Chapter IX. The Missing Friends' Column of the "New York Herald." Marvel at "Myamyn."

In the missing friends' column of the "New York Herald," within two years from the date of the great coal-king's death, appeared an advertisement inserted by Hallam, Brassy and Hoare, as proctors for Susannah Bubtitt, calling the attention of one Laban Jarves (if alive) to anxious inquiries by his daughter as to his whereabouts, or (if dead) for information page 349as to the date and circumstances of his demise. It further announced that the person concerning whom the advertisement was published was last heard of by letter bearing the post-mark of the Colorado Ranges post-office. It described him as being a man, at the time the advertisement appeared, if alive, approaching sixty years of age, tall in stature, with very dark hair, and by occupation a farm labourer. The notice happened to meet the eye of Miriam. It fastened itself upon her mind with such a weird and peculiar force that she mentioned it incidentally to Dolly one morning after his return from night duty on the steam-boats.

"It seems strange," said Dolly; "old Adam always gloating over the revenge he had on a man named Labby. I think next Sunday I had better ride Rosie out to his cabouche and get out of him all the bearings about the Labby he seems to have in his old cocoanut. I'll acquaint Hallam, Brassy and Hoare myself if I get anything out of the old chap, and give him some of the reward."

The Sunday morning came. Dolly led the old mare saddled and bridled out of the stable, and assisted by her solicitous guardian to mount, he started off for the house where old Adam lived, taking a junk of beef sandwiched between two rounds of bread in his pocket, and expecting to be back shortly after dark.

The distance was thirty-five miles: but he reached the ranche in a little over three hours and a-half, when, hanging the reins over the shakey, lopsided old gate-post, he walked to the back door of the bark-hut. The bought-and-sold old woman of Adam let him into the little kitchen where the old man had sung so many songs for the nascent surgeon. Finding that Adam was not at home, but in the sly-grog shop, he bent his steps thither, and having been apprised by Adam's mate of the secret knocks of the sly-grog shop, he was admitted to the august presence of the patriarchal carpenter and joiner, blacksmith and wheelwright, painter and paperhanger, glazier, undertaker, and general repairer.

"Halloa! my boy, come a-seein' on me," shouted Adam in great astonishment.

"Yes, I rode all the way from Galveston to see you," returned the Flying Dutchman: "but I want to see you about something private: come outside half-an-hour down the paddock."

The covert, felonious purveyor of the smuggled spirit, who was also the proprietress of an illicit still and displayed as a blind in the window a few bits of tape, reels of cotton, strings of dried apples and a dirty card announcing "Summer drinks" to the wayfarer, had begun to poke the fire as the stranger entered, in customary preparation for a call for drinks, and pricked up her ears at the word "private"—an expression of which she always had an uncanny dread. Not having any room in which the private conversation could be conducted, excepting her bedroom, which was more like a cellar—afraid as she was to leave the room where the fire was in case old Adam would make a raid on the bottles—the toothless old beldame contented herself with allowing them to walk out together and watching page 350their movements down the paddock through a peep-hole in the wall. She had, she thought, some recollection of having seen the strange young man before. His face was quite familiar to her, but his name she could not recall.

Stealthily through the little auger-hole, through which those guilty and criminal old foxey eyes had nervously peeped for forty years, she watched the stranger take out a newspaper from his pocket and read out something, which brought the old man to a stand-still with his hair on end. Her uneasy conscience at once, with the perspicuity of a woman, made a coward of her and convinced her that the private conversation had some reference to herself. She hastily removed all the grog from the little shanty into a large box, which she let down a well.

Walking a few paces and stopping now and then, "That was the infernal blackguard's name I do believe," said the old man. "Me and my ole 'ooman always called him Labby: it wouldn't be a morsel bit 'o trouble to my ole 'ooman to tell up all about him: it mide goa into one ear and out at t'other wi' zome, but not wi' my ole 'ooman: she've got a main-top to hold on by, my boy. It's so long sin', but he would be nigh sixty now; at that time he was nobbut a gowk, a bedoited and black-headed scoundrel, very tall and broad-showldered, and about thirty. He used to coome here a-fossickin round and a-seekin' up beer or anything. He wrought on my farm ploughin' and scufflin' taters, and allers a-wearin' a smock-frock, for a twelve month abouts, and I heerd him tell as how he was from somewheere about the north of Kansas. I always thought he was a bad 'un; many a clip at lug I possed him. He always a-seemed to me like a bit daft and maffled-like. I hope there's no harm coomes out on it. This old widow-'ooman 'ud talk a hoss's hind leg off, but she've never spoke about it, not as I ever a-heerd tell: my ole 'ooman ain't never telt nobody; she will keep it dark and so black as a crow, my boy; though I'm downright pleased I had my pinchers on the villyun, and if he was down there again I'd roust him out of that hole to-night, so help my God: roust him out of that hole to-night, so help my God I would, if I had to pass all the stokin' and roastin' devils in hell. I never seed such a villyun in all my creepin' up."

