OUR MALTESE PEERAGE.

All first things are voted the best: first kisses, first toga virilis, first hair of the first whisker; first speeches are often so superior that members subside after making them, fearful of eclipsing themselves; first money won at play must always be best, as always the dearest bought; and first wives are always so super-excellent, that, if a man lose one, he is generally as fearful of hazarding a second as a trout of biting twice.

But of all first things commend me to one's first uniform. No matter that we get sick of harness, and get into mufti as soon as we can now; there is no more exquisite pleasure than the first sight of one's self in shako and sabretasche. How we survey ourselves in the glass, and ring for hot water, that the handsome housemaid may see us in all our glory, and lounge accidentally into our sisters' schoolroom, that the governess, who is nice looking and rather flirty, may go down on the spot before us and our scarlet and gold, chains and buttons! One's first uniform! Oh! the exquisite sensation locked up for us in that first box from Sagnarelli, or Bond Street!

I remember my first uniform. I was eighteen—as raw a young cub as you could want to see. I had not been licked into shape by a public school, whose tongue may be rough, but cleans off grievances and nonsense better than anything else. I had been in that hotbed of effeminacy, Church principles and weak tea, a Private Tutor's, where mamma's darlings are wrapped up, and stuffed with a little Terence and Horace to show grand at home; and upon my life I do believe my sister Julia, aged thirteen, was more wide awake and up to life than I was, when the governor, an old rector, who always put me in mind of the Vicar of Wakefield, got me gazetted to as crack a corps as any in the Line.

The ——th (familiarly known in the Service as the "Dare Devils," from old Peninsular deeds) were just then at Malta, and with, among other trifles, a chest protector from my father, and a recipe for milk-arrowroot from my Aunt Matilda who lived in a constant state of catarrh and of cure for the same, tumbled across the Bay of Biscay, and found myself in Byron's confounded "little military hot-house," where most military men, some time or other, have roasted themselves to death, climbing its hilly streets, flirting with its Valetta belles, drinking Bass in its hot verandas, yawning with ennui in its palace, cursing its sirocco, and being done by its Jew sharpers.

From a private tutor's to a crack mess at Malta!—from a convent to a casino could hardly be a greater change. Just at first I was as much astray as a young pup taken into a stubble-field, and wondering what the deuce he is to do there; but as it is a pup's nature to sniff at birds and start them, so is it a boy's nature to snatch at the champagne of life as soon as he catches sight of it, though you may have brought him up on water from his cradle. I took to it, at least, like a retriever to water-ducks, though I was green enough to be a first-rate butt for many a day, and the practical jokes I had passed on me would have furnished the Times with food for crushers on "The Shocking State of the Army" for a twelvemonth. My chief friend and ally, tormentor and initiator, was a little fellow, Cosmo Grandison; in Ours he was "Little Grand" to everybody, from the Colonel to the baggage-women. He was seventeen, and had joined about a year. What a pretty boy he was, too! All the fair ones in Valetta, from his Excellency's wife to our washerwomen, admired that boy, and spoilt him and petted him, and I do not believe there was a man of Ours who would have had heart to sit in court-martial on Little Grand if he had broken every one of the Queen's regulations, and set every General Order at defiance. I think I see him now—he was new to Malta as I, having just landed with the Dare Devils, en route from India to Portsmouth—as he sat one day on the table in the mess-room as cool as a cucumber, in spite of the broiling sun, smoking, and swinging his legs, and settling his forage-cap on one side of his head, as pretty-looking, plucky, impudent a young monkey as ever piqued himself on being an old hand, and a knowing bird not to be caught by any chaff however ingeniously prepared.

"Simon," began Little Grand (my "St. John," first barbarized by Mr. Pope for the convenience of his dactyles and hexameters into Sinjin, being further barbarized by this little imp into Simon)—"Simon, do you want to see the finest woman in this confounded little pepper-box? You're no judge of a woman, though, you muff—taste been warped, perhaps, by constant contemplation of that virgin Aunt Minerva—Matilda, is it? all the same."

"Hang your chaff," said I; "you'd make one out a fool."

"Precisely, my dear Simon; just what you are!" responded Little Grand, pleasantly, "Bless your heart, I've been engaged to half a dozen women since I joined. A man can hardly help it, you see; they've such a way of drawing you on, you don't like to disappoint them, poor little dears, and so you compromise yourself out of sheer benevolence. There's such a run on a handsome man—it's a great bore. Sometimes I think I shall shave my head, or do something to disfigure myself, as Spurina did. Poor fellow, I feel for him! Well, Simon, you don't seem curious to know who my beauty is?"

"One of those Mitchell girls of the Twenty-first? You waltzed with 'em all night; but they're too tall for you, Grand."

"The Mitchell girls!" ejaculated he, with supreme scorn. "Great maypoles! they go about with the Fusiliers like a pair of colors. On every ball-room battlefield one's safe to see them flaunting away, and as everybody has a shot at 'em, their hearts must be pretty well riddled into holes by this time. No, mine's rather higher game than that. My mother's brother-in-law's aunt's sister's cousin's cousin once removed was Viscount Twaddle, and I don't go anything lower than the Peerage."

"What, is it somebody you've met at his Excellency's?"

"Wrong again, beloved Simon. It's nobody I've met at old Stars and Garters', though his lady-wife could no more do without me than without her sal volatile and flirtations. No, she don't go there; she's too high for that sort of thing—sick of it. After all the European Courts, Malta must be rather small and slow. I was introduced to her yesterday, and," continued Little Grand, more solemnly than was his wont, "I do assure you she's superb, divine; and I'm not very easy to please."

