STRATHMORE;

OR, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND.

A LIFE ROMANCE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "GRANVILLE de Vigne," &c.

PART THE NIneteenth.

I.

THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWER.

SUMMER in the heart of the great city! Mockery of the name!Summer! with the incessant roll of traffic, never ending from the dawn of one day to the dawn of another; with the loud beating of steampresses throbbing and thundering through the nights; with the glory of the skies in azure warmth or starry stillness, shut out from sight by the great wilderness of roofs; with the dense heat of the noon burning on arid pavement, on whirling dust, on grey, gritty, barren walls; with the brightness of the sun shining on toiling crowds, on panting horses, on thronged narrow thoroughfares filled with noise, with stench, with reeking, heavy heat; on dark, noisome courts, where, when its rays stole in through some broken chink or loosened shutter, they found men labouring and lusting for gold, with their eyes blind to the day and their souls lost to heaven. Summer! with the only bird a prisoned lark in some garret window, that shook its dust-covered wings and strained its parched throat in song that was but a long quiver of agony, while it plunged its beak into the dry sear sod as though in some wild memory of the fresh woodland grasses far away. Summer! with the only flower a sickly drooped plant, whose leaves hung lifeless, and whose blossoms were colourless with smoke; with the only living water the ink-black, poisonous river, forestthick with masts; with the only murmur through the day and night the toiling of the weary feet of crowds who had forgotten what green fields were like!

Summer! it is a terrible and ghastly thing in the pent alleys of a great city, and Marion Vavasour, when she stood leaning her arms on the sill of her narrow window, and gazing down into the noxious street below, sickened and shuddered at it as under a physical torture. Beauty, colouring, poetry, luxury, they were the life of this woman's life; her eyes longed, her heart thirsted for them as the lark's for the woodland shadows, as the flower for the light of the sun and the sweetness of the morning dew. Years of evil and of infamy could not trample this out of her nature; she had been born for all the richness of sovereignty, all the luxuriance of power, all the delicate lustre of sight, and scent, and touch, and ever-changing scenes of beauty, which are the prerogatives of wealth; she lived in them, without them she perished famine-stricken. The heat, the noise, the dusty glare, the barren, vulgar hideousness of

the life about her were bitter torture to her, the death to which she had sunk in the whirling chasm of the ocean had not been one tithe so terrible, so accursed to her, as the living death in which she dwelt. Proud, she was steeped to the lips in degradation; a poetic voluptuary, her life was sheared barren of every memory of beauty; once a patrician and a ruler, she lived a pariah imprisoned in want and misery. Vengeance could not have been more subtle and complete than his.

Where she looked down into the hot, vile, unsightly street, with its crowded wretchedness, and its narrow strip of sunny sky left between the high pent roofs as though in mockery of all the glorious world beyond, laughing in loveliness and light, that was lost and unknown to those who were the dwellers here, her thoughts wandered to her dead and golden past. The hours of triumphs, the homage of courts, the rich perfection of her peerless loveliness, the days of her glad and splendid sovereignty, they floated before her in memories tangled and lustrous like the glories of a dream. A thousand summer days, a thousand summer nights, the perfume of Southern climes, and the fragrance of luminous seas flashing in phosphor light, whilst the air was balmy with flowers, and filled with music from palace-stairs, gleaming marble white through deep odorous thickets of myrtle; the murmur of love-words whispered low, and the radiance of her own resistless beauty, with the gold light on her hair, and the proud challenge in her eyes, and the throngs of princes and of courtiers waiting on her steps, that swept like Cleopatra's over rose-strewn paths they drifted past her, the phantoms of dead years, and a dull, sickly sense of unreality stole on her, looking on that glorious sun-lighted, diamond-crowned vision of her youth. Had hers ever been this fair and sovereign life? Was she what the world had known as Marion Vavasour? The soft grace, the rich lustre, the divine fragrance of that bygone life, were they all dead for ever? Could the light never come back to her eyes, the laughter to her heart, the beauty-her loved, lost beauty!-to her face, for which men had deemed the world well lost? And the ceaseless ebb and flow of the black river-tide, and of the surging throng in the weary glare below, seemed to beat as answer on the stifling air,

"For ever, never! Never, for ever !”

Yet among the living, as though condemned wraith-like to wander without rest among the world that knew her not, and in which she had no place, Marion Vavasour was dead!

