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BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN
M
CONTINUED FROM TENTH PAG®.
and bound witbin the limits of his
narrow sphere, whose lore was of the
field and racecourse, whose horizon
was bounded by a covert, whose
sweetest music was “Tally ho!” and
“View halloo I” Herbert must have
been duly conscious of his wife’s
superiority to himsetf, and the jeal*
ousy of an ignoble nature doubtless
stirred within him and lent poig
nancy to his resentment against her.
But how was it that she had ever
supposed him capable of responding
to the needs of such a temperament as
her own? She was surely above being
deceived by mere physical attrac
tions; and could his devotion—real
enough probably at the time—blind
her to the absolute lack of sympathy
between his character and hers? There
appeared to be only one solution to
the mystery—that Una Bertram had
thrown around Grantley Herbert a
mist of her own imagination, which
had hidden from her eyes the very
man as he was; so that, in truth, she
had given her love and her band to a
being of her own creation, not
to the Grantley Herbert of re
ality. How harsh, how ineffably
bitter must have been the swift and
sure awakening! Before the honey
moon was old she must have seen the
golden mist roll away, and realised
that she had loved a phantom—a
creature as unreal as a dream. It
seemed to Desborough unlikely that
such a woman as Una Bertram de
liberately “ran counter” to her hus
band; but she must have found it as
impossible to understand him as it
was to him to comprehend her, and
his coarse and selfish nature could
only see willfulness where there was
simply inability.
Poor Una! her lot was perhaps
harder than that of the heroine of
“Locksley Hill,” because if Herbert
was superior to the “clown” of that
noble poem,Una was no Amy the gros
ser nature would have no force to drag
herdown; she would never sink to
its level, and so at least lose the sense
of pain; for her there must ever be
the keen knowledge of the wide, im
passable gulf that separated her from
her husband; a knowledge embit
tered by the memory of a mistaken
love, crushed and trampled to death.
CHAPTER 111.
THE LADY OF BRCILDOVNK.
“ A form more fair, a face more sweet,
Ne’er hath it been my lot to meet ’*
—Whittier.
It was not a very cheerful trio that
the ladies left behind them when they
withdrew to the drawing room. Lau
rence Desborough, though he liked a
good glass of wine, would have great
ly preferred the society of his hostess
to the choicest vintage ever grown;
Herbert, whatever his faults, was no
devotee of the decanter, and Lord
Darnleigh did not seem in a very con
vivial mood.
They kept up a dropping sort of con
versation for a little while, each feel
ing rather bored, and both guests were
glad when the host gave the signal for
departure. He himself oared little
enough for the society of his wife; yet
he was proud of her, r 4 nd pleased to
see her shine above all other women.
She belonged to him; it reflected cre
dit on huh that his wife should carry
off the palm,
“You’re smitten with Una, eh?” he
said, laughing to Desborough, as the
two men repaired to the urawlng
room, Lord Darnleigh having preced
ed them.
“Who could fail to be 'smitten/ as
you put it?” returned the otter. “She
is the most beautilui woman I ever
saw, and possesses what beauty has
not always—a mind and a soul,”
“ Too much mind and soul
for my taste, ” said Herbert,
drily, “a woman should be more
malleable; that girl has will
enough for a dozen men, and a host of
fantastic notions, nut one of which
she will yield to reason; but women
never do yield to reason,” he added,
with true masculine assumption of
invariable superiority in this particu
lar.
Desborough was not called upon for
a rejoinder, for Herbert, almost as he
spoke, opened the drawing-room doer,
and the sound of piano and singing
greeted the two gentlemen.
Evelyn Barrington was at the piano
singing one of Molloy’s ballads, and
Lord Darnleigh was turning over her
music, Una Herbert sat on a low
lounge near one of the windows, list
ening, or seeming to listen, to the
song, which Evelyn was rendering
in good taste, with a clear, sweet,
and carefully taught soprano.
Desborough paused to listen awhile;
then, before the song was finished, he
crossed the room, and seated himself
by his hostess.
“Are we not to have the pleasure of
hearing you, Lady Una?” he asked.
She turned towards him, smiling a
little.
“I wonder,” she said, “if you ask
that question under a sense ot obliga
tion, or if you are fond of music?”
ignorant fashion, lam afraid, but I
am quite of Congreve’s opinion re
garding it.”
