CHAPTER IX.

Alice Montgomery’s health steadily drooped as the weeks went by and brought no sign from her husband in reply to her loving message, and when at length she received the letter written by her husband on leaving the monastery its utter hopelessness served only to add to her misery and to further undermine her health.

“We must take our poor darling south for the winter,” said the old grandmother to her husband, “or we shall lose her,” and her sad-eyed partner sighed acquiescence.

For Alice, the spring of her life seemed broken, and look which way she would, the horizon seemed dark and hopeless.

Her brother’s malady showed no signs of improvement; he went about pursued by a thousand phantasmal monetary cares--a craze of his brain for which no remedy could be provided, and which was only kept within bounds by his habit of spending long hours daily in signing imaginary checks in payment of inextinguishable loans.

In the late autumn an incident happened to him which accomplished what his medical advisers had considered to be well-nigh impossible in the ordinary course of nature.

While hanging a picture for his sister one day, the step-ladder on which he stood gave way, and precipitated him through a large pane of thick plate-glass. The sharp edges of the glass cut his face and neck severely and the result was a most terrible and alarming hemorrhage, which was only stopped after such a loss of blood as imperiled for a time the sufferer’s life.

This loss, however, served to ease and finally to entirely remove the pressure upon his brain resulting from his bullet wound, and when he came back to consciousness from the long fainting spells which succeeded the loss of blood, he inquired feebly of his sister, where he was, and whether she knew who the man was who had shot him.

His life, from the moment George Montgomery’s bullet had struck him until now, was a complete blank.

When Alice Montgomery learned from her brother’s lips what had taken place between him and her husband on the night of the quarrel, she, gentle soul, had no blame for the latter, although she loaded herself with bitter reproaches.

“My poor husband; what _must_ he have thought to see me meeting and kissing another man surreptitiously, when he believed I had no male relative living excepting the one in this house!”

Her husband’s letter had prepared her for her brother’s confession, but the details, as furnished by the latter, showed that the crime had been the result of but a momentary frenzy of jealousy which, as a woman, she could readily forgive.

When she took her first walk out of doors with her invalid brother, the last shock of autumn had stripped the trees and covered the sward with a dense matting of leaves which the colored gardener was leisurely removing with a large rake.

For a while the two stopped to speak to the old servitor, and then the latter resumed his work.

Suddenly Alice sprang with a cry from her brother’s side and seized the gardener’s rake.

“Stop! I saw something flash in the light just where your rake is.”

Softly she turned over the crumpled mass and there, at last, lying on a withered chestnut leaf, and round and clear as the first day it was made, lay the wedding-ring lost on that fateful morning, so many weary months ago.

Hidden in the dense green of the turf during the summer season, it had become exposed by the withering of the grass, only to be presently covered by the falling leaves.

First glancing at the initials and date cut on the inside of the hoop to see that there was no chance of a mistake, Alice pressed the ring again and again to her lips, cooing and murmuring glad words of love to herself the while.

“This is my wedding-ring,” she exclaimed to her greatly astonished brother, “which I lost on the day of your--your first accident, and all my trouble, I am sure, resulted from that loss. Now its recovery seems like an omen of good luck. Oh, I wonder where on the face of the world my dear husband is! I want to send him a message to tell him that all will be right if he will only come back.” And then as the apparent hopelessness of his return came back to her mind, the bright light died out of her eyes, and she resumed the walk with her brother in silence.

At the same hour George Montgomery learned for the first time from his dying comrade’s lips about the message which his wife had sent him by cable: “Come back; all is well.”

He had no words of reproach for the man who had atoned for the harm which he had done by sacrificing his life for him, but even in the midst of his great and new-found happiness, he groaned to think what dire complications the want of a reply to that message might have entailed.

The Indian had towed the boat to the shores of the beautiful Lake Rosalie, in whose wonderful hammocks that branch of the Seminole tribe which still clung to the Grand Mico, Tallahassee, had long built their wigwams.

The Indians bore the wounded man gently up the bluff on a deer-skin litter, and laid him on a soft couch of prepared Spanish moss, or old man’s beard, as it is sometimes called.

Over the sick man’s couch a great live oak flung its protecting shade, high above and impermeable to either sun or rain. On all sides the same gigantic trees with their dense evergreen foliage, towered to the skies, their vast limbs festooned with the long draperies of the flowing Spanish moss. A wide open space lay within a vast forest of these trees. The space was large enough for the encampment of an army, and as the mighty span of the live oak branches enabled them to overlap far overhead, the whole looked like some vast cathedral ornamented with delicate fretwork and bathed in a soft and appropriate religious gloom.

To the left of the wounded man lay beautiful Lake Rosalie, across whose broad bosom a refreshing breeze swept which fanned his fevered brow.

To his right, and far within the natural retreat, stood a cluster of wigwams, in whose entrances could be seen groups of squaws of all ages curiously regarding the new arrivals.

After a proper interval had elapsed, the aged Chief Tallahassee, came forward from his tent to greet George Montgomery. The chief was a man of commanding and exceedingly dignified appearance. He was evidently in nowise forgetful of the glories of the tribe of which he was head, even although that tribe should have dwindled down to a mere handful.

The braves who stood by his side were men of gigantic stature, and the Czar of all the Russias owns not warrior more true, or courtiers more obedient or of superior address.

The turbaned heads, clear aquiline features, and long wavy hair served to distinguish this race from all others on the continent of America. Beside their intellectual faces and stalwart frames, the cunning and ferocious Apache, with his meaner physique, shifty eye and animal profile, looked as the hyena looks beside the royal-looking lion.

George Montgomery despatched a letter to his wife, availing himself of the services of an Indian to reach the nearest postal point.

Allowing an interval of ten days to elapse, the same Indian returned by his direction for a reply.

None, however, came either that week or the next, and after the third week the Indian went back no more, and the gloom returned to George Montgomery’s brow.

He would fain have sped northward himself to investigate the cause of this silence, but his dying friend still lingered, and as his end drew near he seemed more eagerly to crave the other’s society.

“George--it will not be long--wait and close my eyes, and say a Christian prayer over my grave.”

And George, in sore trouble, waited.

At length it was clear that the end was at hand and poor De Leon begged his friend not to leave his side that day. As George sat by the other’s couch his ear caught now and then the utterances of delirium of his dying comrade.

“George! they are coming, and will soon be here. If they come before the sun sinks behind Lake Rosalie, I shall die happy.”

Then he slumbered, and George’s head sank on his breast in sad and heavy meditation.

“See! they are coming!” suddenly cried De Leon, rousing from his stupor and startling the various members of the tribe within sound.

George glanced anxiously at his friend, who was now struggling to a sitting position, and pointing across the lake.

“Look! look!” continued the dying man, “they have come in time.”

As Montgomery’s eyes followed the other’s hand, he saw, far in the distance, a small steam-boat crossing the lake. He leaped to his feet and then sat down, bitterly adding aloud, “Why should I excite myself, it is probably a party of surveyors.”

An hour later, George Montgomery and Alice, his wife, stood hand in hand by the death-bed of De Leon, and the latter’s dying eyes seemed only to have waited for this, for when they saw the happy reunion, they smiled a last benediction and then closed forever.

The meeting between husband and wife, inexpressible as it was in words, was a profound surprise to both. Mrs. Montgomery had gone South at her grandmother’s request, and George’s first letter was still following her. During their stay in Florida the old lady heard that Chief Tallahassee was camped near Lake Rosalie, and she conceived the brilliant idea of visiting her former friend, and, at the same time, lending some additional interest to her grand-daughter’s life.

With some difficulty she had secured the use of a small steam-yacht, with what result the reader already knows.

Tallahassee and two of his braves were absent when the boat arrived.

When the former silently entered the camp, rifle in hand, he found himself suddenly face to face with Mrs. Montgomery and the elder lady.

As he saw Alice, a wonderful light leapt to his eyes, and in the soft Seminole tongue he murmured: “It is the Water-Lily come back,” and he stooped and kissed the fair young hand which hung by her side.

“Ah, no, Tallahassee,” exclaimed the elder lady, with a rising mist in her eyes and a quiver in her voice which showed that she forgave the present neglect for the sake of the old and faithful memory, “Water-lilies fade as even great warriors fade. I am the friend whose husband you saved at Homosassa, and this new Water-Lily is my grand-daughter.”

Tallahassee recognized his error, and his eyes had a soft and tender light in them, as he scanned the aged though still beautiful lineaments of the woman he had known and loved so many years ago. Then he gently took her hand and raised it to his lips, saying tenderly as he did so, “The Water-Lily blooms afresh every spring, but Tallahassee, the Seminole, fades and dies.”

* * * * *

That night, as the full-orbed moon shone on the waters of Lake Rosalie, Alice explained fully what had only been whispered when they met. Her brother, she told her husband, had recovered, and no one save themselves knew who had wounded him. He, on his part, explained that some one else had received the message she had sent to Madrid begging him to return; but the name of the man who had received it, he did not divulge, so that in mingling her tears with those of her husband over De Leon’s lonely grave by Lake Rosalie, there was no bitterness from the thought of wrong done by the dead.

* * * * *

As George replaced on his wife’s hand the ring which had been lost, their eyes met in a long eloquent glance, misty with happy tears. “I will take good care not to take it off again, darling,--that is what you mean, is it not?--for I am sure that whatever others may say, _we_ will always believe that it is very unlucky either to take off or lose one’s wedding-ring.”

THE LEGEND OF THE RED MOSS RAPIDS.

“Is this the spot where the knight of the old legend was killed, Rowell?”

“Yes, dear, he died on these sharp, spear-pointed rocks, and the old folks living around here who remember the particulars as they were handed down through long generations, say that the rocks assumed that shape and the moss for the first time put on that peculiar blood tint after the murder. Imagination, no doubt; still the combination is certainly a very weird one.”

“Suppose you tell me the legend, dear, while we sit on this sloping bank; but, first of all, let me ask, was not the knight who was killed an ancestor of yours?”

“Our family is descended from his brother, Sir Gawain Erfert, whose likeness you saw in the picture gallery.”

“What! that strange, stern-looking knight in mail with his hand resting on the cross handle of his sword?”

“Yes, dear, he was the real founder of our family.”

“And now for the legend, dear,” said the fair Hilda, a beautiful girl of nineteen with large, dark, sympathetic eyes, and a smile whose brightness lit up all the shaded landscape.

Still, Rowell hesitated, and his naturally serious, almost sombre, air, took on more than a touch of gloom.

The two were betrothed lovers, and their wedding was fixed for the following June. Their engagement had suffered from none of the vicissitudes which are supposed to imperil the course of true love. This was largely owing to the depth of their mutual attachment, but it was also due in no small degree to the perfect compatibility of their natures. She was all sweetness and gentleness; he all calmness and strength, with apparently none of the usual masculine waywardness which is more prone to cloud than to illuminate the lover’s horizon.

“I am waiting, sir,” expostulated the gentle Hilda, nestling much closer to his side than was necessary to a successful hearing.