She gazed down into the colourless dust-strewn street, while the hot air was filled with sickening, stifling odours from which she shrank, and up from the river swept noxious, pestilential vapours in the arid noon, in which the pale leaves of the garret-flower drooped, and the caged lark sat huddled and blind, with wings that hung nerveless, and a little life without song; and as she gazed through the deadly weariness of her beggared years, one human passion rose, still sweet, still unexhausted, still the right and the lust of the outcast as of the monarch-the passion of revenge. The hatred which had destroyed her, was scarce so cruel and so pitiless as the hatred that she bore; for men at their worst never

reach the depths to which a woman sinks when once unsexed, and cast into the fathomless sea of unlicensed evil; the tigress is more cruel than her mate. Men strike at what they hate; women, more subtle and more merciless, strike at what is best-beloved by the life they would destroy. It is the difference of the sexes; one tramples out under an iron heel, the other poisons unseen and with a smile.

Vague, shapeless, hopeless, her vengeance rose before her sight; she knew now where to strike-but how? Sunk amongst the lowest, destitute, and banned from every household, how could she sever two lives lifted far above her in the security of rank, and power, and peace? How could she learn the force to forge a bolt to reach and pierce the kingly mail of the patrician and the statesman? She had seen where the single weakness lay in the steel-clad strength of the man who had denied her mercy; but her hands were empty, she had no weapon with which to strike. All that brutality could have compassed, all that a serpent subtlety and an insatiate thirst could have schemed and been slaked in, she would have done; but her power was paralysed, whilst her passion to destroy burned but the fiercer for its impotence.

"He loves her!-he loves her!" the words that had been hissed from her lips in the night stillness as she had looked on them, broke from them now, as though in them she felt the whole measure of her hate were gathered, as though in them lay the mystical encantation at whose summons vengeance would rise incarnate, to be her minister and slave. She hated Lucille's young loveliness and life, as that which is evil ever hates that which is pure; the divine compassion which had pitied her, the sweet graciousness with which the young girl had smiled on her and offered her her roses, were but memories which made her savage greed the thirstier to destroy her.

She knew nothing of her save what rumour, floating to her as rumour floats amongst the masses of those above them, told; that she was a young, high-born girl, whom he had married in her earliest years, and of whom many idle stories wandered downward through all the ranks of society, till even the lowest caught and retailed them, touching her gentleness to all who suffered or sought charity, and her husband's passionate devotion to her, Rumour's hundred tongues outlying one another in what they babbled of the beauty, the luxury, the brilliance with which it was his pleasure to surround her, and of the strange tenderness in which he was said to hold one whom he had wedded when the world had deemed him bound solely and for ever to the chillness of power and the solitude of ambition.

This was all she knew; but it was more than enough to overfill the measure of a deadly hate, sole lingering passion of a ruined and ruthless life, which, accursed and driven out itself from every fairer and every holier thing, loathed and panted to destroy all beauty that lived in another, all light that shone on other lives.

Strathmore had been her slave; in his passion, in his crime, she had been his temptress, even as she had been his destroyer; and a burning, poisonous jealousy consumed her, twisted in with the lust for her vengeance. She hated him with a hate unutterable; but a thrill of thirsty envy ran through her when she knew that this young and graceful loveliness was in his home, in his heart, in his life. If the vain and sensual

nature of Marion Vavasour had ever loved, she had loved-for a brief while the man whose mad devotion had been lavished on her in that imperious force which wakes the heart of women in their own despite; the cruel tyrant had valued most the costliest toy she most utterly, most brutally destroyed; the sweetest, richest hours of her rich, sweet past had been those in which Strathmore had lain subject at her feet. She had deemed that love was for ever dead in him, and she had deemed aright; that which he bore to Lucille was too pure to bring the wild, delicious passion he had known once, and but once alone. But this she knew not; she only knew that in another lay the sole joy of his life; that to another was given his kiss, his thoughts, the wealth of his riches and of his tenderness. And the poison of a fierce and brutal jealousy was in her-the jealousy of a woman who hates, and who has lost all that makes womanhood human.

"He loves her!-he loves her!" The thirsty words were on her lips as she leaned out, looking on the heavy, noxious, sultry street; in them she seemed to feel the prophecy and surety of her vengeance. Yet how touch them who dwelt as far above her now as the skies were above the wretched companions of her infamy? how, with the impotent hate of an outcast, reach and sever the lives surrounded with the might and the purple of power?