“You do not go so far as Shake
speare, I suppose? That is, if Loren
zo speaks Shakespeare’s mind. What
style do you prefer—in singiujr, I
mean?” *
“Will you think me a barbarian if I
say ballads—an English ballad? I
have no proficiency in foreign tongues,
and I like a song that I can under
stand.”
“Why should I think you a barba
rian? You do not know that I can sing
anything but ballads—or that I can
sin? at all.”
“No, I do not know it, La<lv Uaa: but I
am utmost as sure as if I did ; and I hope
you sometimes sing Eaglish ballads ”
“Yes, I do, sometim-s,” she answered,
laughingly. She rose as she spoke—her
friend bad now quitted the piano—and
turned to her cousin.
“Darnleigh.” she said, “please bring me
my portfolio. I left it in my boudoir this
morning.”
The Marquis left the room, and speedily
returned with the portfolio in question.
Herbert threw himself int > an arm-chair
and took up a mapazne; he liked the fan
fare of a military band or a dashing cho
rus, but the playing of a Joachim or a
Rubinstein, or the singing of an Albani,
would have bored him.
“Sing ‘When Sparrows Build,’ Una,”
said Evelyn Barrington, approaching her
friend, and Unaccmplied with the request
She had a rich, full contralto voice, and
sang with a passion and pathos that did
full justice to the words and more than
justice to the music.
“How could I tell I should love thee today,
Whom that day I held not dear ?
How could 1 know I should love thee away,
When I did not love thee anear?”
Desborough glanced at his host, loung
ing in handsome indifference while the
pathetic music of his wife’s voice swelled
through the room. It gave him no pleas
ure to listen to her; perhaps he hardly
hardly heard her, for he seemed to have
found something that interested him —
probably an article about hunting or
horseracing.
Una rose from the piano, and Desbor
ough thanked her with an enthusiasm
entirely real, begging for another
song, which she promised “present
ly,” and approaching her husband, she
asked half carelessly, “What have you
found in that magazine to interest you so
much, Grantley?”
She laid her hand, not on his shoulder,
as might have seemed natural, but on the
bank of the chair, bending forward a little
to see what he was reading. Perhaps she
was surprised that he should r»ad Black
wood, but if so, her tone betrayed no
shade of surprise.
Herbert tossed the magazine on to the
table withanimpatient “Pshaw! I never
read such trash in my life! It’s a pity you
trouble your head about nonsense of that
sort!”
She had seen the page that momentarily
o copied her husband’s a’tention, and had
drawn back with a slight color mounting in
to cheeks usually very pale; the colour
deepened at Herbert’s scarcely courteous
words, and she said a little quickly, but
almost coldly. “I do not consider it non
sense. It i» far too wide a subject to be
dismissed off-hand.”
“What’s that, Una?” asked Lord Darn
leigh, unintentionally interrupting Her
bert, who was about to make a possibly
somewhat sharp rej under to his wife.
“That article in Blackwood,” she said,
turning towards her cousin, “that we were
talking abjut the other day—Caerlyon’s
article.”
“Oaerlyons?” exclaimed Desborough,
taking up the magazine; “is that any rela
tion of Maxwell Oaerlyon, the barrister,
or ie it the man himself?”
“The man himself. Dq you know him ?”
“Only so much as every one knows of a
famous advocate. I have not seen this
month’s Blackwood. Is it a political arti
cle?”
"Oh, no; it is a strange 'subject*, one
might think, for a lawyer to choose,
but the title, 'Two Worlds,’ does
not tell you mnch, dots it?
If you do not care for psychological
studies, I do not suppose the article will in
terest you greatly.”
"Psychology! Certainly a curious study
for a lawyer; and yet I scarcely know
why one should say so.”
"Nor I,” said Una, smiling. “I should
like very much to know him, and if he is
down at Bramblemere for the assizes, I
shall have him introduced to me. That
will be easy, for he is a friend of Mr.
Westlake, the chairman of the Quarter
Sessions, who is a friend of curs.”
“Isn’t it odd, Mr. Desborough,” said Ev
elyn Barrington, coming up at this mo
ment, “for a man whose head must be full
of ‘briefs* and 'cases’ to be dealing in the
ories about ‘sympathies* and supernatural
rapport, and things of that sort?”
“He is not a Uumtist, then,” asked Des
borough, “with doctrines of affinity?”