"What's her name?" I asked, rather impressed with this view of a lady too high for old Stars and Garters, as we irreverently termed her Majesty's representative in her island of Malta.

Little Grand took his pipe out of his lips to correct me with more dignity.

"Her title, my dear Simon, is the Marchioness St. Julian."

"Is that an English peerage, Grand?"

"Hum! What! Oh yes, of course! What else should it be, you owl!"

Not being in a condition to decide this point, I was silent, and he went on, growing more impressive at each phrase:

"She is splendid, really! And I'm a very difficile fellow, you know; but such hair, such eyes, one doesn't see every day in those sun-dried Mitchells or those little pink Bovilliers. Well, yesterday, after that confounded luncheon (how I hate all those complimentary affairs!—one can't enjoy the truffles for talking to the ladies, nor enjoy the ladies for discussing the truffles), I went for a ride with Conran out to Villa Neponte. I left him there, and went down to see the overland steamers come in. While I was waiting, I got into talk, somehow or other, with a very agreeable, gentleman-like fellow, who asked me if I'd only just come to Malta, and all that sort of thing—you know the introductory style of action—till we got quite good friends, and he told me he was living outside this wretched little hole at the Casa di Fiori, and said—wasn't it civil of him?—said he should be very happy to see me if I'd call any time. He gave me his card—Lord Adolphus Fitzhervey—and a man with him called him 'Dolph.' As good luck had it, my weed went out just while we were talking, and Fitzhervey was monstrously pleasant, searched all over him for a fusee, couldn't find one, and asked me to go up with him to the Casa di Fiori and get a light. Of course I did, and he and I and Guatamara had some sherbet and a smoke together, and then he introduced me to the Marchioness St. Julian, his sister—by Jove! such a magnificent woman, Simon, you never saw one like her, I'll wager. She was uncommonly agreeable, too, and such a smile, my boy! She seemed to like me wonderfully—not rare that, though, you'll say—and asked me to go and take coffee there to-night after mess, and bring one of my chums with me; and as I like to show you life, young one, and your taste wants improving after Aunt Minerva, you may come, if you like. Hallo! there's Conran. I say, don't tell him. I don't want any poaching on my manor."

Conran came in at that minute; he was then a Brevet-Major and Captain in Ours, and one of the older men who spoilt Little Grand in one way, as much as the women did in another. He was a fine, powerful fellow, with eyes like an eagle's, and pluck like a lion's; he had a grave look, and had been of late more silent and self-reticent than the other roistering, dÉbonnair, light-hearted "Dare Devils;" but though, perhaps, tired of the wild escapades which reputation had once attributed to him, was always the most lenient to the boy's monkey tricks, and always the one to whom he went if his larks had cost him too dear, or if he was in a scrape from which he saw no exit. Conran had recently come in for a good deal of money, and there were few bright eyes in Malta that would not have smiled kindly on him; but he did not care much for any of them. There was some talk of a love-affair before he went to India, that was the cause of his hard-heartedness, though I must say he did not look much like a victim to the grande passion, in my ideas, which were drawn from valentines and odes in the "Woman, thou fond and fair deceiver" style; in love that turned its collars down and let its hair go uncut and refused to eat, and recovered with a rapidity proportionate to its ostentation; and I did not know that, if a man has lost his treasure, he may mourn it so deeply that he may refuse to run about like Harpagon, crying for his cassette to an audience that only laughs at his miseries.

"Well, young ones," said Conran, as he came in and threw down his cap and whip, "here you are, spending your hours in pipes and bad wine. What a blessing it is to have a palate that isn't blasÉ, and that will swallow all wine just because it is wine! That South African goes down with better relish, Little Grand, than you'll find in ChÂteau Margaux ten years hence. As soon as one begins to want touching up with olives, one's real gusto is gone."

"Hang olives, sir! they're beastly," said Little Grand; "and I don't care who pretends they're not. Olives are like sermons and wives, everybody makes a wry face, and would rather be excused 'em, Major; but it's the custom to call 'em good things, and so men bolt 'em in complaisance, and while they hate the salt-water flavor, descant on the delicious rose taste!"

"Quite true, Little Grand! but one takes olives to enhance the wine; and so, perhaps, other men's sermons make one enjoy one's racier novel, and other men's wives make one appreciate one's liberty still better. Don't abuse olives; you'll want them figuratively and literally before you've done either drinking or living!"

"Oh! confound it, Major," cried Little Grand, "I do hope and trust a spent ball may have the kindness to double me up and finish me off before then."

"You're not philosophic, my boy."

"Thank Heaven, no!" ejaculated Little Grand, piously. "I've an uncle, a very great philosopher, beats all the sages hollow, from Bion to Buckle, and writes in the Metaphysical Quarterly, but I'll be shot if he don't spend so much time in trying to puzzle out what life is, that all his has slipped away without his having lived one bit. When I was staying with him one Christmas, he began boring me with a frightful theory on the non-existence of matter. I couldn't stand that, so I cut him short, and set him down to the luncheon-table; and while he was full swing with a Strasbourg pÂtÉ and Comet hock, I stopped him and asked him if, with them in his mouth, he believed in matter or not? He was shut up, of course; bless your soul, those theorists always are, if you're down upon 'em with a little fact!"

"Such as a Strasbourg pÂtÉ?—that is an unanswerable argument with most men, I believe," said Conran, who liked to hear the boy chatter. "What are you going to do with yourself to-night, Grand?"