The serpent is powerless as the dove to harm, unless it can wind its way in to wreathe around and breathe its venom on the life it would destroy. She had the will, the thirst, the passion to strike, and to strike without pity; but her hands were empty. It was hopeless.

Where she leaned, the flower on the pent, dark casement was blown by the wind against her lips; she shuddered from its touch; she thought of the rose-rich, fragrant, dew-laden-that she had drawn from its leafy nest of foliage on the terrace at Vernonçeaux. As that scarlet, odorous rose had been her life in the Past,-as that withered, prisoned flower in the closeness of the sunless, noxious garret was her life in the Present! The poetry which still lingered in this woman's nature made her lean over the yellow faded leaves drooping there in the sickening air, and see in them companions to her fate, and touch them with a weary hand-the hand that once dealt life or death at pleasure, and was touched with as reverent a kiss of homage as that which queens receive! Susceptible, impressionable still, a thrill of terrible joy ran through her, as at some symbol and metaphor of vengeance, sure, if slow, as she saw gnawing at its roots the ghastly, poisonous fungi-they were to her an omen and an augury.

Ah!" she whispered to the flower, with the graceful, imaginative fancy which once had been her softest charm, now warped, usurped, and darkened, and made evil like herself, "they have shorn you of beauty, of fragrance, of glory, of life. No sun shines on you, and none think you fair. You are dead, and the world will give you no place-but you hold what will poison still!"

"Was any one ever so happy as you make me?" Lucille asked him, wistfully, with a soft, deep-drawn sigh of joy that could find no eloquence fitting for it, as she leaned against him, in the lateness of that night, looking upward at the stars, while silvered and hushed in the moonlight

reach the depths to which a woman sinks when once unsexed, and cast into the fathomless sea of unlicensed evil; the tigress is more cruel than her mate. Men strike at what they hate; women, more subtle and more merciless, strike at what is best-beloved by the life they would destroy. It is the difference of the sexes; one tramples out under an iron heel, the other poisons unseen and with a smile.

Vague, shapeless, hopeless, her vengeance rose before her sight; she knew now where to strike-but how? Sunk amongst the lowest, destitute, and banned from every household, how could she sever two lives lifted far above her in the security of rank, and power, and peace? How could she learn the force to forge a bolt to reach and pierce the kingly mail of the patrician and the statesman? She had seen where the single weakness lay in the steel-clad strength of the man who had denied her mercy; but her hands were empty, she had no weapon with which to strike. All that brutality could have compassed, all that a serpent subtlety and an insatiate thirst could have schemed and been slaked in, she would have done; but her power was paralysed, whilst her passion to destroy burned but the fiercer for its impotence.

"He loves her!-he loves her!" the words that had been hissed from her lips in the night stillness as she had looked on them, broke from them now, as though in them she felt the whole measure of her hate were gathered, as though in them lay the mystical encantation at whose summons vengeance would rise incarnate, to be her minister and slave. She hated Lucille's young loveliness and life, as that which is evil ever hates that which is pure; the divine compassion which had pitied her, the sweet graciousness with which the young girl had smiled on her and offered her her roses, were but memories which made her savage greed the thirstier to destroy her.

She knew nothing of her save what rumour, floating to her as rumour floats amongst the masses of those above them, told; that she was a young, high-born girl, whom he had married in her earliest years, and of whom many idle stories wandered downward through all the ranks of society, till even the lowest caught and retailed them, touching her gentleness to all who suffered or sought charity, and her husband's passionate devotion to her, Rumour's hundred tongues outlying one another in what they babbled of the beauty, the luxury, the brilliance with which it was his pleasure to surround her, and of the strange tenderness in which he was said to hold one whom he had wedded when the world had deemed him bound solely and for ever to the chillness of power and the solitude of ambition.

This was all she knew; but it was more than enough to overfill the measure of a deadly hate, sole lingering passion of a ruined and ruthless life, which, accursed and driven out itself from every fairer and every holier thing, loathed and panted to destroy all beauty that lived in another, all light that shone on other lives.

Strathmore had been her slave; in his passion, in his crime, she had been his temptress, even as she had been his destroyer; and a burning, poisonous jealousy consumed her, twisted in with the lust for her vengeance. She hated him with a hate unutterable; but a thrill of thirsty envy ran through her when she knew that this young and graceful loveliness was in his home, in his heart, in his life. If the vain and sensual