Miss Barrington puckered her pretty
brows and laughed. She had probably never
heard mnch more of Comte than that he
was a man with “queer theories of some
sort,” but Herbert struck in—
“lf you make head or tail of Caerlyon’s
article, Desborough, you’ll be clever. I
wouldn’t have believed a clear-headed fel
low like him could have written it; but it
seems the authorship is an open secret in
some quarters.”
“Have you read it?” asked Desborough,
without, apparently, intending to be iron
ical.
“Bead iti Not I. I have read a few bits
of it.”
“A royal road to criticism,” observed
Una, quietly. “It is very strange to me,”
she added, turning to Desborough, “that
the two subjects of which the majority of
people know least—theology and the su
pernatural—should be those on which
every one thinks himself competent to lay
down the law.”
“I quite agree with you in the first case,
Lady Una, and I daresay you are right in
the second; but the supernatural is a mat
ter in which we have no law or data—the
wisest and the most ignorant meet on the
same ground.”
“Do not say that," said she, with a Bud.
southern farm
den flash in her deep-violet eyes. “I know
that we can ascertain nothing for certain
in the supernatural world that surrounds
us; psychological problems cannot be
formulated into an axaet science; but w e
may build upon external and internal ev
idence a body of proof that almost
amounts to certainty; and are there not
infinite possibilities in what I might call
supernatural ethics?”
She spoke earnestly, seemingly carried
out of by h-r enthusiasm for theo
ri s which evidently had a strong hold
upon her mind; but she paused rather ab
ruptly after the concluding question,
and bit her lip, as if suddenly recol
lecting that she had betrayed too much
feeling in a matter generally treated with
ridicule or hardly veiled contempt. Des
borough noticed the change, and divining
its cause said quickly—
“ Believe me, Lady Una, I am'no scoffer,
though I frankly confess to being scepti
cal with regard to the supernatural. Cer
tainly, I have never given the subject an
hour’s serious thought, and I should think
it rather a dangerous study.”
"Why dangerous?" asked the girl—she
was no more, being scarcely twenty years
old—looking at her guest with a curiously
soru inisiug glance that somewhat discon
certed him, and his gaze sank before
those clear, singularly luminous eyes.
It is so purely speculative,” he said,
“and may so easily lead an inquirer into
a land of wild and morbid fancies.”
“You wish to warn me,” she said, smil
ing slightly, and moving her eyes from
Desborough’s countenance, as it seemed
to occur to her that her scrutiny was hard
ly oolite; but she showed no confusion or
embarrassment.
“I daresay you imagine,” she went on,
“that lam a ghost-seer, and pore over
mysterious tomes and horrifying treatises
on the unseen, such as Edgar Allan Poe
enumerates in one of his tales. lam no
such awe-inspiring creature, and I do
not know that I believe more than many
wiser men and women than I am have
believed in the past, and will believe in
the future.”
Hostess and guest were virtually alone;
Herbert had strolled out on to the ter
race, to smoke a cigar, and Lord Darn
leigh and Evelyn Barrington, having
more interest in each other than in a con
versation in which both were out of their
depth, had retired to a little distance where
they pretended to be looking at pho
tographic views. Desborough had no desire
to cut short a discussion with so beautiful
and so fas'-inating a woman; and he was,
besides, beginning to feel that attraction
which the supernatural rarely fails to ex
ercise. He rejoined immediately—
“l did not imagine you to be a ghost
seer, Lady Una, but you seem to have
paid a great deal of attention to super
natural lore, and even to have arrived at
some definite conclusions —if you employ
the word ‘believe’ advisedly.”
“I do employ it advisedly. You think,
then, that there is not sufficient data in
the science—perhaps I should not use that
word, but let it pass—of the supernatural
to justify belief; at the most we can only
attain to what in theology is called 'pious
opinion’?”
“I think so—yes.”
“You only agree with the majority.
Even demonstration would not convince
you?”
She was looking at him again with that
searching, penetrating g*zs, which this
time affected him even more strongly
than at first. A strange tremor went
through him; there flashed confusedly
across his memories of those theories
concerning mesmerism and “thought
reading” thatin these days fill the air.
He had always considered mesmerism
"charlatanry” and thought-reading a
figment; yet just now a vague idea that
Una Herbert might lay claim to these
faculties gave him precisely that unen
viable sensation which the staunchest
sceptic experiences when he shears wholly
unaccountable noises in his bedchamber
in the dead of night.