“Do you really want to hear that unhappy legend, dear?” replied Rowell. “It is a miserable story, and the consequences of what took place here so long ago have left a poison in our family tree which has showed itself in every generation since, in some painful way. Ever since that time, when the Knight Templar died on these rocks, five hundred years ago, some wretched blunder, like an echo of the old one, has occurred time and again to cloud each generation with misery and self-reproach; and caused the family to be known throughout the whole North Country as the “Gloomy Erferts.” When I tell you the story, which is shown by the old chronicles to be a dismally true one in every detail, and in that respect different from many other Border Legends, you may, perhaps, not care to become a member of such an ill-starred house. The risk, dear, seems to me to be quite considerable,” and the smile with which Rowell looked into the eyes of his _fiancée_ had infinitely more of wistfulness and pathos in it than was good to see in one so young.

“Oh, Rowell, do you think me a child! Our marriage is now so near that I consider myself one of the family already; and you would not hide my own family’s secrets from me would you?”

To Rowell, the warm pressure of the locked hands, the arch, lovelit glance, and the magnetism of the beautiful girl-woman at his side were irresistible; and taking the dainty head between his hands he kissed the upturned face again and again--eyes, hair, lips--in a burst of passion which left the fair Hilda’s cheeks all aglow, and her eyes eloquent with a struggle between rebellion and rapture.

“Now, to business, sir, if you have got over your outbreak of lunacy,” resumed the still blushing Hilda, as she regained possession of herself, and moved, with much pretence of distance, a foot away.

Rowell, seeing there was no escape, took up the recital of the legend, but there was a protest in his tones, which roused a look of remonstrance in his listener.

“When the second Crusade failed,” began Rowell, “among the surviving English knights who drifted slowly back to their homes, across Europe, enfeebled by wounds and the pestilential climate in which they had endured such untold hardships in their efforts to rescue the Holy City from the Infidel, there was a Knight Templar who for special valor in rescuing the person of the Preceptor as well as the sacred standard of his Order after their capture by the Saracens, was, at his request, absolved from his vows of celibacy by the Grand Master.

“This meant a retirement from the sacred Order, and as the latter’s rules recognized no form of withdrawal, or absolution from its vows save by death, the elaborate ceremonial customary on the death of a great knight was observed and the Knight Templar obtained his freedom only after the due performance of his funeral obsequies. The fame and position of these knights and of their spiritual order was so great that it is difficult to imagine any knight craving release.

“The explanation of the strange request, however, was to be found in the fact that this knight, after taking his vows, had met and had fallen hopelessly in love with a beautiful woman, the Lady Erminie Athelrade, and the love was fully reciprocated.

“A mutual confession of attachment had taken place, and the knight left with the apparently hopeless task before him of earning absolution from his vows by some unparalleled service to the Order. Failing success--and fulfilment of their desires had seemed beyond earthly possibilities--their only hope lay in some future reward for their constancy, beyond the grave, for the knight was of stainless character and would rather have suffered death a thousand times at the hands of the Paynim hosts than have betrayed his vows. So the knight had left England for the Holy Land, breathing the sentiment which found voice hundreds of years later: ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.’

“You will now understand with what feelings the knight--now no longer a Templar, but simply Sir Julian Erfert--found himself, wounded and war-beaten, it is true, but still alive, back in his native country; in the same little island as the woman he worshipped, whose image, glowing in his heart like a holy flame, had inspired him to deeds which had thrilled Christendom and beggared all knightly possibilities.

“Sir Julian, I ought to say, had one confidant of his passion, his elder brother, Sir Rowell.

“When Sir Julian arrived in England, no one would have recognized in the battered knight, innocent of followers, the former princely Templar, whose splendor of apparel and of retinue had elicited so much applause when he left to join the Crusaders five years before.

“It was late one summer afternoon, in early June, when Sir Julian rode up to the Castle of Barronby, where he had left the Lady Erminie in the care of her guardian, the Earl of Wolston, a man, the knight now recollected with a chill of apprehension, notorious for his grasping and ambitious nature.

“Sir Julian had had no tidings of the lady since he had left, and he had sent her no love message, ever mindful of the fact that it would be death to the fair reputation of any dame to have her name breathed by a Templar, or to have it known that she was interested in his welfare. He had sent her word of the accomplishment of his release, but whether or not his message had perished by the way in those perilous times he could not tell. He had forwarded a letter to his brother, too, and so there he was at last under the shadow of Castle Barronby’s walls, with his heart throbbing as it had never beat even when a dozen Saracen blades were at his throat and the gleam of his Red Cross banner was lost among the tossing crescents of the Infidel host.

“As he gathered rein for an instant in an open glade, a foot soldier, unarmed and with his head-casque gone, tottered into the opening and fell with a moan into the heavy grass. On seeing this strange sight, the knight dismounted and stooped over the soldier, who was evidently badly wounded.

“After he had unlaced the fainting man’s jerkin the soldier opened his eyes, and seeing Sir Julian, strove to rise, while his hollow voice struggled for utterance.

“‘Sir Knight, go tell the Earl, the Lady Athelrade has been carried off and her guard killed.’

“‘How many, and which way did they go?’ briefly inquired the knight.

“‘Full half a score spearmen and a knight whose crest I could not see. They went by Swivel’s Moss, on the Umber Road,’ and he said no more but fell back dead.

“The knight gave no glance to the castle, but he looked to his saddle girths, untied the mace at his saddle-bow, loosened the heavy sword in its sheath, and swung into the saddle humming softly a quaint eastern air which made his gallant charger crane back his ears to hear, and took all the fatigue out of his weary limbs. ‘This is like the old times, Salado,’ said the knight softly to his Arab, and the horse leapt at the words.

“The knight looked young again. ‘This is as my soul desired to win her, at the sword’s point. Heaven is good. And here is Swivel’s Moss, and there lies the Umber Road. Now, Salado!’

“Half an hour more and the Mivern Rapids could be heard. A few minutes later and the glint of helmets came to the rider through the trees. ‘We shall catch them at the ford, Salado,’ and the words gave new life to the willing Arab, who came of a fighting race, and to whom fighting was the very breath of life. ‘Ten to one, Salado, dare we venture?’ and the knight laughed softly to himself, and the flying steed shook his sides as if he too chuckled at the thought.

“A minute more, and the knight found himself face to face with the abductors, who, hearing pursuit, had gathered themselves into line on the edge of the ford.

“Yes, there they were, fully half a score and a knight with visor down, and without a crest, in command, and on the further side a female figure on horseback being hurried on in advance, on either side of her a well-armed soldier.

“‘Surrender the lady,’ shouted the knight through the bars of his visor.

“‘To whom?’ came back the haughty inquiry.

“‘To her friend and Earl Wolston.’

“The strange knight laughed.

“‘Tell the Earl,’ he said, ‘the lady is a willing fugitive, and will not return.’

“Sir Julian made no response, but Salado felt the touch--no more--of a gilded spur and shot forward like an arrow from a bow. The men-at-arms were stout and willing, but three of them fell from their seats like dummies before the whirl of that demoniac mace; and the gallant Arab fought no less willingly and mangled the opposing steeds. The odds were terrible, but such odds were familiar, and the solitary warrior was not without his chances. He had almost cleared a path, and even in the frenzy of fight his brain was troubled to know why the lady made no sign. Another horseman overthrown, and he stood face to face with the leader, exchanged with him ringing blows, which could be heard far above the roar of the rapids, on whose edge they fought. Once more the spur touched Salado, and the mace beat down the leader’s guard. Victory was in sight, almost, when, alas! the gallant Arab’s foot sank in the ooze of the river, and his suddenly arrested movement threw horse and rider into the shallow torrent. Sir Julian struggled to extricate himself and to rise to his feet, but half a dozen spears hemmed him in and drank his blood through the rifts in his armor made by the pointed rocks. The struggle of his horse carried him beneath the current, the surging flood filled his closed casque, and a long and last good-night fell, in his native land, on the knight who had survived all the dangers of the terrible Crusade. No, at least not yet, the leader knight, now unhelmeted, directed his spearmen to raise the dying knight and carry him to shore. But a javelin of rock between his shoulder-plates held him fast while he was bleeding to death from spear thrusts.

“When his helmet was unbarred he regained the consciousness temporarily lost, and his dying eyes wandered from the faces of the men around him to that of their leader. The sight of the latter seemed to trouble him, and he strove feebly to clear his eyes from the spray of the water and the mist of approaching death. ‘My brother, can it be?’ he murmured hoarsely.

“But why prolong the dismal story. It was his brother, Sir Rowell, who had carried out the abduction of the lady. He had heard that the Earl was about to wed the Lady Erminie to his nephew for the sake of her lands, and having received his brother’s message from the Holy Land and communicated its contents to the lady, an abduction was arranged as the only possible means of preventing a forced marriage. He had intended that his wife, the Lady Rowell, should give safe sanctuary to Erminie until Julian returned, when the two long-parted lovers should be united.

“The knight died in the arms of the lady he loved. Her lips consoled him--dying--for life’s disappointment. ‘Wait for me,’ were the last words he heard on earth, and his waiting was short, for as his eyes closed in death she drew the dagger from his belt and with it liberated her own soul, so that it could--not follow--but accompany him. They were buried together, and they left behind them the saddest man in all the world, my ancestor, Sir Rowell, whose terrible share in that fatal mistake--innocent enough in all conscience--has left all his descendants a heritage of penance, showing that Nature, like man, never forgets or forgives a blunder, or rather that she fails to discriminate between a crime and a blunder, and punishes or rewards only according to results.

“The tragedy of the rapids has been repeated in our family time and again down through the intervening centuries, not as tragedies perhaps, but as unhappy blunders--echo-like repetition of the first--such as have worked untold miseries to all the race.

“Now, darling, that I have told you the true legend of the Red Moss Rapids, do you still wish to marry into so dismal a family?”

“Yes, yes, more than ever; before it was simply a pleasure, now it is also a duty.”

“In what way, dearest?”

“Ah, that is my secret, sir, only to be revealed on our wedding day; but, tell me, was there no sequel to that terrible tragedy?”

“Well, my ancestor, who was the innocent cause of the slaying of Sir Julian, said on his death-bed that in the far distance he foresaw a time when the shadow consequent on his fatal error would be lifted from our house, but it would only happen when some descendant of the Athelrade family, who should be ignorant of all the circumstances, had of her own free will revived the traditions of the celebrated Order of the Templars.

“It was thought that grief had to some extent crazed the old knight’s brain, and that in the long trances which he was subject to prior to his death his burning desire to right the wrong he had inadvertently done--which had grown to be a perfect monomania with him--had put strange fancies into his head, and that as he imagined the misfortune which fell on our house had come through the slight done to the Order of the Templars by his brother’s retirement from it, even under proper dispensation, he grew in time to believe that peace could only come to the house again through some member of the Athelrade family (Lady Athelrade being the person who, so to speak, tempted Sir Julian) doing what I have stated.”