On returning to the grog-shanty, the old man was first admitted alone, but in a few seconds he came out and piloted through the door the Flying Dutchman, whose name old Mag had insisted upon having before supplying any grog to the old resurrectionist again. When they re-entered the little private bar, Dolly paid for a glass of wine for himself and two quarts of beer in quick succession for Adam. The widow proceeded to engage him in conversation, but could not get any satisfaction as to what the nature of the private business had been.

"I ain't seen a newspaper for three munce," said the artful old unlicensed purveyoress: "would you be kind enough to leave that one sticking out of your pocket: you don't want it and you can get plenty in the town, to be sure you can."

page 351

His suspicions aroused, he said there was nothing in it worth reading, and demurred at lending it to her; but the giddy old girl tried on a little old-fashioned flirtation and snatched it out of his pocket, promising that she would give it back in a few minutes. Saying that he was going away very soon and wanted particularly to take the newspaper away with him, he sat down again with Adam, talking about the doctor's children and loads of box and birch.

The old beldame fossicked about the little private bar for her spectacles and began spelling out the words to herself as fast as her educational lights would enable her. Two crosses in ink, marking the spot where the notice appeared, attracted her attention as she turned over the second page. Soon Dolly rose from the old broken candle-box on which he was sitting and prepared to leave. The old woman handed him the paper back with profuse and antiquated politeness. She didn't want to keep it, she said—only to glance at it, but the marks and the advertisement had been engrossing her attention all the time she had it in her hands.

Dolly Whitworth walked back with the old man to the gate where the mare was anchored, and admonishing Adam to say nothing about the notice to anybody, he was leaving with the satisfied feeling of having made a thrilling and important discovery.

"It's a bit dubersome about this year old Mag: there's no tellin' how she'll fettle oop, but my ole 'ooman'll see til her if she lets anything lose," said Adam as Dolly prepared to leave. "She be alters routin' an' groutin' and maunderin' here an' daunderin' there an' whisperin' an' haverin' an' hidin' away in neuks an' corners. Look-I-zay, my boy, you can't tell what's under the widow-'ooman's bonnet, and mark'ee she've a-bin a great scholard and can pitch real langwidge too: I thoct she'd give thee a buss I did. The way she carried on it's maist as if she nobbut knew all about it. I never heerd tell o' siccan a thing afore and it like dinges me over, but no body'll get nowt off of my ole 'ooman; my ole 'ooman is no siccan a fuil till she be fairly bet; but she'll mebbe greet when she hears tell o' the pollisman; so I'll just go'ome and sit me down at fire with my ole 'ooman, for she be right bad with her jaw;" and the Flying Dutchman cantered away.

Reaching home and submitting to the reproaches of his father for getting the mare into such a lather of a sweat, he unfolded to the household the tale that old Adam had related. It came like a revelation of some occult Nemesis on old Christopher Whitworth. He vehemently reproved Dolly for his precipitation in consigning the bones to the waves under the prow of the "Baltimore" instead of letting him replace them in the sequestered and rifled grave.

"There's no money in it at all events for us," said Dolly: "that is all I went after: we can't very well give any clue to Hallam, Brassy and Hoare when it might lead to the dragging of the bay, and get the old man into trouble. You had better go by the steamer in the morning and let Eugene know about it as soon as you can."

"Not a bit of fear," returned old Christopher. "He didn't dig up the page 352man's bones. He didn't know what the old villain was after, and he thought they were only the bones of a Red Indian. I'm not going to leave that mare to be starved and ridden to death, as the saying is, for any nonsense of that sort, so there's an end to the business as far as I am concerned." Lighting the meerschaum he got up from the sofa and walked out to have a smoke and another look at the "little picture" encircled in a pink-webbed surcingle¹ in the stable.