"I am going to—ar—hum—to a friend of mine," said Little Grand, less glibly than usual.

"Very well; I only asked, because I would have taken you to Mrs. Fortescue's with me; they're having some acting proverbs (horrible exertion in this oven of a place, with the thermometer at a hundred and twenty degrees); but if you've better sport it's no matter. Take care what friends you make, though, Grand; you'll find some Maltese acquaintances very costly."

"Thank you. I should say I can take care of myself," replied Little Grand, with immeasurable scorn and dignity.

Conran laughed, struck him across the shoulders with his whip, stroked his own moustaches, and went out again, whistling one of Verdi's airs.

"I don't want him bothering, you know," explained Little Grand; "she's such a deuced magnificent woman!"

She was a magnificent woman, this Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St. Julian; and proud enough Little Grand and I felt when we had that soft, jewelled hand held out to us, and that bewitching smile beamed upon us, and that joyous presence dazzling in our eyes, as we sat in the drawing-room of that Casa di Fiori. She was about thirty-five, I should say (boys always worship those who might have been schoolfellows of their mothers), tall and stately, and imposing, with the most beautiful pink and white skin, with a fine set of teeth, raven hair, and eyes tinted most exquisitely. Oh! she was magnificent, our Marchioness St. Julian! Into what unutterable insignificance, what miserable, washed-out shadows sank Stars and Garters' lady, and the Mitchell girls, and all the belles of La Valetta, whom we hadn't thought so very bad-looking before.

There was a young creature sitting a little out of the radiance of light, reading; but we had no eyes for anybody except the Marchioness St. Julian. We were in such high society, too; there was her brother, Lord Adolphus, and his bosom Pylades, the Baron Guatamara; and there was a big fellow, with hooked nose and very curly hair, who was introduced to us as the Prince of Orangia Magnolia; and a little wiry fellow, with bits of red and blue ribbon, and a star or two in his button-hole, who was M. le Due de Saint-Jeu. We were quite dazzled with the coruscations of so much aristocracy, especially when they talked across to each other—so familiarly, too—of Johnnie (that we Lord Russell), and Pam, and "old Buck" (my godfather Buckingham, Lord Adolphus explained to us), and Montpensier and old Joinville; and chatted of when they dined at the Tuileries, and stayed at CompiÈgne, and hunted at Belvoir, and spent Christmas at Holcombe or Longleat. We were in such high society! How contemptible appeared Mrs. Maberly's and the Fortescue soirÉes; how infinitesimally small grew Charlie Ruthven, and Harry Villiers, and Grey and Albany, and all the other young fellows who thought it such great guns to be au mieux with little Graziella, or invited to Sir George Dashaway's. We were a cut above those things now—rather!

That splendid Marchioness! There was a head for a coronet, if you like! And how benign she was! Grand sat on the couch beside her, and I on an ottoman on her left, and she leaned back in her magnificent toilette, flirting her fan like a Castilian, and flashing upon us her superb eyes from behind it; not speaking very much, but showing her white teeth in scores of heavenly smiles, till Little Grand, the blasÉ man of seventeen, and I the raw Moses of private tutelage, both felt that we had never come across anything like this; never, in fact, seen a woman worth a glance before.

She listened to us—or rather to him; I was too awestruck to advance much beyond monosyllables—and laughed at him, and smiled encouragingly on my gaucherie (and when a boy is gauche, how ready he is to worship such a helping hand!), and beamed upon us both with an effulgence compared with which the radiance of Helen, Galatea, [OE]none, Messalina, LaÏs, and all the legendary beauties one reads about, must have been what the railway night-lamps that never burn are to the prismatic luminaries of Cremorne. They were all uncommonly pleasant, all except the girl who was reading, whom they introduced as the Signorina da' Guari, a Tuscan, and daughter to Orangia Magnolia, with one of those marvellously beautiful faces that one sees in the most splendid painters' models of the Campagna, who never lifted her head scarcely, though Guatamara and Saint-Jeu did their best to make her. But all the others were wonderfully agreeable, and quite fÊte'd Little Grand and me, at which, they, being more than double our age, and seemingly at home alike with Belgravia and Newmarket, the Faubourg and the Pytchley, we felt to grow at least a foot each in the aroma of this Casa di Fiori.

"This is rather stupid, Doxie," began Lord Adolphus, addressing his sister; "not much entertainment for our guests. What do you say to a game of vingt-et-un, eh, Mr. Grandison?"

Little Grand fixed his blue eyes on the Marchioness, and said he should be very happy, but, as for entertainment—he wanted no other.

"No compliments, petit ami," laughed the Marchioness, with a dainty blow of her fan. "Yes, Dolph, have vingt-et-un, or music, or anything you like. Sing us something, Lucrezia."

The Italian girl thus addressed looked up with a passionate, haughty flush, and answered, with wonderfully little courtesy I considered, "I shall not sing to-night."

"Are you unwell, fairest friend?" asked the Duc de Saint-Jeu, bending his little wiry figure over her.

She shrank away from him, and drew back, a hot color in her cheeks.

"Signore, I did not address you."

The Marchioness looked angry, if those divine eyes could look anything so mortal. However, she shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, my dear Lucrezia, we can't make you sing, of course, if you won't. I, for my part, always do any little thing I can to amuse anybody; if I fail, I fail; I have done my best, and my friends will appreciate the effort, if not the result. No, my dear Prince, do not tease her," said the Marchioness to Orangia Magnolia, who was arguing, I thought, somewhat imperatively for such a well-bred and courtly man, with Lucrezia; "we will have vingt-et-un, and Lucrezia will give us the delight of her voice some other evening, I dare say."