“Dear me,” remarked the fair Hilda, “how those fine old knights used to worry about things; just fancy any soldier of the present day distressing himself on his death-bed about an unlucky accident for which he was in no way to blame, and torturing his last moments with the forecast of what was going to happen three hundred years later.”

“Yes, it does seem strange,” returned her companion, “that these knights who seemed in many respects so much more cruel and bloodthirsty than men of the present day, should yet have had worries and anxieties which even the most delicate and nervous lady of the nineteenth century would despise. They were a strange medley, those knights of old, steeping Europe in blood for a mere idea, and dying cheerfully themselves if in their final departure they could but kiss a lock of some fair creature some thousands of miles away, whom they adored. Oh, enthusiasm is a great, an immeasurably great force. Tallyrand says: ‘_Point de zèle--point de zèle_,’ but his clarion-trumpeted cry of ‘No zeal, no zeal,’ is a vast mistake I think.

“His maxim may be all right for statesmen and diplomatists, but when the zealot dies from off the earth, one of Nature’s grandest forces will disappear.”

* * * * *

“Thank you, dear, that was quite an interesting little homily,” archly ventured Hilda, as she wooed her lover back to present and more attractive pursuits by placing her lovely arms round his neck. “Now, suppose you tell me, my hero, what you will give me if I can erase all that dark inky stain from your family escutcheon, in addition to providing you with a brand-new bride?”

“Well, _cara-mia_, I am afraid it is not to be done; what you term the ink stain has been there too long. My little sweetheart, who cannot find acidity enough for her daily life, and is imposed upon all the time on that account, certainly cannot evolve any acid strong enough to clear away a stain which has grown deeper with the centuries. No, dearest, if you insist upon marrying me after my recent disclosure, I am afraid you will find that the ill-fate will follow us, and that our union will be indeed for woe as well for weal.”

“Fie upon you, sir, for such gloomy thoughts; they are unworthy of my future husband, and I protest against them. Yes, sir,--in this way,” and her rosy lips stole upwards to his after a fashion that effectually erased everything but Paradise from his mind.

* * * * *

The wedding-day must have been Hymen’s own selection. The morning broke bright and clear with that dewy freshness in the air only to be found in Merrie England.

“Happy the bride the sun shines on,” a hundred pair of loving lips murmured in joyous congratulation to the dainty white-robed figure crowned with orange blossoms.

Surely never since time began did wedding-bells sound so merrily and so sweetly on the palpitating air as on that morning when the proud and happy Rowell led the fair Hilda from the altar. Forgotten were all ill-fated ancestry and gloomy legends. The past rolled itself up hastily and convulsively, as a roll of long-kept musty vellum bounds back into its old-time shape, and only the happy, glorious, untranslateable present remained. Words of gracious congratulation fell in showers on the ears of the blissful pair as sweet June flowers fell beneath their feet; but they scarcely heard or saw, so much greater was the joyous tumult in their happy blissful hearts.

* * * * *

“Hilda, my darling,” inquired the happy husband when his breath had come back to him, and they were seated behind a pair of high-stepping horses on their way to the railway station, with suspicious traces of rice still visible on their travelling attire, “I noticed you signed your name in the marriage register as Hilda Athelrade Erfert of Temple Newsam!”

“Yes, dearest, and you want to know how I come to use the name of Athelrade? Well, dear, I am a descendant of the Athelrade family. And O, my darling, I must confess something else now--_my secret_. I am also the owner of Temple Newsam--the innocent restorer of the tombs of the Knight Templars, foretold by your ancestor, and O, sweetheart, last and best of all, the destroyer of your family curse, as well as, I hope, the founder of your own particular and individual happiness.”

TWO NINETY-DAY OPTIONS.

“It is a most wretched business, and I wish I were well out of it.”

As these words fell from the speaker’s lips his strong right hand smote the portals in front of him, and Delmonico’s heavy glass doors swung violently back in response to the vigor of his touch.

Carried away by the force of his feelings, he swung into the restaurant with the full vigor of his mountain stride, and more as if he were a detective in expectation of surprising a gang of coiners than an innocent visitor in quest of congenial society and wholesome fare.

To speak the truth, Douglas Gaskell, a native of Scotland, and mining expert by profession, thought himself in very hard luck indeed this bright summer evening. Not even the hum of cheerful life around him could overcome his despondency or soften the bitter reflections which gnawed at his heart.

And as he reviewed the situation later on under the soothing influences of his cigar and coffee, he still reassured himself that he had most excellent grounds for repining, if not indeed for despairing altogether.

Glancing backward a few months he saw himself returning to his native land after many long years of self-denial and hardship in the mining districts of India and South Africa, with enfeebled health, a few hundred pounds, a good reputation for honesty in a business of some temptations, and a ripe experience in mining matters.

Then, in his retrospect, amid the hum of cheerful humanity around him, he saw the fairest face in Scotland smiling on him; he saw an obdurate old Scottish laird, who utterly refused to let his daughter be engaged to a “penniless mining fellow;” and after a long siege by soft, persistent womanhood’s irresistible arms, he saw the grim old borderer yield so far as to say that if he, Gaskell, could satisfy him, before he started for Norway in July, that he had means to maintain his daughter suitably, he would then be willing to consider the propriety of an engagement, on the clear, mutual understanding, however, that Gaskell must sheer off for good if he were unable to satisfy the old man within the three months which he allowed him.

This had been a most despairing decision to the mining expert, who termed it the offer of “A ninety-day option on the woman I love, with impossible conditions, and the wreck of two lives as a forfeit.” But Madge, the lady of his heart’s affections, had declared everything was possible of achievement to true love within three months; and how his stern face softened as he recalled the bright, hopeful loyal look with which she had dispatched him to London to take counsel with her uncle, her dead mother’s favorite brother.

He remembered how the uncle had obtained him a commission to examine an American gold mine, as a step towards finding, on his own account, while in the mining districts of the United States, some good property suitable for the British market.

“If you find such a mine,” he had said, “I will do my best to place it for you, and you can honestly add $100,000 to its price as discoverer, if it is large enough, and provided the terms on which you obtain the control will justify it. That is the only way that occurs to me in which you can honestly comply with the old curmudgeon’s absurd conditions within the time.”

The face of the silent and absorbed man grew dark as he recalled how, in the execution of his commission, he had arrived in New York only to learn that the property he came to examine had been withdrawn from the market.

The fact was that the gentleman who had offered the property in London, and who had accompanied him across the ocean to introduce him to the proprietors, had taken his measure accurately during the voyage, and had reported to his colleagues and joint owners that he was quite satisfied that Gaskell could not be tampered with, but would insist upon making a thorough examination, such as must inevitably disclose the worthlessness of the property. The owners were simply a gang of unscrupulous adventurers, who had thought to avail themselves of the existing craze for American mining properties.

It was the announcement of the withdrawal of the property which had plunged Douglas Gaskell into the depths of despondency in which this narrative finds him.

As his retrospection ended he sat lost in thought, and barely conscious of the ebb and flow of the city’s gilded youth, and the men of affairs who throng Delmonico’s in ever-increasing numbers.

He was all unconsciously being very closely observed by three gentlemen seated at a distant table. Mr. Oswald, who had accompanied him across from England; Hector Marble and Hamilton Gilbey, all “speculators” in other people’s money. They were, in fact, the owners of the withdrawn mine. Mr. Gilbey broke the silence at their table. “It is just as easy to make a large haul as a small one,” he said. “We must manage to fix something up for this Scotch expert who is sitting over there looking so glum. He is disappointed at our withdrawal of this mine, and is, I imagine, ready for a fresh suggestion. Now I have been casting about for something to suit him, and I think I have discovered it at last.”

The three drew their chairs closer together than strictly honest men found it necessary to do in Delmonico’s, and the champagne in their glasses grew flat, and their cigars went out, while the one expounded and the two received and approved one of the choicest plans which villainy has ever concocted in connection with international syndicate or corporate business.

The proposition laid by Mr. Gilbey before his colleagues with much graphic force and a wealth of luminous illustration began with the preamble, They must have money. The Scotchman sitting near by suggested a means of getting it; he was only useful in connection with mines; he could not be fooled as to the quality of a mine, therefore he must be fooled in some other way, as they could not promptly get the control of any honest mine on terms which would be acceptable to the syndicate and profitable to them. That was the argument, and it was considered as being to the point. The proposition was as follows: Gilbey knew of a mine called “The Gold Queen” in California, which had at one time embraced a great number of claims and covered quite an extent of territory. This mine became quite a valuable property, and a dispute having arisen as to the ownership of one-half of it, the property was finally divided between the two litigants by decision of the Court of Appeals. Both properties retained the title of “Gold Queen,” and openings had been made in both about 700 yards apart. The workings in one mine had proved enormously successful, and that mine could not be purchased. The other had resulted in failure, and very little, if any, labor was now being expended on it.

Mr. Gilbey’s suggestion was that the “Gold Queen” mine, which had proved a failure, should be optioned to the English syndicate, and that while its survey should be correctly given on the option, steps should be taken to get Mr. Gaskell to examine the good mine, under the belief that he was inspecting the one optioned to his syndicate. “Although you can’t deceive him as to the existence of paying ore in a mine,” continued Gilbey, “you can readily confuse him as to the identity of the property he is examining, more especially if he is simply a mineralogist and not a surveyor as well.”

“I know the manager of the ‘Gold Queen’ now in operation--number one let us call it--and I can guarantee that he will see this business through if we divide with him. Number one is well known to be well worth a large sum of money, and it won’t do for us to offer the other property at less than half a million. The owner of the latter is willing to give me a four months’ option on it at $15,000.”

Their plans being matured, the illustrious pair were presently introduced to Mr. Gaskell as the owners of the mine which had been withdrawn. They had exerted themselves, they said, to find him a property of equal promise, and had at last, after much trouble, succeeded in obtaining for him an option on the “Gold Queen.”

Mr. Gaskell had notified Madge’s uncle of his first disappointment by cable, and two hours after meeting Gilbey’s partners he walked across Madison Square and sent another cablegram intimating that he had heard of another property, and was about to go West to examine it at his own expense.

* * * * *

Two days later Mr. Gaskell left for San Francisco, where, on his arrival, he met the manager of the “Gold Queen” No. 1, who had received a telegram from Mr. Gilbey to go to San Francisco to receive an important letter, which letter he had carefully read and very cordially approved.

The days which followed had many anxious moments for the three speculators in New York.

“I do most devoutly hope this business won’t land us in State’s prison,” murmured the less courageous Marble.

“What nonsense. We have not made any incriminating statement in writing.”

“True, but you forget your letter to the manager of the mine. Won’t that show conspiracy?”

“That is all right,” was Gilbey’s airy rejoinder; “the manager is under my thumb.”

“By the way,” continued the tranquil Gilbey, “did you notice that Gaskell had the ninety days’ option which you gave him made to himself personally, and not as representing the syndicate?”

“Yes,” replied Oswald, “I noticed it. He would not take the responsibility of spending the syndicate’s money in making investigations which the members had not ordered. If he approves the property he will recommend it to his syndicate.”

A soft, sweet, childlike smile crept over the faces of the precious three as they separated.