"Are you a medium?” he said, involun
tarily. He han not meant to say it; he
bad no form of words in his head at all.
What he actually did sty sounded
quite foolish the moment the question
nad passed his lips, ana seemea to be
the utterance of his thoughts escaping
the control of will Una’s soft,
half-mock ng laugh interrupted his al
most instant attempt to correct his error.
“I have frightened you, Mr. Desbor
ough,” she said; “you imagine I shall
summon a ghost from behind the window
curtain, or tell you all your thoughts A
mediuml Do you mean by that—no I. xi
speaking gravely now—l am not a bit
offended at the question—do you mean by
that word to convey the idea generally as
sociated with the name?”
"Scarcely,” said Desborough, who had
recovered himself while Una spoke; "I
was rather thinking of the notion that
there are people who possess above their
fellows a faculty of piercing into the Un
known ”
"A facultyin which you have no faith,”
said Una, quietly; “but perhaps you are
weary of the subject?”
“Not in the least. lam growing deeply
Interested.”
‘‘Well, then, ‘let ns clear onr minds of
cobwebs,’ as some statesman once said,
and abjure terms which have come to be
abused or misused. My own personal ex
perience and reading have taught me that
there are Individuals for whom the veil
between the two worlds, as Casrlyon calls
them, is thinner than for others. Some
times it is by dreams or by visions; some
times by the appearance to them of the
dead, or even living people, that these in
dividuals are proved to possess these mys
terious faculities; but they need not seek
after knowledge; it comes to them —often
it is their curse. Do you believe that the
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glamour—the second sight—is a mere su
perstition? You look at me in amazement.
I am making your flesh creep ” She
laughed again “You see,” she added,
“how deep rooted is what you call super
stition In our human nature.”
Before Desborough could reply, the cur
tain that partially veiled the window near
which the speakers were sitting was
pushed aside, and Grantley Herbert
stepped into the room-
"What, at it stll?” he asked, with a
sneer, as his wife rose quickly to her feet,
“fouwilibe afraid to go to bed, Des
borough, if you listen to my wife’s ghost
lore.”
“I think not,” returned Desborough,
irritated by this interruption and greatly
annoyed for h<s hostess, who had turned
away; "we were enjoying a most interest
ing discussion, and I am not easllv
frightened.” y
“Lucky for you. Has Una told you
about our family banshee? She devoutly
believes in that young woman—or old wo
man—who plays the harp at odd times,
hut never shows up. Tell him the story,
Una ”
“Not tonight,” said Una, coldly. “Evie,
come and join me in a duet, and then you
and I will court the sleepy god: it is grow
ing late.”
It was long before sleep visited Lau
rence Desborough that night. The expe
riences of the evening were so new and so
exciting as to banish all sense of bodily fa
tigue.
Uua Harbert presented a problem as in
teresting mentally as she was beautiful
personally, and resolving to become as
mnch as poisible acquain ed with that
Eroblem, Grantley Harbert’s friend was
yno means blind to the danger of the
study. But his conscience was not of the
hyper-sensitive order, and gave him no
trouble on the score of the above-men
tioned danger.
TO BE CONTINUED.
The Train Wrecker.
There is no legal punishment pro
portioned to the enormity of the crime
of train wrecking.
An inhuman disregard of the lives
of others and a most cowardly fear for
self must characterize the train
wrecker who is actuated by the hope
of robbery; but there are no words
burning enough to stigmatize the
malevolence of the wretch who could
wreck a train through motives of re
venge or hatred. The utmost degra
tion of all that pertains to manhood is
necessary to the contemplation of such
a heinous crime by a mind not disor
dered and diseased.
The lowest class of criminals only
can supply the sort of monsters vi
cious enough to wreck a train at the
peril of death to innocent persons, and
there should be short shrifts and little
mercy for any miscreant guiky of the
crime. There is no use in wasting
sentiment on these men. If it be pos
sible to shoot them down as they seek
to escape from the consequences of
their misdeed, so much the better.
That is the gentlest wise way of deal
ing with them. The purpose of trials
by law is to ascertain whether the ac
cused be guilty and deserving of pun
ishment, and they imply the possibil
ity of innocence. No such considera
tion need be shown the utter scoun
drels who deliberately contrive the
wrecking of a train hurrying along
with its freight of human lives. The
sbot-gun argument is the best possi
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