We had vingt-et-un; the Marchioness would not play, but she sat in her rose velvet arm-chair, just behind Little Grand, putting in pretty little speeches, and questions, and bagatelles, and calling attention to the gambols of her darling greyhound Cupidon, and tapping Little Grand with her fan, till, I believe, he neither knew how the game went, nor what money he lost; and I, gazing at her, and cursing him for his facile tongue, never noticed my naturels, couldn't have said what the maximum was if you had paid me for it, and might, for anything I knew to the contrary, have been seeing my life slip away with each card as Balzac's hero with the Peau de Chagrin. Then we had sherbet, and wine, and cognac for those who preferred it; and the Marchioness gave us permission to smoke, and took a dainty hookah with an amber mouthpiece for her own use (divine she did look, too, with that hookah between her ruby lips!); and the smoke, and the cognac, and the smiles, unloosed our tongues, and we spake like very great donkeys, I dare say, but I'm sure with not a tenth part the wisdom that Balaam's ass developed in his brief and pithy conversation.

However great the bosh we talked, though, we found very lenient auditors. Fitzhervey and Guatamara laughed at all our witticisms; the Prince of Orangia Magnolia joined in with a "Per Baccho!" and a "Bravo!" and little Saint-Jeu wheezed, and gave a faint echo of "Mon Dieu!" and "TrÈs bien, trÈs bien, vraiment!" and the Marchioness St. Julian laughed too, and joined in our nonsense, and, what was much more, bent a willing ear to our compliments, no matter how florid; and Saint-Jeu told us a story or two, more amusing than comme il faut, at which the Marchioness tried to look grave, and did look shocked, but laughed for all that behind her fan; and Lucrezia da' Guari sat in shadow, as still and as silent as the Parian Euphrosyne on the console, though her passionate eyes and expressive face looked the very antipodes of silence and statuetteism, as she flashed half-shy, half-scornful, looks upon us.

If the first part of the evening had been delightful, this was something like Paradise! It was such high society! and with just dash enough of Mabille and coulisses laisseraller to give it piquancy. How different was the pleasantry and freedom of these real aristos, after the humdrum dinners and horrid bores of dances that those snobs of Maberlys, and Fortescues, and Mitchells, made believe to call Society!

What with the wine, and the smoke, and the smiles, I wasn't quite clear as to whether I saw twenty horses' heads or one when I was fairly into saddle, and riding back to the town, just as the first dawn was rising, Aphrodite-like, from the far blue waves of the Mediterranean. Little Grand was better seasoned, but even he was dizzy with the parting words of the Marchioness, which had softly breathed the delicious passport, "Come to-morrow."

"By Jupiter!" swore Little Grand, obliged to give relief to his feelings—"by Jupiter, Simon! did you ever see such a glorious, enchanting, divine, delicious, adorable creature? Faugh! who could look at those Mitchell girls after her? Such eyes! such a smile! such a figure! Talk of a coronet! no imperial crown would be half good enough for her! And how pleasant those fellows are! I like that little chaffy chap, the Duke; what a slap-up story that was about the bal de l'OpÉra. And Fitzhervey, too; there's something uncommonly thorough-bred about him, ain't there? And Guatamara's an immensely jolly fellow. Ah, myboy! that's something like society; all the ease and freedom of real rank; no nonsense about them, as there is about snobs. I say, what wouldn't the other fellows give to be in our luck? I think even Conran would warm up about her. But, Simon, she's deucedly taken with me—she is, upon my word; and she knows how to show it you, too! By George! one could die for a woman like that—eh?"

"Die!" I echoed, while my horse stumbled along up the hilly road, and I swayed forward, pretty nearly over his head, while poetry rushed to my lips, and electric sparks danced before my eyes:

"To die for those we love! oh, there is power
In the true heart, and pride, and joy, for this
It is to live without the vanished light
That strength is needed!"

"But I'll be shot if it shall be vanished light," returned Little Grand; "it don't look much like it yet. The light's only just lit, 'tisn't likely it's going out again directly; but she is a stunner! and——"

"A stunner!" I shouted; "she's much more than that—she's an angel, and I'll be much obliged to you to call her by her right name, sir. She's a beautiful, noble, loving woman; the most perfect of all Nature's masterworks. She is divine, sir, and you and I are not worthy merely to kiss the hem of her garment."

"Ain't we, though? I don't care much about kissing her dress; it's silk, and I don't know that I should derive much pleasure from pressing my lips on its texture; but her cheek——"

"Her cheek is like the Catherine pear,
The side that's next the sun!"

I shouted, as my horse went down in a rut. "She's like Venus rising from the sea-shell; she's like Aurora, when she came down on the first ray of the dawn to Tithonus; she's like Briseis——"

"Bother classics! she's like herself, and beats 'em all hollow. She's the finest creature ever seen on earth, and I should like to see the man who'd dare to say she wasn't. And—I say, Simon—how much did you lose to-night?"

From sublimest heights I tumbled straight to bathos. The cold water of Grand's query quenched my poetry, extinguished my electric lights, and sobered me like a douche bath.

"I don't know," I answered, with a sense of awe and horror stealing over me; "but I had a pony in my waistcoat-pocket that the governor had just sent me; Guatamara changed it for me, and—I've only sixpence left!"