Further pressure was then brought to bear upon him by Miriam; she gave him no peace on the subject and insisted on going herself by the first steamer; but as the boat left before the toy shops were open and she might, she thought, just as well stay at home as go without a goodly collection of drums, juvenile bassoons, hautboys and bugles, she procured a multifarious répertoire from St. John's church carnival that night and embarked on the next morning looking like a punch-and-judy show.

Arriving at Mobile, to the hearts' content of the children she made the presentation of musical prizes, and promised to stay with them till the end of the week, during which time and for weeks after, Myamyn was a counterpart of the euphonius villa at Summer Hill.

After she had unburthened the inauspicious news that floated in a sickly glamour over the sinless soul of Miriam, she shuddered with apprehension when Eugene told her that Mrs. Hornblower's name before she was married to Augustus was Jarves: that Mrs. Hornblower had obtained a divorce from her first husband on the ground of lunacy, but that Sukey Bubtitt was always known after her mother's second marriage as Sukey Hornblower till she married Simon Ernest Bubtitt.

"It's not a very uncommon name though—Jarves," he said: "besides I don't think she would advertise for a missing acquaintance if he were a poor man, supposed to be labouring on a farm. I never heard of her or any of her kindred ever spending a cent on any charity. She would be more likely to ask for money than give it away. I never heard her speak of her father or any missing relatives. Once when Mrs. Hornblower was in the middle of an angry altercation with the old coal-king, he taunted her about some soft-brained relative. I thought that he said the relative was in an asylum for the insane. Many a time Gould told me himself that her name had been Jarves and that she was married in Kansas. The family, according to Gould, were very poor and common people. Sukey Bubtitt was born in the same place as her mother, a little village near Topeka, in the State of Kansas. The auntie was, he said, ten years older than Jarves. She can neither read nor write. The world of letters is caviar to auntie: her acquisitions are the glimmerings of such knowledge as long life alone teaches. The Jarves family must have been some of the proletariat too; and the rasping, nagging, harsh lingo and the long breaths aggravate her general repulsiveness."

Just then a patrolman came through the front gate and knocked at the door, while Miriam in great perturbation of mind looked out through the window. Breathless and trembling with nervous agitation, she sat over-page 353come with fear as Eugene advanced to the door and opened it for the minion of the law, who merely called to ask the doctor if the vaccination returns were ready for the end of the quarter, and took them away with him.

"You mark my words," said Miriam kindling with excitement; "if that vindictive Marvel has the slightest inkling of the history of her cousin's father she will never rest till she proves that you had a sort of connection with the removal of the bones of the missing man. As it is, she would glory in seeing you carried out of that door in a six-feet box. I always thought she was a wicked, treacherous and dangerous wife for any man. She would do any mortal thing to gratify her spite and revenge herself upon you and the children. Money can do a great deal at law and she will find plenty about the city who will go into court for a trifle and swear a man's life away."

"On the honeymoon trip, I remember," he said: "when we were on the deck of the steamer, pointing out to Marvel the Colorado ranges and telling her that I used to go about there in the college vacations shooting woodpigeons over the fields, but I never told her I had anything to do with the resurrection of the bones. The place was pointed out to her in such a casual sort of way that it is a question if she recollects anything about what I said. In any case I can't see how they can get any clue as to the whereabouts of their missing relative, assuming the man was Sukey's father, as there is nobody living about the ranges but old Adam Quain at all likely to have any knowledge of the man Laban Jarves unless perhaps old Mag.

Miriam's pulses strengthened. Her palpitating heart subsided into steady and rhythmical action when the doctor showed such indifference over the matter, which had brooded over her pure and spotless soul like a horrible incubus ever since she had noticed the advertisement in the New York Herald and had shown it to Dolly. In a few days, to the great disappointment of Pearly and Valentine, she left Myamyn and returned by boat to her own quiet home; but the muffled beat of the drum—in which there was already a hole made by Vallie to let out more of the music—the early calls of the clarionet and the sound of the big bassoon rang for weeks in the ears of Eugene to keep him in memory of her visit.