* * * * *

A fortnight later Mr. Gilbey presented to his delighted associates the following dispatch from Gaskell, dated San Francisco:

“I approve of the mine optioned, subject to some amendment in price, and start East to-night.

“DOUGLAS GASKELL.”

When Mr. Gaskell returned to New York he said he had made a very careful examination of the mine, and would be willing to accept an option for it if the price were fixed at $250,000 instead of double that sum. The radical curtailment of their figures somewhat dampened the ardor of the three confederates, but finally the price was fixed at $325,000 cash, with many protests on the part of Messrs. Marble and Gilbey. Mr. Oswald had throughout taken only such interest in the matter as a friend might manifest. His name did not occur on any of the papers given Mr. Gaskell, and on this occasion as on the others, he took little part in the arrangements.

In due time the purchase money was paid over, and Messrs. Marble & Gilbey, each with $100,000 to his credit, decided that they would seize the opportunity to satisfy a long-felt ambition to explore Southern America, not in the least--they were careful to assure the cynical Oswald--because they were fearful as to what view the cold judicial eye of the law might take of their action in connection with the mine they had sold.

Mr. Oswald, who, as stated, had purposely kept in the background, and in consequence contented himself with a smaller share of the profits, remained in New York.

* * * * *

Six months later Messrs. Gilbey and Marble were in the city of Mexico, wearied beyond the power of words with the vaunted charms of that country, and anxious only to be once more within sight of New York. Many a time they echoed the sentiment of the city wanderer at which we smile so often, “I would rather be a lamp-post on Broadway than a king anywhere else.”

But respite was at hand. A letter to Mr. Oswald, making apparently casual inquiry as to whether he had heard anything further of the “Gold Queen” sale, elicited the following characteristic reply:

“If you are cooping yourselves up in the city of Mexico because you are afraid to return on account of any troublesome developments in the ‘Gold Queen’ business, you may as well come back at once. The Englishmen have not discovered their blunder, and I do not think they ever will. I have a good story to tell you which is worth your while to come 3,000 miles to hear. Meet me at dinner on the 8th, usual time and place, and I’ll tell you the story. There’s no place like home!”

Within three hours the two speculators were on the way to New York.

When the second bottle of champagne had been opened at Mr. Oswald’s dinner the host lit a cigar, saying he supposed they were dying to hear his story.

The lips of the two twitched a little, and a hardly perceptible pallor indicated a passing nervousness.

“When the Scotchman got to the mine,” Oswald began, “the manager took him to ‘Gold Queen’ No. 1, as you (or as we) arranged. He remained under ground forty-eight hours. The manager was cautioned not to lose sight of him for a moment, but he gave in after thirty-six hours and went home to bed, as the Scot looked like spending a week in the bowels of the earth. When the manager returned, twelve hours later, he found Gaskell just coming to the surface. In reply to his inquiry he said he had completed his investigation and would take some rest. Whether this was merely a blind to put the manager off his guard, or whether he changed his mind, I don’t know, but after he had seen the other descend the mine, and had had some breakfast, he took the map which you gave him out of his valise and proceeded very carefully to compare it--first, with the boundaries of the No. 1 mine, which some loafing miner pointed out to him at his request, and then with the map of the same mine hanging in the company’s office, and which the manager had stupidly omitted to remove.

“As nearly as can be computed, it took that fellow just about five minutes to detect the trick. Of course this is mere guess-work, for the man himself was as silent as a clam. The profundity of his silence when he unravelled our tangled plots aroused my admiration.

“After he learned the game, he placidly descended Mine No. 2, the one of which he really held the option. He remained in that mine just sixteen hours, and all that time the manager concluded he was in bed and asleep. I’m sure I don’t know why, except on the assumption that a man must sleep sometime.

“With the assistance of an old Mexican miner, who practically lives down in that mine, in one of the shafts, he thoroughly explored the mine, more especially at that part which is in a straight line with the rich vein of No. 1.

“He had to all appearances some queer theory about that vein, for he and the old Mexican worked for more than twelve hours cutting in its direction. The result of these efforts was (it was ascertained after the purchase) that while the Mexican slept Gaskell struck a continuation of the vein belonging to No. 1. Having satisfied himself that he had struck the true vein and after taking out several specimens of the ore, he carefully covered up his ‘find,’ awoke the old man and returned to the surface.

“You will understand the discovery Gaskell had made when I tell you that from the vein in No. 1 to where it was identified in No. 2 is just 700 yards, of which 550 run through the land of No. 2, so that 11.14 of the great vein belong to the mine that Gaskell bought.

“Well, gentlemen, Gaskell sold that mine to his syndicate--it was his own venture--for $750,000, half cash, half stock, and his syndicate sold it to the public for $1,500,000. The new company has already taken $500,000 out of the mine in four months’ working, with the prospect of taking out twenty times as much in the next two years. The Scotsman’s profit of $325,000 taken in stock is now worth $1,000,000 in the market.”

Marble and his associates gazed at each other fixedly for a minute, and although their eyes spoke volumes, no word was uttered. The situation was altogether too deep for words. With one impulse they rose in grim silence from the table. “I find the air in this room suffocating,” finally ejaculated Gilbey, “let us go.”

As the now silent trio passed into the vestibule in making their exit to Fifth Avenue, Oswald shattered his preternatural calm by ejaculating: “Great Jupiter!” The exclamation was not surprising, for there, coming toward them, was Mr. Gaskell, the man they had done their best to swindle, and his bride, the beautiful and queenly Madge. For a moment a wavering in the ranks of the three was perceptible, and just the suspicion of a desire to stampede, but the expression on the expert’s face reassured them.

“My dear,” he said, addressing his wife, “let me present to you some friends of mine who once rendered me a very great service--somewhat inadvertently it is true”--(a faint shiver shook the three)--“but nevertheless a genuine service. They helped me to win what I wanted most on earth,” and his eyes rested fondly on his wife.

Mrs. Gaskell commented to her husband afterward on the strange, shy modesty which almost prevented the three gentlemen from meeting her gaze, and his smiling reply was, “They couldn’t stand the battery, dear.”

After the three friends had escaped into the street from the (to them) terrible situation, Oswald, probably for the first time in his life, wore a crestfallen air. “Boys,” he said, “he carries too many guns for us all round. Just think of it, he has never even mentioned to her the--to put it mildly--somewhat peculiar part we took in the mining deal.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you can always tell by the expression in a woman’s eyes, when you are presented to her, how her husband has been in the habit of speaking about you to her. I would rather have faced a hair-trigger revolver than those great gray eyes if she had known our game.”

Mr. Gaskell has taken other ninety-day options since his marriage, and some of them have proved very valuable, but he never expects to find one to equal that marvellous pair by which he won both fortune and bride in 1888.

A STRANGE STORY.

MR. JOHNSTONE’S INFIRMITY.

“Felix Johnstone! What a name, mamma! There is a great want of tone about it. Don’t you think so? I’m sure I hope the man is presentable, but you know how careless and unobservant Dick is.”

The speaker, Maud Ponsonby-Fitzwaring, a lovely girl of some twenty summers, sat, pen in hand, and with her pretty brows all a-pucker, in her mamma’s boudoir, scanning the list of names of intended guests of Ormsby Hall during the ensuing shooting season.

“My dear,” replied her stately and abundant mamma in a tone which settled the matter, “he is as rich as Crœsus, and even if he should prove eccentric, why he is an Australian, and you know everything is excused in a ‘Colonial;’ especially,” resumed the dame after a brief pause and with more than her usual drawl--“especially if he is very wealthy.”

Maud was too young for an argument of this kind to have any weight with her, but she only shrugged her well-poised shoulders by way of protest, and presently the letter of invitation for the Twelfth of August, when grouse shooting commenced, was on its way to Mr. Felix Johnstone.

The person whose name set the dainty Maud’s teeth on edge was a stoutly-built, well-preserved gentleman of some forty years, the greater part of whose life had been spent at the Antipodes, where, if he had not acquired much of the polish demanded by polite society, he had, nevertheless, secured a goodly supply of that excellent substitute for it--gold.

When Mr. Felix Johnstone reached the Hall, in response to the invitation, he found that the bulk of the other visitors had already arrived, and to a great extent “sorted” themselves, as he termed it; that is to say, that the males and females had, for the most part, settled upon their friendships for the period of their stay at Ormsby Hall.

This arrangement left the late arrival somewhat out in the cold. It is true that his friend Dick did his best to make him feel at home, but, as the old Squire, Colonel Ponsonby-Fitzwaring, was somewhat gouty, most of his duties as host devolved upon his son, who had in consequence but little time to devote to any particular guest.

“Jarvis,” said Mr. Johnstone to his valet the morning after his arrival, “you’ll have to keep me posted in things. You know that’s what you’re here for. Captain Fitzwaring recommended you as being the best man he knew, and Dick--I mean the Captain--knows a good man, if anybody does.”

“Yes, sir,” responded Jarvis with more of embarrassment than his usually immovable face was wont to show.

“What shall you wear this morning, sir?” inquired the valet, as if anxious to turn the conversation.

“Well, I thought a frock coat and that pair of lavender trousers, which Poole sent in before I left London, and a white waistcoat, would about suit this kind of weather and the style of society hereabouts--these and--of course patent leather shoes.”

It could hardly have happened in so well-trained a servant, and yet surely it was the ghost of a smile which his master saw flitting across Jarvis’ face.

“Eh! What is it, Jarvis?” inquired Mr. Johnstone sharply, “wont these do?”

“Well, sir,” replied the valet with much deference, “most gentlemen wear knickerbockers and lacing boots in the morning when they are going shooting. I thought, perhaps, this velvet jacket and these corduroy trousers, and woollen stockings or gaiters--”

“What, these great coarse things? Why, I was better dressed than that in the ‘Bush!’--still,” noticing a certain relentlessness of aspect creeping over the well-trained servant’s face, “if I must, I must; only it seems to me that there’s a great fondness here for showing one’s legs. I’m sure the way these flunkies aired their white silk stockings and great calves last night before the ladies was hardly decent. By the way, Jarvis, do you know any of the gentlemen staying here? If you do, just fire away and tell me all about them while I’m dressing myself like a--like a navvy!”

“Well, sir, there’s Mr. Granby just walking across the lawn. He is a celebrated barrister, made his reputation as a junior counsel in the Tichborne case; he is likely to get a judgeship out in Bombay soon, they say. The gentleman with him is Mr. Softleigh, editor of the Morning Whisper, a very fashionable paper. That dark-browed swarthy man with the piercing eyes, just lighting his cigar, is Hugo Swinton, the African traveler who had the terrible fight with the great gorilla now in the Zoo. The man waiting for him is Captain Bottomly, of the Guards, who reformed the British square when the Soudanese broke it at--somewhere in Egypt. They say he has six spear wounds in his body.”

“But, I say, Lord! Who is that pompous individual dressed in black--the one with the clean shaven face and port-winey complexion?”

“That, sir, is the Bishop of Oldchester,” replied Jarvis, with a touch of remonstrance in his tone.