"Old boy," said Little Grand to me, the next morning, after early parade, "come in my room, and let's make up some despatches to the governors. You see," he continued, five minutes after,—"you see, we're both of us pretty well cleared out; I've only got half a pony, and you haven't a couple of fivers left. Now you know they evidently play rather high at the Casa di Fiori; do everything en prince, like nobs who've Barclays at their back; and one mustn't hang fire; horrid shabby that would look. Besides, fancy seeming mean before her! So I've been thinking that, though governors are a screwy lot generally, if we put it to 'em clearly the sort of set we've got into, and show 'em that we can't help, now that we are at Rome, doing as the Romans do, I should say they could hardly help bleeding a little—eh? Now, listen how I've put it. My old boy has a weakness for titles; he married my mother on the relationship to Viscount Twaddles (who doesn't know of her existence; but who does to talk about as 'our cousin'), and he'd eat up miles of dirt for a chance of coming to a strawberry-leaf; so I think this will touch him up beautifully. Listen! ain't I sublimely respectful? 'I'm sure, my dear father, you wilt be delighted to learn, that by wonderful luck, or rather I ought to say Providence, I have fallen on my feet in Malta, and got introduced to the very highest' (wait! let me stick a dash under very)—'the very highest society here. They are quite tip-top. To show you what style, I need only mention Lord A. Fitzhervey, the Baron Guatamara, and the Marchioness St. Julian, as among my kindest friends. They have been yachting in the Levant, and are now staying in Malta: they are all most kind to me; and I know you will appreciate the intellectual advantages that such contact must afford me; at the same time you will understand that I can hardly enter such circles as a snob, and you will wish your son to comport himself as a gentleman; but gentlemanizing comes uncommon dear, I can tell you, with all the care in the world: and if you could let me have another couple of hundred, I should vote you'—a what, Simon?—'an out-and-out brick' is the sensible style, but I suppose 'the best and kindest of parents' is the filial dodge, eh? There! 'With fond love to mamma and Florie, ever your affectionate son, Cosmo Grandison.' Bravo! that's prime; that'll bring the yellows down, I take it. Here, old fellow, copy it to your governor; you couldn't have a more stunning effusion—short, and to the purpose, as cabinet councils ought to be, and ain't. Fire away, my juvenile."

I did fire away; only I, of a more impressionable and poetic nature than Little Grand, gave a certain vent to my feelings in expatiating on the beauty, grace, condescension, &c., &c., of the Marchioness to my mother; I did not mention the grivois stories, the brandy, and the hookah: I was quite sure they were the sign of that delirious ease and disregard of snobbish etiquette and convenances peculiar to the "Upper Ten," but I thought the poor people at home, in vicarage seclusion, would be too out of the world to fully appreciate such revelations of our crÊme de la crÊme; besides, my governor had James's own detestation of the divine weed, and considered that men who "made chimneys of their mouths" might just as well have the mark of the Beast at once.

Little Grand and I were hard-up for cash, and en attendant the governors' replies and remittances, we had recourse to the tender mercies and leather bags of napoleons, ducats, florins, and doubloons of a certain Spanish Jew, one Balthazar Miraflores, a shrivelled-skinned, weezing old cove, who was "most happy to lent anytink to his tear young shentlesmen, but, by Got! he was as poor as Job, he was indeed!" Whether Job ever lent money out on interest or not, I can't say; perhaps he did, as in the finish he ended with having quadrupled his cattle and lands, and all his goods—a knack usurers preserve in full force to this day; but all I can say is, that if he was not poorer than Mr. Miraflores, he was not much to be pitied, for he, miserly old shark, lived in his dark, dirty hole, like a crocodile embedded in Nile mud, and crushed the bones of all unwary adventurers who came within range of his great bristling jaws.

Money, however, Little Grand and I got out of him in plenty, only for a little bit of paper in exchange; and at that time we didn't know that though the paper tax would be repealed at last, there would remain, as long as youths are green and old birds cunning, a heavy and a bitter tax on certain bits of paper to which one's hand is put, which Mr. Gladstone, though he achieve the herculean task of making draymen take kindly to vin ordinaire, and the popping of champagne corks a familiar sound by cottage-hearths, will never be able to include in his budgets, to come among the Taxes that are Repealed!

Well, we had our money from old Balthazar that morning, and we played with it again that night up at the Casa di Fiori. Loo this time, by way of change. Saint-Jeu said he always thought it well to change your game as you change your loves: constancy, whether to cards or women, was most fatiguing. We liked Saint-Jeu very much, we thought him such a funny fellow. They said they did not care to play much—of course they didn't, when Guatamara had had ÉcartÉ with the Grand-Duke of Chaffsandlarkstein at half a million a side, and Lord Dolph had broken the bank at Homburg "just for fun—no fun to old Blanc, who farms it, though, you know." But the Marchioness, who was doubly gracious that night, told them they must play, because it amused her chers petits amis. Besides, she said, in her pretty, imperious way, she liked to see it—it amused her. After that, of course, there was no more hesitation; down we sat, and young Heavystone with us.

The evening before we had happened to mention him, said he was a fellow of no end of tin, though as stupid an owl as ever spelt his own name wrong when he passed a military examination, and the Marchioness, recalling the name, said she remembered his father, and asked us to bring him to see her; which we did, fearing no rival in "old Heavy."

So down we three sat, and had the evening before over again, with the cards, and the smiles, and wiles of our divinity, and Saint-Jeu's stories and Fitzhervey's cognac and cigars; with this difference, that we found loo more exciting than vingt-et-un. They played it so fast, too, it was like a breathless heat for the Goodwood Cup, and the Marchioness watched it, leaning alternately over Grand's, and Heavy's, and my chair, and saying, with such naÏve delight, "Oh, do take miss, Cosmo; I would risk it if I were you, Mr. Heavystone; pray don't let my naughty brother win everything," that I'd have defied the stiffest of the Stagyrites or the chilliest of Calvinists to have kept their head cool with that syren voice in their ear.

