Sweet are the uses of Adversity, Most persons will agree that the toad is ugly and venomous, but few indeed are the persons who can boast of having actually discovered that "precious jewel in its head," which the poet assures us is placed there. But calamity may be classed in two great divisions-1st, The afflictions, which no prudence can avert; 2d, The misfortunes, which men take all possible pains to bring upon themselves. Afflictions of the first class may but call forth our virtues, and result in our ultimate good. Such is the adversity which may give us the jewel. But to get at the jewel we must kill the toad. Misfortunes of the second class but too often increase the errors or the vices by which they were created. Such is the adversity which is all toad and no jewel. If you choose to breed and fatten your own toads, the increase of the venom absorbs every bit of the jewel. Never did I know a man who was an habitual gambler, otherwise than notably inaccurate in his calculations of probabilities in the ordinary affairs of life. Is it that such a man has become so chronic a drunkard of hope, that he sees double every chance in his favour? Jasper Losely had counted upon two things as matters of course. 1st. Darrell's speedy reconciliation with his only child. 2d. That Darrell's only child must of necessity be Darrell's heiress. In both these expectations the gambler was deceived. Darrell did not even answer the letters that Matilda addressed to him from France, to the shores of which Jasper had borne her, and where he had hastened to make her his wife under his assumed name of Hammond, but his true Christian name of Jasper. In the disreputable marriage Matilda had made, all the worst parts of her character seemed suddenly revealed to her father's eye, and he saw what he had hitherto sought not to see, the true child of a worthless mother. A mere mesalliance, if palliated by long or familiar acquaintance with the object, however it might have galled him, his heart might have pardoned; but here, without even a struggle of duty, without the ordinary coyness of maiden pride, to be won with so scanty a wooing, by a man who she knew was betrothed to another -the dissimulation, the perfidy, the combined effrontery and meanness of the whole transaction, left no force in Darrell's eyes to the commonplace excuses of inexperience and youth. Darrell would not have been Ďarrell if he could have taken back to his home or his heart a daughter so old in deceit, so experienced in thoughts that dishonour. Darrell's silence, however, little saddened the heartless bride, and little dismayed the sanguine bridegroom. Both thought that pardon and plenty were but the affair of time a little more or little less. But their funds rapidly diminished; it became necessary to recruit them. One can't live in hotels entirely upon hope. Leaving his bride for a while in a pleasant provincial town, not many hours distant from Paris, Jasper returned to London, intent upon seeing Darrell himself; and should the father-in-law still defer articles of peace, Jasper believed that he could have no trouble in raising a present supply upon such an El Dorado of future expectations. Darrell at once consented to see Jasper, not at his own house, but at his solicitor's. Smothering all opposing disgust, the proud gentleman deemed this condescension essential to the clear and definite understanding of those resolves upon which depended the worldly station and prospects of the wedded pair. When Jasper was shown into Mr Gotobed's office, Darrell was alone, standing near the hearth, and by a single quiet gesture repelled that tender rush towards his breast which Jasper had elaborately prepared; and thus for the first time the two men saw each other, Darrell perhaps yet more resentfully mortified while recognising those personal advantages in the showy profligate which had rendered a daughter of his house so facile a conquest: Jasper (who had chosen to believe that a father-in-law so eminent must necessarily be old and broken) shocked into the most disagreeable surprise by the sight of a man still young, under forty, with a countenance, a port, a presence, that in any assemblage would have attracted the general gaze from his own brilliant self, and looking altogether as unfavourable an object, whether for pathos or for post-obits, as unlikely to breathe out a blessing or to give up the ghost, as the worst brute of a father-in-law could possibly be. Nor were Darrell's words more comforting than his aspect. "Sir, I have consented to see you, partly that you may learn from my own lips once for all that I admit no man's right to enter my family without my consent, and that consent you will never receive, and partly that, thus knowing each other by sight, each may know the man it becomes him most to avoid. The lady who is now your wife is entitled by my marriage-settlement to the reversion of a small fortune at my death; nothing more from me is she likely to inherit. As I have no desire that she to whom I once gave the name of daughter should be dependent wholly on yourself for bread, my solicitor will inform you on what conditions I am willing, during my life, to pay the interest of the sum which will pass to your wife at my death. Sir, I return to your hands the letters that lady has addressed to me, and which, it is easy to perceive, were written at your dictation. No letter from her will I answer. Across my threshold her foot will never pass. Thus, sir, concludes all possible intercourse between you and myself; what rests is between you and that gentleman." Darrell had opened a side-door in speaking the last words - pointed towards the respectable form of Mr Gotobed standing tall beside his tall desk-and, before Jasper could put in a word, the father-in-law was gone. With becoming brevity Mr Gotobed made Jasper fully aware that not only all Mr Darrell's funded or personal property was entirely at his own disposal-that not only the large landed estates he had purchased (and which Jasper had vaguely deemed inherited and in strict entail) were in the same condition - condition |