“Well; and even he puts his chubby old calves on exhibition. Is he going shooting too?”

“No, sir,” replied Jarvis, with quite an air, as if there were limits to this kind of thing. “All the Bishops wear black tight fitting cloth gaiters; it is their Episcopal dress.”

“O, I see; well now, who is that very elegant young gentleman with the cane, bowing to the ladies in the pony carriage?”

“That is a Mr. Elphinstone Howard. I have never seen him before, but they tell me he belongs to one of the County families in the North somewhere. He is not very well acquainted with the gentry around here yet, as he has been brought up abroad where his father was retrenching. He saved Colonel Fitzwaring’s life in Florence by stopping a run-away horse, and with that introduction the family took him up and introduced him to English society.”

“Well, Jarvis, all of these men seem to be celebrated for something excepting myself. Can you tell me how such a common-place person as I am comes to be here?”

Jarvis did not like to tell Mr. Johnstone that his great wealth was his recommendation, so he evaded the question by inquiring which of his guns he would use that day.

“Oh, bother the guns,” was the response, “I don’t want to kill anything this beautiful morning. Here, Jarvis, quick!” he called suddenly from the window, “who is that lady driving the ponies?”

“That, sir, is the Lady Evelyn Beeton, daughter of the late Earl of Kingswood.”

“Is she very poor, Jarvis?” inquired Mr. Johnstone, after a substantial sigh indicative of dampened hopes at hearing the lady’s title.

“No, sir, she is reported to be quite wealthy, as she succeeded to the old Earl’s property, excepting the estates which, being entailed in the male line, passed to his nephew.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, Jarvis, deuced sorry, for that is the only woman I could ever have loved. Funny thing to tell you, isn’t it, but then you are in a way my confidential adviser in this strange, God-forsaken country, and I know you would never split on me, for if you did, Jarvis, I would break your blessed neck to a certainty.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the complaisant Jarvis, by way of acknowledging the other’s kind intentions.

“No, sir,” resumed Mr. Felix Johnstone with a burst of enthusiasm, “I’m not one of these men who have all their life long been trailing their hearts through the streets and highways for every thoughtless miss to trample on; my heart is a virgin field to be harvested only by one woman in this world, and if she won’t have it so, then, Jarvis, the grain has got to rot on the ground, that’s all. Now, Jarvis, there is something about the lady’s voice and look which stirs me like a trumpet. I sat opposite her at dinner last night, and the mistakes I made in consequence are something awful to contemplate. You see, Jarvis, she is not too young. She is, I imagine, about thirty----”

“She is thirty-two, sir,” respectfully corrected Jarvis, closing a Burke’s Peerage at which he had been glancing.

“Well, now, it strikes me, my friend,” retorted his master, with a flush on his brow, “that you are infernally precise about the Lady Evelyn Beeton’s age. May I take the liberty of inquiring, sir, how you came to know it exactly--just to a hair, as it were?”

There was fire in the master’s eye, but the well-trained valet answered with stoical calm. “Her ladyship’s age is in the Peerage; sir, I thought it might interest you to know.”

The answer was mollifying, but the little outburst called for a lull in the conversation, and Mr. Johnstone, now fully dressed, stood in silence looking out at the window, while the valet busied himself about his master’s effects with unruffled brow.

“She has such a high-bred and refined air, and such a soft and musical voice, and her eyes, what wonderful color and expression! And then the figure, so graceful, and yet so rounded. She ought to be a queen, and there I’m only a common Australian squatter and digger.”

Such was the murmuring monotone which rolled musically from the massive throat of Felix Johnstone by the window.

“Well--I’m--consumed,” he suddenly shouted, “if that jackanapes Howard hasn’t got into the pony chaise beside her! My hat, Jarvis, quick!”

But soon he reined his fury’s pace. “After all, it is no business of mine,” he resumed, “besides, what could an uncultivated clod like me have in common with a noble refined lady like that! Now if she were only poor or in need of a friend, and,” warming to his work, “in danger of her life, there would be some show for me, but as it is, my case is simply hopeless,” with which moody reflections Mr. Johnstone slowly wended his way downstairs to a late breakfast.

He found Miss Maud, the daughter of the house, presiding at the breakfast table, with that radiant look and well groomed air peculiar to English country girls, and by and by, when they were left alone, he managed to turn the conversation to the object of his adoration.

“We think all the world of her,” remarked his companion. “She is one of nature’s true noble-women. She gave up the best years of her life to her invalid father, and now I suppose she will never marry.”

“Why it seems to me,” quickly replied Johnstone, “that young fellow Howard is paying her marked attention. And he is quite young and very good-looking.”

This sentence bore so dismal a tone that Miss Maud looked up, and after regarding the speaker with a demure glance, she arose from the table simultaneously with her _vis-à-vis_, and thereby terminated the morning meal.

As she saw Mr. Johnstone standing on the steps a few minutes later, in a listless attitude uncommon in so stalwart and well-knit a figure, she remarked to herself, “and so you are caught, my handsome but unsophisticated Antipodian.”

That evening at dinner an accident occurred which, for a time, assumed the dimensions of a calamity. Colonel Ponsonby-Fitzwaring, it must be stated, was lord lieutenant of the county in which he lived, and although he bore no title he occupied a position and lived in a style unsurpassed by any titled magnate within a hundred miles. Dinners at the Hall under his _régime_ assumed the importance of State festivals, and the order of procedence was as carefully observed as at any court ceremony.

At eight o’clock, when the dining-room’s stately doors were thrown wide open, it was accordingly a brilliant procession which Colonel Fitzwaring--albeit still somewhat shaky from the gout--headed with the worthy Bishop’s lady on his arm. Mrs. Penelope Broadbent was proud of her revered husband, and she was, subject to no deductions, proud, also, of herself. She was a lady of magnificent quantities, and if none of her numerous admirers used the word “stately” in describing her, it was probably because her wealth of proportion was other than perpendicular. If a great and artistic photographer had had to choose as to the best means of getting a really accurate and comprehensive likeness of Mrs. Penelope Broadbent, it is probable that he would have decided on a bird’s-eye view as having many points of advantage.

The lady, although of somewhat ardent complexion, affected the most delicate conceivable shades of dress, probably by the way of contrast. The latter was certainly sufficiently startling. On this particular evening the dress which sheltered and adorned, without qualifying, the tropical super-abundance of the bishop’s greater half, was a delicate primrose satin, and it shimmered and billowed in the softened light like waves of embodied chastity, while above it rose and fell a tossing wave of glittering jewels, the Broadbent historic gems, the envy, it was said, of Royalty itself.

The Bishop’s lady, as became her rank, sat at the right hand of the host, while her benign and dignified lord sat next to the hostess at the bottom of the table.

How it came about will probably never be known with absolute accuracy, but just as a staid and dignified footman was about to hand a plate of turtle soup to Mrs. Broadbent, the gentleman on her right--our friend Mr. Felix Johnstone--was observed to be searching wildly for his handkerchief. Alas! unfamiliarity with the geography of pockets in dress clothes, and a hazy recollection that a table napkin should never be placed to the nose, and the result was that Mr. Johnstone’s sneeze--a thing known and dreaded along a hundred miles of Australian coast--burst upon the dinner-table like the crack of doom. So weird, so awful, so unspeakable, and ear-splitting a sneeze had surely never been heard since the world began!

The footman, on Mr. Johnstone’s left, utterly demoralized, dropped his plate of soup where he stood, by the chair of the Bishop’s wife, and the contents, rich, dark, tenacious, fell on the ripe, warm shoulders of the shrieking, half-scalded victim, and rolled in an oily river down the palpitating, outraged bosom, and all athwart the delicate, primrose tinted garment.

The scene now beggared description. Mr. Felix Johnstone, also bespattered by the waiter’s munificence, for which he was devoutly grateful, as it gave him an excuse for leaving the table, walked to the door as if he expected to be hanged outside. As he bowed himself out with a calm born of the supremest desperation, three glances were daguerreotyped on his brain--the flaming visage of the Bishop burning with a look of very unapostolic rage; the amused and cynical smile of Mr. Elphinstone Howard (“I’ve seen you before, where?” flashed the thought and inquiry through the unhappy one’s brain), and last, a look of distress and commiseration directed toward him by Lady Evelyn. That last glance was one of resuscitation in its effects, and was painful, as such always are.

“O the pity of it!” the unhappy man murmured. “But for this awful occurrence she might have grown to care for me, but no woman ever forgave a man for making himself so ridiculous.”

“Jarvis,” he shouted as he entered his rooms, “bring me Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.”

“Yes, sir, I see you have had an accident, won’t you change your clothes, sir, before you return to the dining-room?”

“Jarvis, you are an idiot, do I look like a man who is about to return to a dining-room? I want you to find me the earliest train that starts for the North Pole, and if you don’t catch it, you’ll catch something else; that, I can promise you.”

Jarvis was a discreet servant of vast experience, and the train which he did look up, found its terminus in Euston Square, London.

“There is no train to-night, sir,” was all he said, as he closed his Bradshaw.

An hour later Dick, the son and heir of the family, entered his friend’s room, and after carefully closing the door and seeing Jarvis out of the way, he sat down opposite his friend and gave himself up to great and unrestrained laughter--laughing until the tears ran down his cheeks and until he rolled off his chair through weakness.

“The sight of that old girl!” he exclaimed irreverently between his paroxysms, “will last me till I die. She was clothed with soup as with a garment, and had more on than I ever saw her wear before at table. By Jove, Johnstone, you have rendered yourself immortal.”

“That’s right, old man, laugh your fill; but all the same, the thing has done for me. I shall leave here in the morning.”

“Now look here,” returned Dick with an approach to gravity in his manner; “that is precisely the very thing you must not do. My brain is small, but what there is of it is clear, and I know just what is going to happen. By to-morrow morning every one concerned in the accident, and most of all the Bishop and his wife, will be anxious to have the whole thing forgotten, and everything placed on its old footing. That is their only chance of escaping being made the laughing-stock of every county meeting within a hundred miles. Fancy it’s getting wind that you had run away because you had been the means of having the Bishop’s wife smothered with turtle soup while in a very _décolléte_ condition! Why, people would say it was judgment on the exuberant old dame. No, old chap, stay where you are and I’ll guarantee you absolution both from Bishop and dame.”

The other sat in silence for a while, and presently Dick continued, “By the way, if it is not too delicate a question, was there any special cause for that unique sneeze, and is that about your usual figure?”

The other winced for a moment, and then slowly answered, “That sneeze is my infirmity, but it does not spring from a cold. Ever since my earliest recollection the smell of musk has caused me to sneeze in just that way, and I noticed the scent of that perfume at table just before the attack came on. I was told in Australia that a very slight operation on the nostril, if skillfully performed, would cure the tendency to sneeze, and I thought I would try some specialist in London, but it is so long since I had one of the spasms that I imagined I was outgrowing them.”

Mr. Johnstone’s reception the following day bore out his friend’s prophecy. The Bishop and his wife were cordial in the extreme and by common consent the unwelcome subject was tabooed. Indeed the affair was overshadowed by an occurrence of a much more serious character.