And La Lucrezia sat, as she had sat the night before, by the open window, still and silent, the Cape jasmines and Southern creepers framing her in a soft moonlight picture, contrast enough to the brilliantly lighted room, echoing with laughter at Saint-Jeu's stories, perfumed with Cubas and narghilÉs, and shrining the magnificent, full-blown, jewelled beauty of our Marchioness St. Julian, with which we were as rapidly, as madly, as unreasoningly, and as sentimentally in love as any boys of seventeen or eighteen ever could be. What greater latitude, you will exclaim, recalling certain buried-away episodes of your hobbedehoyism, when you addressed Latin distichs to that hazel-eyed Hebe who presided over oyster patties and water ices at the pastrycook's in Eton; or ruined your governor's young plantations cutting the name of Adeliza Mary, your cousin, at this day a portly person in velvet and point, whom you can now call, with a thanksgiving in the stead of the olden tremor, Mrs. Hector M'Cutchin? Yes, we were in love in a couple of evenings, Little Grand vehemently and unpoetically, I shyly and sentimentally, according to our temperament, and as the fair Emily stirred feud between the two Noble Kinsmen, so the Marchioness St. Julian began to sow seeds of jealousy and detestation between us, sworn allies as we were. But "le vÉritable amant ne connaÎt point d'amis," and as soon as we began to grow jealous of each other, Little Grand could have kicked me to the devil, and I could have kicked him with the greatest pleasure in life.

But I was shy, Little Grand was blessed with all the audacity imaginable; the consequence was, that when our horses came round, and the Maltese who acted as cherub was going to close the gates of Paradise upon us, he managed to slip into the Marchioness's boudoir to get a tÊte-À-tÊte farewell, while I strode up and down the veranda, not heeding Saint-Jeu, who was telling me a tale, to which, in any other saner moments, I should have listened greedily, but longing to execute on Little Grand some fierce and terrible vengeance, to which the vendetta should be baby's play. Saint-Jeu left me to put his arm over Heavy's shoulder, and tell him if ever he came to Paris he should be transported to receive him at the HÔtel de Millefleurs, and present him at the Tuileries; and I stood swearing to myself, and breaking off sprays of the veranda creepers, when I heard somebody say, very softly and low,—

"Signore, come here a moment."

It was that sweetly pretty mute whom we had barely noticed, absorbed as we were in the worship of our maturer idol, leaning out of the window, her cheeks flushed, her lips parted, her eyes sad and anxious. Of course I went to her, surprised at her waking up so suddenly to any interest in me. She put her hand on my coat-sleeve, and drew me down towards her.

"Listen to me a moment. I hardly know how to warn you, and yet I must. I cannot sit quietly by and see you and your young friends being deceived as so many have been before you. Do not come here again—-do not——"

"Figlia mia! are you not afraid of the night-air?" said the Prince of Orangia Magnolia, just behind us.

His words were kind, but there was a nasty glitter in his eyes. Lucrezia answered him in passionate Italian—of which I had no knowledge—with such fire in her eyes, such haughty gesticulation, and such a torrent of words, that I really began to think, pretty soft little dear as she looked, that she must positively be a trifle out of her mind, her silence before, and her queer speech to me, seemed such odd behavior for a young lady in such high society. She was turning to me again when Little Grand came out into the veranda, looking flushed, proud, and self-complaisant, as such a winner and slayer of women would do. My hand clenched on the jasmine, I thirsted to spring on him as he stood there with his provoking, self-contented smile, and his confounded coxcombical air, and his cursed fair curls—my hair was dust-colored and as rebellious as porcupine-quills—and wash out in his blood or mine——A touch of a soft hand thrilled through my every nerve and fibre: the Marchioness was there, and signed me to her. Lucrezia, Little Grand, and all the rest of the universe vanished from my mind at the lightning of that angel smile and the rustle of that moire-antique dress. She beckoned me to her into the empty drawing-room.

"Augustus" (I never thought my name could sound so sweet before), "tell me, what was my niece Lucrezia saying to you just now?"

Now I had a sad habit of telling the truth; it was an out-of-the-world custom taught me, among other old-fashioned things, at home, though I soon found how inconvenient a bÊtise modern society considers it; and I blurted the truth out here, not distinctly or gracefully, though, as Little Grand would have done, for I was in that state of exaltation ordinarily expressed as not knowing whether one is standing in one's Wellingtons or not.

The Marchioness sighed.

"Ah, did she say that? Poor dear girl! She dislikes me so much, it is quite an hallucination, and yet, O Augustus, I have been to her like an elder sister, like a mother. Imagine how it grieves me," and the Marchioness shed some tears—pearls of price, thought I, worthy to drop from angel eyes—"it is a bitter sorrow to me, but, poor darling! she is not responsible."

She touched her veiny temple significantly as she spoke, and I understood, and felt tremendously shocked at it, that the young, fair Italian girl was a fierce and cruel maniac, who had the heart (oh! most extraordinary madness did it seem to me; if I had lost my senses I could never have harmed her!) to hate, absolutely hate, the noblest, tenderest, most beautiful of women!

"I never alluded to it to any one," continued the Marchioness. "Guatamara and Saint-Jeu, though such intimate friends, are ignorant of it. I would rather have any one think ever so badly of me, than reveal to them the cruel misfortune of my sweet Lucrezia——"

How noble she looked as she spoke!