The warmth of the summer air and the spinning whirlwinds of white sand in front of Myamyn brought to Eugene the reflection that he had been nearly a year in Mobile. During the year he had made excellent ground in his practice. His cup of joy was as full as those of the children themselves. All the year they had been healthy and strong—Pearly like a little dairy-maid and Vallie's face was as round and rosy as an apple. They had both benefited immeasurably by the tender care and the benign influences of Guinevere. Pearly had grown into a charming and self-possessed little girl, and Vallie was as intrepid and lusty as a young eagle. On his little wooden Grecian velocipede² he was the Ixion³ of the footpath: he could outpace boys twice his size on bigger machines. Level or unlevel crossings were all the same to Vallie. Time after time he bowled over page 354with the velocipede on the top of him into the thick sand off the unaligned side-walk only to laugh and mount again. Bruises, cuts and scratches came quite naturally to Vallie, rubbing the place with his chubby hand more comically than ruefully. The old servant Lillie Delaine still remained and exercised a general supervision over the children and the house in general. If Miss E. Powell, affected as she was with prudery and priggishness, disdained to enter the bedroom in the mornings for the children's clothes while the doctor was still in bed, no harm could be seen in so doing by the more sensible, devoted and faithful old servant. To Lillie the children would run when in trouble or to explain their little requirements. Their former experience of the cruel Emma, the dismissed nurse-girl and the unreconcilable enemy of Pearly, made them suspicious of any newcomer. A new girl came on trial for a week, but she failed to suit the children. What failed in her to find favour with them was that the new girl was of a very religious turn of mind. Vallie had on her first day offended her supernatural soul by holding up a white kitten with its arms spread out flat on the passage wall and calling her attention to the little Jesus nailed up on the cross. Guinevere came every morning with Cyril. The children attended her little school in the afternoons and walked with her when school was over, along the silvery sand of the hibiscus, azalea and sandbox fringed shore.

It was near Easter-tide when a short letter came for Eugene, covered in a dark blue envelope of quite a fanciful pattern and written on ribbed dark green paper. It was from no less a personage than the heavenly bird, who all the time had been living in the same hostelry with the other binary star—the Italo-Mexican woman—and visited her children once a month. Opening the letter he read to himself—

"Summer Hill, Constellation Hotel, 21st December, 1852.

"Dear Dr. Whitworth,—

"As my lawyers think I should return to your house and live with the children, I propose doing so sometime after Easter. I must, however, insist on your dismissing the servants who have been in your employ during the past three years, or as many of them as still remain. I shall certainly insist on your not keeping race-horses.—Yours, &c.,

"Marvel Imogen Narramore Whitworth."

The prefix "Paradise" had been written down and crossed out again. His first thoughts were to send her the recherché epistle back and refuse to take her home again. With the children alone he had been contented and happy. He reflected on the number of letters he had written to her, without receiving any reply; on the years he had waited for her return: the ruination which she had brought about in his practice and the large amount of money it had cost him to redeem his children at law. Perhaps again, he thought, she would be a sadder and a wiser woman after her two defeats and the homilies which she had received from both the judges, and page 355that it might be to the interests of the children themselves if their mother lived under the same roof to study their welfare. When he looked forward to the stain that would pigment the vistas of their fair and innocent lives as the histories of their mother's actions were hurled at them like arrows of scorn, he sat down in his surgery and wrote an answer to the letter. He was willing that she should return, but that it seemed from the wording of the epistle she intended to come back solely for her own sake and the childrens' and not in any contrite way as his wife at all—not from any love she had for the children or her husband, but because her lawyers had said she should do so; just as any other lawyer might have advised her to act. He reminded her of the large sums of money he had spent to recover his children; of the facility with which she obtained her supplies compared to the drawbacks and difficulties which he had in making his comparatively small income; that the quarterly payments of the childrens' money had all been impounded by Warne, Costall and Davitt, and that all the money spent on the maintenance and education of his children in contravention of the will had been provided by him. In conclusion, he asked her if she would contribute something towards the support of the house and the children providing he agreed to her proposal that she should return as the mother of the children, and he gave expression to the opinion that it would be a mean act of injustice on his part to summarily dismiss a good and faithful servant who had for nearly three years spent all her energies in attending to the house and in her ministrations to the needs of Pearly and Valentine whom she had so long refused to look after at home, although there was no reason why she should not have returned long before. He was a man of warm affections and of a constancy of mind and inclinations, to whom forgetfulness of old ties or indifference to old associations were impossible traits of character, and he would no more think of discharging a good servant, unless he had really good cause, than he would think of cutting off his hand.