Mrs. Broadbent’s jewels, to which reference has already been made, were discovered to have been stolen during the night. The shock which followed the announcement was intensified by the discovery that other jewels were missing. The stolen gems had been locked in a despatch box which was kept in the dressing-room adjoining the Bishop’s bedroom, and in the morning the box was found open and rifled of its contents. As the diamonds taken were of immense value it was deemed advisable to send to Scotland Yard for a London detective, and a telegram had been received promising the arrival of the detective the following morning.

In the closer companionship which crime always induces among the innocent within its orbit, Mr. Felix Johnstone found opportunities of conversation with the Lady Evelyn Beeton, and it is a pleasure to note that the lady found many solid attractions in the Colonist. He was different from the men of her acquaintance--more natural, more manly, less frivolous--in a word altogether more acceptable as a companion than her more polished friends.

In the result our hero sought his couch that night with very different feelings from those with which he had encountered it the previous night.

“About the North Pole, sir?” Jarvis had inquired, and his master’s reply was, “Jarvis, if you mention that vegetable or mineral again, you’ll lose your place. You leave that pole alone!”

And presently he slept the sleep of the just.

It was probably 2 A.M. when the door of Mr. Felix Johnstone’s bedroom opened softly and a male figure stole in on tiptoe. The light burned low in a night lamp, but that did not embarrass the intruder, who carried a dark lantern of his own. The sleeper’s face was turned from the door, and his breathing was deep and regular. Poising himself on his tiptoes, as if ready either to advance or fly, the intruder paused for a moment and regarded the sleeper attentively. Apparently the scrutiny was satisfactory, for the burglar now advanced noiselessly in his list slippers to a stout portmanteau, and as he laid his hand on the lock he murmured, “I know him of old; he always carries heaps of money with him.” The better to facilitate his operations he laid a jewelry case, which he was carrying in his hand, on the dressing-table, while he took a bunch of skeleton keys from his pocket. With the keys a cambric handkerchief was drawn out, and instantly the room was filled with a pungent odor of musk. The subdued jingle of the keys, or some other influence, troubled the sleeper, who moved uneasily. Warily the burglar stooped over him with the aromatic handkerchief, which he had just picked up, in his hand. Instantly the closed eyes opened wide, and ere the burglar could even move his hand there burst on the silence of the night that stupendous and unearthly sneeze. It had seemed terrible beyond measure in the crowded noisy room; but here, in the midnight silence, its intensity and immensity baffled all description.

Instantly Johnstone, now fully awake, bounded to his feet, and being nearer to the door than the burglar, he shut and locked it, and turned to confront the intruder, who in his affright and surprise had turned the light of his dark lantern on the room and on himself. “Whew!” exclaimed the astonished Australian, who recognized in the man before him not only the elegant Howard Elphinstone whose face had puzzled him long, but also Red Winthrop, a notorious Melbourne burglar, whom he had once been the means of “sending up” for a term of years.

“Don’t you think you have tempted your luck once too often, Red Winthrop?” inquired Johnstone grimly, as he faced the other with the bed between them.

The other’s eyes gave a dangerous gleam, but he said nothing. He only shook his wrist sharply, and a long bowie-knife lay in his palm. But for an instant, however. The next moment it flew with unerring aim at the other’s throat. Perhaps Johnstone should have been more on his guard, still his quick eye noted the danger, although not in time altogether to avert it. The willing blade hewed a deep rut along the side of the jaw, missing the jugular vein by a hair’s breadth, and passing on went straight through a pier glass and stuck quivering in the wood at the back of the glass. As the latter shivered, Johnstone, unmindful of his wound, called out “Seven years’ bad luck for you, Winthrop,” and vaulting across the bed he closed with the ex-convict, whom, after a short but sharp struggle, he succeeded in tying, hands and feet.

Meanwhile the whole household, aroused by the unearthly noise, was pounding at the door. When the latter was opened, a combined scream burst from the assembled guests. Johnstone was standing over the ex-convict in a pool of his own blood, which stained the white bed-clothes and even the walls of the room.

Little more will suffice. The casket left on Mr. Johnstone’s table contained the Lady Evelyn’s diamonds stolen that night. In the prisoner’s rooms were found Mrs. Broadbent’s jewels intact, and also those stolen from the other visitors.

Mr. Johnstone was in danger for some time from the excessive loss of blood, and when finally he managed to leave his room he did so, not only to find himself a general hero to all the folks at the Hall, but a very especial and particular kind of a hero to a certain Lady Evelyn Beeton.

When in process of time the mutual admiration between these two was crystallized in a happy union, the worthy Bishop tied the knot with an unction as ripe and gracious as ever the church sanctioned, while madame beamed on the alliance with a radiant effulgence which eclipsed and dwarfed all the surrounding objects.

Shortly after the recovery of our Australian friend he testified against Red Winthrop, and as that talented gentleman received his sentence of seven years’ transportation, Mr. Johnstone dryly remarked, “You shouldn’t break looking-glasses, Winthrop; I told you it meant seven years’ bad luck.”

It is only right to add that although our friend the Australian had sneezed himself back into favor after sneezing himself out of it, he rightly felt that so fateful a blast was a dangerous and uncertain possession, and, after a time, he took competent advice on the subject with the result that he now no longer dreads the musk odor which used to be his _bête noir_.

TWO CHRISTMAS EVES.

The swirling, eddying wind drove with a silent, ghostly fury up the deserted High Street of Upper Medlock one winter’s evening in 1884, carrying with it into every crevice and corner, in its wild pirouette, great waves of heavy inch-square snowflakes.

“Oh, what lovely weather for Christmas time,” exclaimed Mrs. Cargill as she stood by her husband’s side looking out of the deep, broad, comfortable bow-window of their house on the rioting tempest in white outside.

“Do you know,” she continued, nestling so close to her husband’s side that he had to put his arm round her dainty little waist to maintain his equilibrium, “do you know, that a storm like this makes me think our new home doubly comfortable and beautiful. You see it is the first real home that I was ever able to call my very own or yours, dear, which is quite the same thing, is it not?” and she looked up into her husband’s face with bright, happy eyes.

By way of reply her husband imprinted a warm kiss on the tempting lips so near to his own, and his arm tightened lovingly round the slender form.

“For shame, sir, kissing me at the window, I’m sure Mr. Strangely over the way at the banks saw you; it is too public even in a snow-storm.”

But the husband dropped the arm which imprisoned her waist, and turned from the window with a sigh which only a strong effort kept from changing into a groan of despair.

“Ben!” exclaimed the anxious voice of his wife as she heard the sigh, “there is something wrong with you, tell me what it is, darling.”

“No, dear, there is nothing wrong; I was standing in an awkward position that was all,” and with this love-framed fiction the husband stroked his wife’s glossy brown hair, and looked tenderly into her eyes. But there was a shade of wistfulness in his own which the wife’s keen gaze noted with apprehension, and with womanly persistence she pressed her point.

At last, and not altogether unwillingly, for the load was a heavy one for a single heart to bear, the husband unbosomed his trouble, as, half an hour later, they sat round the bright fire, with the bleak storm barred and curtained out.

“You remember,” he began, “how your rejected admirer, Banker Strangely, returned good for evil, as we thought, by giving me an opportunity of going into the Longfellow mining deal with him, by which he said we both would make an enormous fortune.”

Mrs. Cargill nodded her head by way of reply, but kept silent. Her woman’s wit already saw trouble ahead, but she anticipated it by no word.

“Well,” her husband resumed, “you advised me not to have anything to do with the banker or his scheme; and, dear, you were so positive about it that when Strangely over-persuaded me by explaining that your objection arose only from a dislike to him, I felt averse to confessing what I had done until the money should have been made and I could bring it in my hand to you. You will recollect, dear,” almost pleaded the husband by way of excuse as he looked into the loving, patient eyes before him, “we were not very well off, and,” with a moist tenderness in his eyes, “I wanted so badly to have a pretty cage for the bonny bird I had just caught.”

The hand on his own pressed it gently, and there was a soft mist rising in the corner of the brown eyes, but the mouth was set and firm.

“Tell me, dear.”

The words fell from her lips, and they almost startled the husband, they sounded so unlike her usual soft, flute-like notes.

“Well,” resumed the husband almost desperately, “the sum I was to put in was $10,000, which was just $5,000 more than I could command at the time. I told Strangely that, and he said he would let me have the other $5,000, on my note of hand, which, he said, could be paid out of the profits of the mine, which was then doing remarkably well. I hesitated about giving the note, but Strangely showed me a letter from the owner of the mine, a man named George Williams, of Denver, which stated that the preceding month’s profit had been $1,500 nett, and he thought that figure would be maintained and considerably increased. Well, if that was true--and Strangely vouched for Williams’ honesty--I could easily meet the note which he asked me to give, out of the profits, more especially as the banker said he would agree to let all the profits be put aside for that purpose, and would not himself draw anything until the note I was asked to give was paid.

“That same letter of Williams which I speak of showed me that since Strangely had paid $1,000 down to bind the purchase, he (Williams) had received an offer of $35,000 for the mine, which was $10,000 more than we were going to pay for it.

“So to cut a long and miserable story short, I gave the banker my note six months ago, and the purchase of the mine was completed, I contributing $10,000 and Strangely paying $15,000. Since that time we have had the hardest kind of luck with the mine. First of all the manager left; then the mine was flooded; then some of the wooden supports gave way, and one of the shafts was closed, and the end of it all is that we have not received a single cent from the mine since we took it over, and my note for $5,000 is due to-morrow, and all the money I have or can control is $200. Was there ever such hard luck?”

For a time the two sat in silence hand in hand, he, just a little bit averse to forcing a premature expression, she, with her soft velvety eyes staring unseeingly into the blazing coals, miles deep in thought. Presently she spoke, and her voice was sweet and even, but there was an icy air about it, as if the breath which uttered it partook of the chill of the dismal night outside.

“And Mr. Strangely, won’t he enable you to meet that note or let it stand over, or renew it?” There was a suspicion of contempt in the last words, but not contempt for the person she was addressing.

“No, dear, Strangely has been telling me all the month that he is very short himself and that his directors will insist on the note being paid when due. He says that they have made some losses lately and are in quite a bad mood over them.”

“Well, dear, but if you _cannot_ meet the note, what will they do then?”

“They will protest my note, get a judgment against me, and sell my property.

“What! this house--our home!” almost screamed his wife, as she sprang to her feet, her indignant eyes all ablaze and giving back flame for flame with the leaping sea-coal fire.

“Yes, darling,” murmured the weary, heart-broken man, “everything down even to the baby’s cradle.”

“O, but they _cannot_ do it,” replied the wife, her bright head high in the air, and her eyes full of a lovely defiance. “Ben,” she resumed with a pitiful attempt at a cheery smile, “they cannot sell _you_, can they?”

“No, sweetheart,” replied Ben with a duplicate of the same wintery heartbreaking mirth in his tone.