"But you, Augustus, you," and she smiled upon me till I grew as dizzy as after my first taste of milk-punch, "I have not the courage to let you go off with any bad impression of me. I have known you a very little while, it is true—but a few hours, indeed—yet there are affinities of heart and soul which overstep the bounds of time, and, laughing at the chill ties of ordinary custom, make strangers dearer than old friends——"

The room revolved round me, the lights danced up and down, my heart beat like Thor's hammer, and my pulse went as fast as a favorite saving the distance. She speaking so to me! My senses whirled round and round like fifty thousand witches on a Walpurgis Night, and down I went on my knees before my magnificent idol, raving away I couldn't tell you what now—the essence of everything I'd ever read, from Ovid to Alexander Smith. It must have been something frightful to hear, though Heaven knows I meant it earnestly enough. Suddenly I was pulled up with a jerk, as one throws an unbroken colt back on his haunches in the middle of his first start. I thought I heard a laugh.

She started up too. "Hush! another time! We may be overheard." And drawing her dress from my hands, which grasped it as agonisingly as a cockney grasps his saddle-bow, holding on for dear life over the Burton or Tedworth country, she stooped kindly over me, and floated away before I was recovered from the exquisite delirium of my ecstatic trance.

She loved me! This superb creature loved me! There was not a doubt of it; and how I got back to the barracks that night in my heavenly state of mind I could never have told. All I know is, that Grand and I never spoke a word, by tacit consent, all the way back; that I felt a fiendish delight when I saw his proud triumphant air, and thought how little he guessed, poor fellow!——And that Dream of One Fair Woman was as superior in rapture to the "Dream of Fair Women" as Tokay to the "Fine Fruity Port" that results from damsons and a decoction of sloes!

The next day there was a grand affair in Malta to receive some foreign Prince, whose name I do not remember now, who called on us en route to England. Of course all the troops turned out, and there was an inspection of us, and a grand luncheon and dinner, and ball, and all that sort of thing, which a month before I should have considered prime fun, but which now, as it kept me out of my paradise, I thought the most miserable bore that could possibly have chanced.

"I say," said Heavy to me as I was getting into harness—"I say, don't you wonder Fitzhervey and the Marchioness ain't coming to the palace to-day? One would have thought Old Stars and Garters would have been sure to ask them."

"Ask them? I should say so," I returned, with immeasurable disdain. "Of course he asked them; but she told me she shouldn't come, last night. She is so tired of such things. She came yachting with Fitzhervey solely to try and have a little quiet. She says people never give her a moment's rest when she is in Paris or London. She was sorry to disappoint Stars and Garters, but I don't think she likes his wife much: she don't consider her good ton."

On which information Heavy lapsed into a state of profoundest awe and wonderment, it having been one of his articles of faith, for the month that we had been in Malta, that the palace people were exalted demigods, whom it was only permissible to worship from a distance, and a very respectful distance too. Heavy had lost some twenty odd pounds the night before—of course we lost, young hands as we were, unaccustomed to the society of that entertaining gentleman, Pam—and had grumbled not a little at the loss of his gold bobs. But now I could see that such a contemptibly pecuniary matter was clean gone from his memory, and that he would have thought the world well lost for the honor of playing cards with people who could afford to disappoint Old Stars and Garters.

The inspection was over at last; and if any other than Conran had been my senior officer, I should have come off badly, in all probability, for the abominable manner in which I went through my evolutions. The day came to an end somehow or other, though I began to think it never would, the luncheon was ended, the bigwigs were taking their sieste, or otherwise occupied, and I, trusting to my absence not being noticed, tore off as hard as man can who has Cupid for his Pegasus. With a bouquet as large as a drum-head, clasped round with a bracelet, about which I had many doubts as to the propriety of offering to the possessor of such jewelry as the Marchioness must have, yet on which I thought I might venture after the scene of last night, I was soon on the veranda of the Casa di Fiori, and my natural shyness being stimulated into a distant resemblance of Little Grand's enviable brass, seeing the windows of the drawing-room open, I pushed aside the green venetians and entered noiselessly. The room did not look a quarter so inviting as the night before, though it was left in precisely a similar state. I do not know how it was, but those cards lying about on the floor, those sconces with the wax run down and dripping over them, those emptied caraffes that had diffused an odor not yet dissipated, those tables and velvet couches all À tort et À travers, did not look so very inviting after all, and even to my unsophisticated senses, scarcely seemed fit for a Peeress.

There was nobody in the room, and I walked through it towards the boudoir; from the open door I saw Fitzhervey, Guatamara, and my Marchioness—but oh! what horror unutterable! doing—que pensez-vous? Drinking bottled porter!—and drinking bottled porter in a peignoir not of the cleanliest, and with raven tresses not of the neatest!

Only fancy! she, that divine, spirituelle creature, who had talked but a few hours before of the affinity of souls, to have come down, like any ordinary woman, to Guinness's stout, and a checked dressing-gown and unbrushed locks! To find your prophet without his silver veil, or your Leila dead drowned in a sack, or your Guinevere flown over with Sir Lancelot to Boulogne, or your long-esteemed Griselda gone off with your cockaded Jeames, is nothing to the torture, the unutterable anguish, of seeing your angel, your divinity, your bright particular star, your hallowed Arabian rose, come down to—Bottled Porter! Do not talk to me of DorÉ, sir, or Mr. Martin's pictures; their horrors dwindle into insignificance compared with the horror of finding an intimate liaison between one's first love and Bottled Porter!