In a few days after the posting of the letter, as he sat on the rustic loggia of Myamyn on the Easter eve, he smoked a cigar and looked back upon the reminiscences of his past married life, after the children had gone into their little blue bizarre boudoir—musing over the chequering blight under which theretofore he had suffered and the paths of briars and thorns over which he had trodden—paths which he ardently hoped would, on the return of his changed wife, end in paths of roses for the children as well as himself. The evening sky shone like an opal dome, and through the air, misty as a soft spun veil, the little grey gnats flew around and around the cap of the gate-post in narrowing and expanding circles, tiny stragglers from the ring flitting lazily before him and all suddenly vanishing into their marshy homes. The fragrant dusk of the garden was beginning to melt into trembling light, and the last flush of sunset had long since faded beyond the hills. Full rose the yellow moon from far across the peaceful ocean, dispersing night's clouds, and her pall thrown over the town, lighting up the whole road in front of Myamyn and sending her mellow beams in page 356silver tracery over the sea and into the openings of the sand-box and azalea fringe. The quiet moonlight streamed full upon his face as, gazing in the direction of the scrub through the avenue of escalonia hedges—what figure was that motioning as if to him and beckoning to him to come?

He sat and watched and smoked, but the motioning of the arms and the beckoning still continued. He noticed the figure move, as if coming towards the road; it was plain to him that it was the form and figure of a woman. "Can it be Marvel?" he whispered to himself: "it's about the same size as Marvel, but it appears to be dressed in deep black; whereas since the death of her father Marvel had not donned much sackcloth and ashes, but had worn favours only three months, and now she always affected bright colours again. "Still it must be Marvel," he thought: "what on earth is she doing there? she wants me to go over there."

Rising from the Cingalese lounge on the verandah, he walked in wonder towards the arm-waving figure, which suddenly, as he moved, ceased to beckon towards him. Bareheaded, across the road he walked, and saw the figure debouching⁴ among the trees. He stepped upon the footpath and drew near to the boundary of the sand-box fringes, following the retreating woman, who stopped and said—"Don't you know me, Eugene?"

"No," he replied: "who are you—Marvel?"

Beckoning again to him to enter the forest, away from the light of the moonbeams, she drew him nearer and nearer into the shade of some copper beeches. It was the voice—it was the form of his mother.

"I wouldn't go to the house," she said, "as I heard Marvel had gone home. Old Adam came in great excitement a few days ago and told me that a lawyer had been catechising him about Laban Jarves' remains; that the lawyer belonged to Brassy's office. He told the lawyer that he knew nothing about the man, except that he had worked for a few weeks on the same farm, and that Jarves had gone out of his recollection ever since. Detectives called upon Adam the next day. They took him to the grave and taxed him with knowing all about the mystery. He would not acknowledge anything, and the detectives went away. He says that the old woman who keeps the little store went away to New Orleans the day after Dolly was there. She must have seen the advertisement in the newspaper and apprised the lawyers of the fate of the missing man, whom she knew as well as old Adam did himself. It was that old woman who gave the information to the police before, you remember. She has been up to mischief again, with the hopes of getting the reward."

"Better come into the house," said Eugene: "Marvel is not there, and it's not certain if she ever will be there. I never know what she means, or whether she intends to come back or stay away."

"No," rejoined Miriam, "I won't go inside; the servants may see me and wonder. I am afraid that detectives will come here in a day or so and if they find that I have been before them they will suspect you all the more. If that sly Sukey Bubtitt or Marvel imagines you had anything to do with the disturbing of their relative's grave, they will prosecute you to the bitter page 357end, as only they can do, for the sake of a legal revenge. Probably as it is she is thinking of coming back for a while to worm the secret out of you on her cousin's behalf. Then again, if you keep it hidden from her, in the event of her return, it may be the means of crippling her cousin's spite when she discovers you were there. Better let Marvel return than suffer their malicious vengeance, for she would never be satisfied till she sees you in your own grave. I will go back to the city to-night and leave for home by the steamer to-morrow. No one at home knows where I am excepting Dolly."