“Then never mind, my darling, love will find a way out of the difficulty. My poor, poor dear, to think that you have been bearing this burden all alone for these long, miserable months while I was so blindly, so foolishly happy. And, oh me! to think of a note falling due on Christmas eve; that must have been Mr. Strangely’s doing that, to spoil our Christmas, now wasn’t it dear?”

“Well, I tried to put it off till January, but he said he could not make the note for more than six months, although he could renew it. Now, of course, he says he cannot renew it.”

“Just so, Ben, dear; do you not remember it was last Christmas eve Mr. Strangely proposed, and I declined his suit? Does not this seem like what you call getting even with us, darling, just a little like that, eh? He is a vindictive, jealous man, and he has tried to ruin you, that is all, love; that mine was a complete fraud, just his way of wrecking _you_. Depend on it, I am right. Did you send anyone to examine the mine? Do you know positively that he put $15,000 into it? No, my own honest, unsuspicious husband, I see you did not. Well, be assured it is as I say, and although he has spoilt our Christmas eve, he will not spoil our lives or our love. A woman always gets a keen insight into the character of the man who loves her; that is, provided she does not love him. When she returns his love, she is blind and can see none of his faults. I saw a good deal of Mr. Strangely, and I always disliked him, even when he was expressing the greatest devotion to myself; he is a bad, unprincipled man. That is probably not just what the commercial agencies say about him, but I know I am nearer the truth than they are.”

At this moment a ring was heard at the outer bell, and Mrs. Cargill rose hastily to her feet exclaiming--“Oh, that must be my brother Wilfred. I forgot to tell you that I had a dispatch from him this afternoon saying that he had arrived in New York from Denver, and would be here by this evening to spend his Christmas with us. I have not seen Wilfred for more than five years, and am so glad he is come. He is awfully cheerful, and will keep us from moping, and he is so lucky to everybody but himself, poor boy. He is quite poor, and yet he has been the means of making many people rich. He always seems to bring me good luck; and have you not seen people, dear, who were, on the contrary, what is called ‘ill-fated,’ who were always trying to do people good, and always harming them quite badly. No!--oh I have, time and again; and don’t you remember, in Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Harold,’ the ill-fated Haco, who is always trying to do the king good with the most disastrous results, and is finally the means of his death? Oh, I am so glad Will has come, and he is such a good hypnotizer too;” and so the dear little wife rattled on inconsequently, as if eager to drive out all miserable thoughts from her husband’s mind. But with all her semblance of cheerfulness there was a certain hardness of outline about the rounded cheek and chin which was not noticeable before, and seemed out of place in one so young.

Presently her brother Wilfred was ushered into the room, and introduced to her husband. When the first hearty welcomes were over and the evening meal had been discussed, Wilfred entertained his host and hostess with a graphic account of his experiences in the far West. These exhausted, his sister inquired of him how he had prospered in his affairs.

“About the same as usual,” was his response. “Still a bachelor and likely so to remain, for I am never more than $500 ahead of the world. I take my pleasure as it comes, and don’t hoard up so that I may have it when I am older and less able to enjoy it.”

The new-comer was a man of the most acute perceptions, and he soon became aware of a heaviness or constraint in the social atmosphere which pained him more almost than words could tell. “Great heavens,” he murmured to himself, “I hope my sister Nell has not made an unhappy match; yet I cannot imagine Ben to be an unkind man. There is more here than meets the eye. I must get it out of him; it won’t do to receive any confidences from her, if I am to make any use of them.” He looked so abstracted in his musings that his sister, brightening up forcibly, said, “Why, Will, you are positively dull; are you busy hypnotizing someone now in the distance?”

“No,” replied the brother with a smile, “the fact is I am a kind of wild, unregenerate creature whose habits get away with him at times, having no wife to regulate them, and I am craving for a cigar with all the force of a weak and vicious nature. If you have a den where I can tame this wild beast within me--for I smoke weeds of the vilest strength--I will come back in an hour clothed and in my right mind.”

This was but a ruse to enable him to be alone with his brother-in-law, so that he might, if possible, induce or force a confession from him as to the cause of the domestic cloud. “Give me an hour with Auld Nick,” growled Wilfred to himself, “and I would wring the inside combination of the doors of Hades out of him.”

When the two men emerged an hour later from the cozy smoking-room, Wilfred knew all the facts of the domestic tribulation, and beyond an appearance of occasional absent-mindedness, bore the confession cheerily.

“What about Dick Strangely, who was formerly teller in the bank over the way, and one of your numerous and most persistent admirers, Nell?” he inquired.

“Why,” hurriedly remarked his brother-in-law, “did I not tell you that he was president of the bank over the way who held my note.”

“No, you certainly did not. Now Nell, your good husband has told me all about his trouble, and I want your opinion about it. You used to be pretty clear-headed; perhaps, however, I ought to have said pretty _and_ clear-headed.”

“And so he occupies the flat over the bank, does he?” was the inquiry which followed his sister’s opinion expressed in womanly fashion, but with a sense and directness which caused the listener to weigh well every word that fell from her lips.

As he made the inquiry, Wilfred rose from his seat, parted the heavy window curtains, and, undoing the wooden shutters, gazed across the street. The storm had abated, and for the time being, at least, the snow had ceased to fall. The bright lamp-light from the street fell full on the massive front of the bank and showed a white face and cruel merciless gaze turned on the house--the house the Cargills were occupying.

“Why that was Strangely himself, was it not?” remarked Will, and the other nodding his reply he added, “Not much of friendship in that glance, brother-in-law mine; what do you say?”

Half an hour later the new arrival begged permission to retire, on the plea of fatigue. He had previously urged his sister to give him a bedroom in the front of the house, if possible. “I want to study the banker,” he explained, “and I cannot think properly of anyone over my shoulder, or through a number of empty rooms.” In kissing his sister he whispered in her ear, “I think things will come all right in time for Christmas eve.” For a moment she brightened up and then with a little doleful sigh she replied, “Ah! you do not know how vindictive that banker is; he is working for revenge, not money.”

“I know, I know,” returned her brother with a touch of impatience. “Still you just believe what I say, and go to bed in peace. Leave things to me; I have straightened out worse tangles than this.”

When his sister had left the room he drew a chair in front of the clear wood fire that burned in the low grate, and drawing to his side a small table, he leaned his elbow on it with his outspread fingers supporting his temples. For fully an hour he remained in that position, as immovable as if cast in bronze. At the end of that time he rose from his chair pale and almost ghostly in appearance, but with eyes that shone supernaturally large and bright against the white skin of his face. There was an air of set tension about the man, which a child would have recognized and a thick-hided crocodile of the Ganges have given the right of the road to.

The fire had faded away to smouldering, unnoticeable embers, and the lamp which had been turned down since his sister left the room was now blown out. Moving with a stride of extraordinary expression for the life and vigor the step conveyed, Wilfred stepped to the window, pulled back the curtains, drew up the blind, and swiftly but noiselessly raised the window. The bank across the way lay buried in repose. It was now 11.30, and to all appearances the inmates of the dwelling apartments over it were all in bed, and presumably asleep. The storm had abated, and only the dark unstarred sky above and the snow beneath recalled the storm which had so recently rioted through the street.

Wilfred’s air, as his burning eyes rested on the bank building--or rather pierced it, for that was the impression their fierce intensity conveyed--was one of the most imperious command. It was no lifeless brick and mortar which those compelling orbs transfixed, and which the moving but voiceless lips ordered to perform their behests. His was a face for the deadly breach or the forlorn hope, and it grew paler and paler beyond even the pallor of death; while in spite of the gusts of icy air which swept in through the open window, the dew gathered, beaded and broke on his forehead, and mounted the stiffened hair that rose from his scalp like a frozen crest.

It was evidently no ordinary creature with which this ghostly and fantastic struggle was being waged. After the first stern bout and victory, there was a cessation of action for a few minutes, but soon a new struggle commenced, in which the stern monitor’s visage became that of unbending command and insistence. There was threat, too, in the eye, threat of dangerous and instant action.

At this point the watcher seemed to look for some noticeable event in the house opposite, and surely enough, as if in instant obedience to his wish, the flicker of a lamp could be seen descending the stairs of the bank building.

Presently the light drifted into the bank itself and inside the railing of the president’s office. Then slowly, and as if in a dream, the bearer could be seen to open the great iron safe and take from thence a portfolio, from which he carefully selected a document and then returned it to the safe. At this juncture a night policeman saw the light in the bank and hurried across the street preparatory to sounding an alarm. Recognizing the President, however, by the light of his lamp, he desisted, and stood for a few minutes watching his movements. As he saw him enter his office and commence to write a letter at his desk he resumed his round, merely muttering to himself: “Pretty late for banking business, but I presume he forgot something.”

Returning on his beat half an hour later he saw the banker emerge from his house, walk across the way and drop a long envelope into the letter-box of the house opposite, and then slowly and wearily re-enter his house.

Ten minutes later and the light died out from the banker’s dwelling. Simultaneously a man, spent and exhausted beyond the possibilities of ordinary or even extraordinary fatigue, closed his window, sank into an arm-chair, and lay there with white upturned face, from which the perspiration dropped in big, round, ice-cold beads. Few would have recognized in the pallid face, carved by deeply hewn lines, the gay debonair countenance of Wilfred Wharton, the wit, _bon vivant_ and _bon camarade_ of the plains and city alike.

The following morning Wilfred was up betimes notwithstanding his exhausting labors of the night before. As he descended to the breakfast-room he met his sister, to whose inquiry as to whether he had been able to devise any means of escape from their desperate situation, he nodded encouragingly. “But,” he continued, “you must get me the key of your letter-box at once before your husband comes down. It is necessary for the success of my plans that I control your correspondence for a few hours.”

Within the letter-box he found a long envelope bearing the printed name of the bank. This he promptly opened, and after carefully perusing its contents, nodded in a satisfied way, and placed it in an inner pocket of his coat. Then returning the other letters unnoticed to the box, he carried the key upstairs to his sister.

At breakfast nothing was said of the subject of the note due that day, but as soon as the servant had left the room, Wilfred plunged into the subject.

“Now, Ben,” he began, “you have got to follow me blindly in this matter, or I cannot help you. If you agree to do that, I believe I can get you out of this mess all right. The first request I have to make is that you leave town for the day, without having any communication whatever with the bank. You may return in good time for dinner, and I will promise to report in full to you then. Now, as for you, Nell, if they send across for Mr. Cargill from the bank just say your husband is out of town for the day and will not be back till the evening; and tell them you know nothing about his business. I am going out of town myself and will not be back till five o’clock.”

As the morning wore on there might have been seen a look of vast perplexity and uneasiness on the face of Banker Strangely across the way--that is to say, while in the privacy of his own room. At ten o’clock, on going through his private portfolio, he was unable to find the $5,000 note of hand of his “dear” friend Benjamin Cargill, due that day. He had spent an hour looking for it, and still finding no trace of it he sat down to consider the situation. The day before he recollected destroying some old private papers taken from the same portfolio, and although he had been exceedingly careful, he now came to the conclusion that he must have destroyed the note among those papers. The thought of being baffled of his revenge against Mrs. Cargill for her former slight--for, as the lady rightly surmised, it _was revenge_ and not friendship which inspired the banker--consumed his very soul with rage. Was he to be thus thwarted after tracking his victim down? Not while his brain performed its accustomed office.