She walked away alone, forbidding Eugene to accompany her away from the trees; while Eugene walked home with a complex addition to the conflicting emotions in his mind and another web in the tangled woof of his reflections. To throw any obstacle in the way of his wife's return would be to heap coals of fire on his own head; to have her home might take the sting out of the vindictive persecution of her cousin. Paramount above all, it would be best for the sake of the children. Their interests domineered over every other consideration, and fixed him in his determination to welcome his wife to the flowered-clothed Myamyn.

A few days afterwards he received a second epistle from her to say that she intended to return home after she had made a transpacific winding excursion to Fiji, New Guinea and the South Sea Islands—the summer isles of Eden — in one of the Mississippi United Steam Navigation Company's excursion steamers, which majestic ocean-palace was also to carry some of the upper ten thousand of the city; that she expected to be back in two months, by which time she hoped that he would have discharged the servants, in order that she might bring with her servants of her own. There was nothing further in the reply than this; although in other little notes which she sent—very much like repetitions of what she had said before—there was as much fencing, finessing and fin de siécle diplomacy as would have sufficed to avert the war between China and Japan, before the fugacious Marvel had fully made up her mind to return.

He had steadfastly refused to agree to her dismissal of his servants until she had shown that she was honest in her intention to return by coming and settling herself down for good in his house. Irrespectively of this objection, she took it upon herself to write to the servant who had been so long in the doctor's employ from the saloon of the excursion steamer "Tarshish," informing her that as the girl had once said she would not work for her, and as she had once signed her name to an affidavit detrimental to her interests, she intended engaging other servants of her own on her return from her excursion, by which time the old servant would be good enough to make herself ready to leave. During the trip to the summer isles of Eden the bird of Paradise spent most of her time in her cabin, where she lay in a state of collapse, as miserable as a bandicoot and well nigh sick unto death, calling out night and day "stew—ard—ess, ste—ward—ess, I shall die before I get back home, I shall die, I shall—die."

When the "Tarshish" sailed into her berth on the Mississippi Quay the page 358travel-stained bird of Paradise, whose itineraries comprised visits to her namesakes and prototypes in New Guinea, followed by all the high-flight of the metropolis, disembarked, Marvel and her close companion, the Italo-Mexican dame d'hotel, driving in a carriage which a polite young gentleman—an admirable Crichton of the archery ground, who was running Cocklebrook very close for paradisal favours—had thoughtfully provided to carry them from the quay to the Constellation caravanserai at Summer Hill. It was, however, another month before she showed in sight of Myamyn, and Eugene felt grateful that he had not discharged the old servant, as Marvel had so peremptorily demanded.

Thus an amnesty—a false armistice—was proclaimed, and about three months after Easter, or four months after her first expressed intention of returning, one smiling afternoon she came bowling along in a chariot to Myamyn in stupendous state. Alighting from the chariot drawn by a pair of high-stepping carriage horses, and walking with vacillating steps to the front door she manifested every sign of her recent arrival from the home of her patron bird. She appeared in the eternal gorgeousness which ornamented her nearly all through her life. Brighter than the colours of the picture-book, the hues of the Tyrian dye, the glories of Solomon, or the wardrobe of the Queen of Sheba, were the fal-de-lals of the bird of Paradise—quackeries of colour appealing to the tastes of the vulgar with a pragmatical affectation of refinement. She wore a frock that would have been an ideal for the Melbourne Cup. It was made of shining ivory glacé silk with blue convolvuli upon the surface; the bodice of this simulated three little coats, each one outlined with cardinal paillettes⁵ and buttoned with jewelled blue buttons, fully displaying a front of pale turquoise-green chiffon⁶ draped with Alençon lace. She wore a handsome diadem of large opals and beryls and diamonds at her throat. In her brown, coquettish Panama hat, trimmed in complementary colours, quaint and curious was fixed a tom-cat, with its humped back in the very act of fighting, made from oxydised silver, set in diamonds, and she was accompanied by a French bonne to marshall her luggage and look after her straps and wraps and carriage comforts. As she sailed through the straits of the escalonia hedges the old servant with a bundle under her arm and a carpet bag in her hand disappeared through the back door, and Eugene, who was busy dressing in his military uniform for the Wednesday afternoon parade—in fighting costume too with all the warpaint—received the celestial Marvel, who entered with mincing steps and an air of frigid familiarity, in a becoming military style. After bidding her welcome to his home, he set out on the weekly cavalry parade with the new black horse, which he had brought from Summer Hill.