Taking pen in hand he wrote the following letter to his “friend” Mr. Cargill:

“DEAR SIR:--

“I beg to remind you that your note for $5,000 in my favor is due here to-day. As I explained to you, if the amount is not paid by three o’clock the note will go to protest. I shall be very sorry indeed to have to resort to such measures, but for the reasons already given you, I have no alternative.”

The reply which was brought back was: “Mr. Cargill is out of town for the day; the letter will be handed to him on his return.”

This indicated either a neglect or indifference of the banker’s intentions, which made the latter furious. “I wonder where on earth that note is,” he remarked under his breath feverishly again and again. And as the day passed he grew half crazy with rage. At 2.30 he rang his bell for his signature-book and after opening it at the letter “C,” he carefully studied the specimen signature given there by Mr. Cargill when he opened his account. Then from an inner drawer he took a promissory note blank and slowly filled it in, using for the purpose a bottle of stale black ink. “It is not forgery,” he murmured, as if excusing himself to his conscience, “it is only justice.”

Ten minutes later he rang his bell, and sent the note into the general office with instructions that if it were not taken up by three o’clock, the teller should take it across to Mrs. Cargill and see her about it. Then if still unpaid, he directed that the note should be protested.

The note being unpaid, the teller called on Mrs. Cargill, who politely informed him that she knew nothing about her husband’s affairs. “Did she not seem anxious and perturbed when she saw the note?”

“No, sir, she looked at the handwriting quietly and inquired who signed her husband’s name to it.”

“What!” snarled the banker, “what did you say?”

“She inquired who signed her husband’s name to the note, and I replied of course he signed it himself, and she said, ‘Well, I think I ought to know Mr. Cargill’s signature, and I never saw it as shaky as that before; he must have been put out when he signed that document.’”

When the teller retired, the banker sank into his chair in a heap as one who had received a death wound. “Great Heaven,” he ejaculated, “what am I doing, is that woman going to drive me to perdition? But no, her remarks are only the silly talk of an ignorant woman. No one knows about the note being mislaid.” Saying this he drove his hand down savagely on the gong on his table, and when the clerk appeared in response to his summons, he bade him in imperious tones to have “that note protested.”

* * * * *

At four o’clock a sleigh drove up to Mr. Cargill’s house, from which Wilfred alighted after requesting the driver to wait for further instructions. Learning from Mrs. Cargill of the presentation of the note, Wilfred re-entered the sleigh, giving the driver fresh directions in a tone of command very unusual to him. After a drive of a mile the sleigh stopped at the house of a justice of the peace, for the second time that day.

On issuing from the house of the justice, Wilfred gave directions to be driven to the police station. After announcing his wishes there, he returned to his sister’s house and finding her husband had returned he carried him off to the office of the Notary Public. At the latter place they inquired whether a note for $5,000 had been left there for protest that day. On learning that the note was in the notary’s hands and would remain there until the morning, the Justice of the peace was again visited, and an hour later the notary was served with an injunction not to part with the note of hand.

Once more the sleigh’s sweet bells jangled before the police station and when it sped on its way again its ample robe enfolded the sturdy albeit somewhat bandied legs of the night policeman whose acquaintance we have already made; but who was not now in uniform.

When Mr. Strangely returned to his residence from his own sleigh ride at 5.30 P.M., he was surprised to learn that three gentlemen awaited him in the parlor.

“Who are they?” he inquired of the servant, and when he learned that Mr. Cargill was one of the number he rubbed his hands together gleefully and murmured to himself: “At last, at last, I have got you in the toils, my lady with the dainty, devilish face that refused me so scornfully a year ago.”

The look with which he entered the room where his visitors awaited him had a fine and scornful air of contempt about it, suggestive of unsatiated conquest, and slaves, male and female--especially female--dragging at his victorious chariot’s wheel.

“You are come to take up that note, I presume?” he began, addressing Mr. Cargill and ignoring his companion, “but you are entirely too late. Honorable men do not come sneaking into a bank two hours after it has been closed and after their note has gone to protest. To-morrow the whole town will know that your note has been protested--no not to-morrow, for that is Christmas Day,--but you will be the talk of the town the following day, and no doubt _that_ reflection will sweeten your Christmas dinner--as” he snarled through his shark-like teeth--“as your wife sweetened mine a year ago, through your accursed interference.”

If he had not been carried away by his feelings he would have noticed the peculiar expression on the faces of his visitors, but he did not, and he raved on until, in a stentorian voice, Wilfred bade him be silent. What was it in the look and voice of that man that made the banker pause and wince as he met his gaze? “Who are you, sir, that dare----” he began, but his voice faltered, and his whole frame seemed to shrink as he met the other’s full lambent eye bent upon him, and felt it thrilling him through and through.

“I know you, surely,” he said slowly and almost feebly. “I have seen you before--somewhere,” and then the other’s gaze seemed to freeze him into silence.

“Listen to me, Banker Strangely, and do not dare to open your mouth till I have done.”

“You have been engaged in a conspiracy to ruin my friend, Mr. Cargill. You induced him to give you $5,000 to invest in a mine named the Longfellow, near Denver, and give you his note for $5,000, and you told him you were paying $15,000 more, and that, you said, made up the entire purchase money. To insure his joining you, you showed him a letter from the manager of the mine named George Williams, showing that very large profits were being made. You knew Mr. Cargill’s anxiety to make some money, so that his wife, who had had so many rich offers, might not pine for the wealth which might have been hers. O, revenge was sweet to you, and you played your cards well. Too well, my friend, for your own comfort now. You thought to wreck their happiness this fair Christmas eve, did you; well, there is going to be some wrecking done, my friend, but it is here in this house--_your_ home--where it is going to occur and not over the way in the home of the woman you once said you loved.

“Your whole plot is laid bare. I hold in my hand in your own handwriting a full and detailed confession of your villainy which you wrote out last night and sent to my friend, together with the note for $5,000, which you acknowledged you had got from him by fraud. There it is, and see, you have endorsed it in your own handwriting, and added your private stamp to it. In the same letter you gave my friend the name of your accomplice, George Williams, and his address, and when I showed him your letter he confessed everything too, and told me a good deal more of your dealings than was needful for my case.”

“It is all a lie, that letter is a forgery, I never wrote it, and that note was stolen from the bank last night,” shrieked the banker, goaded to desperation, “I will send for the police.”

“You need not send far, there is one outside the door,” returned Wilfred. Then, opening the door, he summoned the officer to enter.

“This officer in private clothes is the policeman who was on duty last night, and saw you enter the bank office, unlock the safe, take out a document, and after closing the safe, write a letter which you enclosed in a long envelope and placed with your own hand in Mr. Cargill’s letter-box. Am I not right, officer?”

“Entirely correct, sir.”

The banker sat paralyzed, his brain benumbed with the extraordinary statement made to him. Was it all a dream, or was he going mad? And then like a flash of lightning he recollected inquiring that morning if the servant knew what had made his slippers so wet; it was the snow--the accursed snow, as he crossed the street to Mr. Cargill’s. Ah! now he knew they were speaking the truth; besides, that was undoubtedly his handwriting and his seal; and that was beyond all question the genuine note.

“Then,” resumed the inexorable Wilfred, mindful only of his sister’s pain, “ignorant of what you had done in your sleeping hours and being unable to find the note which you had returned to its rightful owner, you imagined you had mislaid it, and lest your darling revenge for which you had imperilled your soul, should escape you, you forged a fresh note, which being of course unpaid, you have sent to the notary’s for protest.

“Dick Strangely, you have played for a high stake--the wrecking of a happy home--and you have lost. That is all, this bright snowy Christmas eve! In my hand here I hold a warrant for your arrest on a charge of conspiracy with Williams to defraud Cargill, and also on a charge of forgery. I have obtained an injunction preventing the notary from parting with the forged note which he holds, and I have Williams safe in prison ready to bear evidence against you.”

As one by one the banker heard of the steps taken to close every door against his escape, his head drooped lower and lower.

“Save me,” he murmured brokenly at last, “I’m a poor, desperate, broken-hearted man, save me, and I’ll make restitution.”

As he glanced on the two faces beside him (the policeman had retired to the passage) he saw on the one, that of Cargill, a mingling of relief and amazement--for the revelations were not one whit the less surprising to him than to the banker--and on the other only relentless determination.

As he recognized the latter he sank on his knees and begged for mercy, offering to pay back double what he had defrauded his former friend Cargill of.

The two brothers-in-law stepped apart for a moment to confer. “Wilfred,” urged the husband’s voice, “this man was until recently a friend. He became an enemy because Nell refused him for me. Her rejection of his desperate love for her has made a scoundrel of him; I imagine it would have made a villain of me too. I surely can afford to be generous when I win all around. I cannot send a man I once called by the name of friend to jail on Christmas eve. Wait here, and I will go across and talk the matter over with my wife; she ought to be consulted on this business.”

“Bring her here,” was the laconic reply.

And so it happened that the mercy which Dick Strangely subsequently received that night was taken humbly and penitently from the hand of the woman he once professed to love, but whose husband and home he ultimately tried to ruin.

The banker returned the money that night of which he had defrauded his friend, and he also returned the mortgages. He offered indeed to pay back double, but his offer was refused with scorn and loathing.

Dinner at Mr. Cargill’s was an hour late that night, but it was eaten with great joy and happiness of heart. “The happiest Christmas eve of my life,” exclaimed Mrs. Cargill with eyes whose radiance was momentarily dimmed by their moisture; and so said they all.

“Wilfred,” exclaimed the happy wife and sister as she rose from table to leave the two gentlemen to their after-dinner cigar, “I will never, never understand how you accomplished what you did. I believe you must have hypnotized Mr. Strangely. Did you, sir, tell me?”

“Perhaps,” was the reply with a curious smile curling the outer wave of his moustache. “Ben, the port wine is with you!”

“Tell me, Wilfred, how you managed it,” pressed his brother-in-law.

“Well,” replied the other after a pause, “it is not fair to make me disclose the secrets of my success, but I had a good deal of influence over that fellow Strangely, at school. On one occasion I caught him at a very disgraceful trick and gave him a very memorable thrashing. After that he seemed to drift into my power somehow, partly by reason of his disgrace, which I kept to myself, and partly because a good thrashing is an excellent beginning in hypnotism among boys. As the result, I could make him do anything I liked. With such a ground-work I had no difficulty in bringing him under my influence last night, more especially as I have become a pretty successful hypnotist by long practice and study.”

“Could you, do you think, have made him do what he did if you had not known him previously?”

“No, I think I would probably have had to go to work some other way with him, but I imagine he would have had to disgorge all the same. Hypnotism as an art is full of resources.”

THE END.

GLANCING SHAFTS.