In the evening, as he returned after the military parade was over, he found that Marvel had re-disposed the drawingroom into a sitting-room and boudoir for herself and the children. Shortly after her arrival two men had come with a beautiful basket-chair and a choice and costly Chippendale boudoir-suite, and on her instructions had fitted it together in page 359the drawingroom, where she had arranged that the children should leave the little bowers in which they had slept so long beside their father, and pass their nights with her in the newly-constituted bedroom. He simply noticed what had been done, but said nothing, although he suspected that the return of his paradisal wife had been instigated by Hallam, Brassy and Hoare from some occult sinister motives. He discovered afterwards that they had verily inspired and drafted the letters, which she had copied and forwarded to him during the lengthy negotiations for a peaceful re-union at Myamyn, some time before Easter-tide. He made up his mind to repress the inward and silent contempt which he felt for his meretricious wife, and to let bye-gone be bye-gones as well as he could. Though nothing could make him forget the outrageous charges which she had made against him so recklessly, he refrained from any reference to the bye-gone litigation, and strived with all his might and main to make himself agreeable with Marvel.

The day after her arrival he took an advertisement for her to the city newspapers and posted one to every registry office calling for applications for the positions of general servant and nurse-girl. The following day about fifty ambitious proponents came. Marvel made a selection of two, recommended to her by her old companion at the Constellation Hotel, fancying they would suit her purposes, although they had never been similarly employed before. They looked more like two gaslight butterflies than domestic assistants. She took the trouble to inform her husband that her contribution to the support of the house would consist in her discharging the debts of the wages of the servants, the expenditure upon whom would amount, she said, to more than she had been paying for her own board and residence at the Constellation, one servant receiving seven dollars a week and the other five dollars. The two neophytes were more like femmes de chambre than menials of the nursery and kitchen, and always appeared gaily decked out in mousseline-de-laine⁷ and red ribbons and farthingales and pectinate⁸ furbelows⁹. They both had aureoline hair and tinctorial rouge thick on their lips and their faces. When he asked them each in turn if they would blacken his boots they both replied "Wot are yer givin' us?" and wanted to know if he was not going to shout, and they talked about supplementing their wages at Myamyn by "going out to business" in the evenings.

Marvel further expended some few dollars on picture-books and hessian boots and shoes of a flimsy and dapper pattern for the children. Although the ones they had were quite good she threw them away over the fence. She had Pearly and Vallie within an incredibly short space of time decked outlike two little harlequins in all the gaudy colours of the rainbow, with all the gew-gaws she could pick up in the fancy fairs in the dry, where she took them one afternoon in order to show them off to her friends and Brassy, with whom she had grown to be on very intimate terms. As they came home from the city with them all on Marvel was something gleaming and flashing in the sun, while the children looked like two gorgeous bright-page 360hued insects of the lepidopterous¹⁰ tribe from Africa. Pearly appeared in a white silk blouse powdered with coloured flowers and ornamented with large epaulettes of poppy-red velvet. Two black and white wings of a peau de soie¹¹ pelisse¹², fluttering on the breeze and spreading themselves out as if Pearly were going to take flight, had been fixed on her shoulders. Imprisoned in a whale-bone pillory and a crinoline-petticoat she displayed a silver cincture wrought in arabesque designs around her waist and her wrists were manacled with rubies and gold. For the first time in his life Vallie discarded his Royal-navy suits for the latest fashion in Windsor costume, looking an absolute guy in dark blue trousers shot with red. For head-gear he had a hat of a nondescript shape ornamented with a serpent-green cassowary feather coiling round his shoulder into his arm-pit, and for additional ornate external decoration he carried a massive gold cable chain. Wonders will never cease. No garish colour according to the notions of the returned paradisal bird was too wonderful or too voyante.

The children, gratified in their innocent little hearts at the bright colours in which they were arrayed, looked up to their mother as the bountiful donor of the finery. They moreover received quotidian lessons from Marvel as to the correct manner of showing their contempt for their father, because he had not bought them such gorgeous things before—pursing their lips and putting out their tongues at him and giving him sullen sidelooks whenever he drew near, besides other signs of insurrection. A sort of divided authority reigned in the house. Myamyn was a house divided against itself. Such a house must fall. Marvel lost no time in currying favour with the children, while the old love for their father waged a constant emotional warfare in their flexile and impressionable minds with the principle of hatred and aversion which she did her best to instil.

It was a sad loss to the doctor, and a sadder loss to the children, when Guinevere entered the gate on the Monday morning pale, piteous and timid as a fawn and she was sharply informed by Marvel that her services in connection with the education of the children would not be required any longer. Indignant, sorrowful and colouring in confusion at the chilling reception, she walked away and the empyreal genius of their invaluable governess ceased to shine over the paths of those childrens' lives for a season.

Eugene had never dreamt of these cardinal changes in the circumstances of his children. He felt displeased with himself for having made his wife welcome to Myamyn when he saw that instead of coming in a spirit of reconciliation, she came from some deep and disguised motive to embitter the minds of his little darlings and to turn them from him and estrange their natural loves. Along the lonely sand-box track where they had gone for their Sunday morning lavations and little water-picnics all to themselves in the copse on the sandy beach, he would walk alone, to listen to the whispering waves saying the loves of his cherubs were gone. There for hours when no business kept him at the house he would sit pondering over his disappointments and remorse. He never stayed at Myamyn unless compelled page 361by the exigencies of his work. Distressed at the demeanour of his captions and cantankerous wife after her return; saddened by the insults which his little children were taught by their mother to throw at him, he wandered away from the flowery Myamyn, and sometimes neglected his practice for days.

He took up with Marmaduke Payne! He supplied him with money to release him from his position at the "Old House at Home" hotel, and filled up his time by drinking with Marmaduke at the little cottage of Guinevere, while she was away at school. At the bars of the hotels the two became regular attendants. It had the effect of throwing oil on the fire within which blazed in indignation at the effrontery of his children and the rancorous vituperation of his secretive, passionate, and acrimonious wife. Marvel's caustic nastiness was worse than vitriol. For days he ate nothing in the house. She snatched the food away from him. She threatened to run out for the police if be returned her galling taunts, and without any provocation she several times threw up the lower sash of the window, crying out 'Police, police.' Never an act of violence or harshness, never a threat he ever offered in return, while the vexation, the insulting and aggravating demeanour of his skittish and prodigal wife were more than a saint could bear.

One evening he came home with two weighty antique Berlin-porcelaine figures of horses, intended as presents for Pearly and Vallie, Placing them on the table in the dining-room, he proceeded to present them to the children, when in burst, in a red-hot rage, the disapproving Marvel. As he stood leaning against the mantelpiece, pleased at the delight with which the children received the presents, in a boiling passion she picked both of them up and burled them with all her force through the window. Snatching up a bowie-knife that lay on the mantelpiece, she struck him savagely across the face, and suddenly she turned as white as a sheet, La belle sauvage!

Wounded and bleeding, he staunched the flowing blood with his handkerchief and walked, without a word and with great equanimity under great provocation, out of the front door and lay down in the summer-house with a buzzing in his ears from loss of blood, returning to the house when the conspirators had gone to sleep.

Next morning be fancied he saw a look of regret on Marvel's face. Probably there was, as the little episode suggested itself as a mistake from a legal point of view. He asked her if she would pick out some of the little spicules of rust from the wound, which was three inches long, extending from his eye across his face and splitting the coating of the bone of his cheek, where some of the fragments of the rusty steel had become impacted. "Go to Gehenna," said the bird of Paradise, or words to that effect: "I wish to God I had cut your eyes out," replied the divine bird. "Next time you will know better and keep your presents to yourself!"

That day he was obliged to go to the city, where one of his former page 362colleagues in Fifth Avenue sewed the wound together with silver wire, and inquired if he had been in a railway smash or if his wife had inflicted the conspicuous damage to his countenance. Her husband screened her and said that it was an accident during military exercises with a sword. For a month he was thus incapacitated from medical practice. He could not show his disfigured face before his patients. Wandering to a strange hotel in the vicinity, he spent his time in the perilous company of Marma-duke, while the toils of the pure and undefiled Guinevere continued in hope and unrelenting martyrdom at her little dismembered school, and the acrid, atrocious Marvel gloated over the satisfaction which she felt at the perpetrated deed, the mark of which Eugene wore on the battle-field, and over the diabolical letter which she wrote to her lawyers, detailing to them the little successes which their intrigues had so far attained.