In my first dim, unutterable anguish, I should have turned and fled; but my syren's voice had not lost all its power, despite the stout and dirty dressing-gown, for she was a very handsome woman, and could stand such things as well as anybody. She came towards me, with her softest smile, glancing at the bracelet on the bouquet, apologizing slightly for her nÉgligÉ:—"I am so indolent. I only dress for those I care to please—and I never hoped to see you to-day." In short, magnetizing me over again, and smoothing down my outraged sensibilities, till I ended by becoming almost blind (quite I could not manage) to the checked robe de chambre and the unbrushed bandeaux, by offering her my braceleted bouquet, which was very graciously accepted, and even by sharing the atrocious London porter, "that horrid stuff," she called it, "how I hate it! but it is the only thing Sir Benjamin Brodie allows me, I am so very delicate, you know, my sensibilities so frightfully acute!"

I had not twenty minutes to stay, having to be back at the barracks, or risk a reprimand, which, happily, the checked peignoir had cooled me sufficiently to enable me to recollect. So I took my farewell—one not unlike Medora's and Conrad's, Fitzhervey and Guatamara having kindly withdrawn as soon as the bottled porter was finished—and I went out of the house in a very blissful state, despite Guinness and the unwelcome demi-toilette, which did not accord with EugÈne Sue's and the Parlor Library's description of the general getting-up and stunning appearance of heroines and peeresses, "reclining, in robes of cloud-like tissue and folds of the richest lace, on a cabriole couch of amber velvet, while the air was filled with the voluptuous perfume of the flower-children of the South, and music from unseen choristers lulled the senses with its divinest harmony," &c., &c., &c.

Bottled porter and a checked dressing-gown! Say what you like, sirs, it takes a very strong passion to overcome those. I have heard men ascribe the waning of their affections after the honeymoon to the constant sight of their wives—whom before they had only seen making papa's coffee with an angelic air and a toilette tirÉe À quatre Épingles—everlastingly coming down too late for breakfast in a dressing-gown; and, upon my soul, if ever I marry, which Heaven in pitiful mercy forfend! and my wife make her appearance in one of those confounded peignoirs, I will give that much-run-after and deeply-to-be-pitied public character, the Divorce Judge, some more work to do—I will, upon my honor.

However, the peignoir had not iced me enough that time to prevent my tumbling out of the house in as delicious an ecstasy as if I had been eating some of Monte Cristo's "hatchis." As I went out, not looking before me, I came bang against the chest of somebody else, who, not admiring the rencontre, hit my cap over my eyes, and exclaimed, in not the most courtly manner you will acknowledge, "You cursed owl, take that, then! What are you doing here, I should like to know?"

"Confound your impudence!" I retorted, as soon as my ocular powers were restored, and I saw the blue eyes, fair curls, and smart figure of my ancient IolaÜs, now my bitterest foe—"confound your impertinence! what are you doing here? you mean."

"Take care, and don't ask questions about what doesn't concern you," returned Little Grand, with a laugh—a most irritating laugh. There are times when such cachinnations sting one's ears more than a volley of oaths. "Go home and mind your own business, my chicken. You are a green bird, and nobody minds you, but still you'll find it as well not to come poaching on other men's manors."

"Other men's manors! Mine, if you please," I shouted, so mad with him I could have floored him where he stood.

"Phew!" laughed Little Grand, screwing up his lips into a contemptuous whistle, "you've been drinking too much Bass, my daisy; 'tis n't good for young heads—can't stand it. Go home, innocent."

The insult, the disdainful tone, froze my blood. My heart swelled with a sense of outraged dignity and injured manhood. With a conviction of my immeasurable superiority of position, as the beloved of that divine creature, I emancipated myself from the certain sort of slavery I was generally in to Little Grand, and spoke as I conceived it to be the habit of gentlemen whose honor had been wounded to speak.

"Mr. Grandison, you will pay for this insult. I shall expect satisfaction."

Little Grand laughed again—absolutely grinned, the audacious young imp—and he twelve months younger than I, too!

"Certainly, sir. If you wish to be made a target of, I shall be delighted to oblige you. I can't keep ladies waiting. It is always Place aux dames! with me; so, for the present, good morning!"

And off went the young coxcomb into the Casa di Fiori, and I, only consoled by the reflection of the different reception he would receive to what mine had been (he had a braceleted bouquet, too, the young pretentious puppy!), started off again, assuaging my lacerated feelings with the delicious word of Satisfaction. I felt myself immeasurably raised above the heads of every other man in Malta—a perfect hero of romance; in fact, fit to figure in my beloved Alexandre's most highly-wrought yellow-papered roman, with a duel on my hands, and the love of a magnificent creature like my Eudoxia Adelaida. She had become Eudoxia Adelaida to me now, and I had forgiven, if not forgotten, the dirty dressing-gown: the bottled porter lay, of course, at Brodie's door. If he would condemn spiritual forms of life and light to the common realistic aliments of horrible barmaids and draymen, she could not help it, nor I either. If angels come down to earth, and are separated from their natural nourishment of manna and nectar, they must take what they can get, even though it be so coarse and sublunary a thing as Guinness's XXX, must they not, sir? Yes, I felt very exaltÉ with my affair of honor and my affair of the heart, Little Grand for my foe, and my Marchioness, for a love. I never stopped to remember that I might be smashing with frightful recklessness the Sixth and the Seventh Commandments. If Little Grand got shot, he must thank himself; he should not have insulted me; and if there was a Marquis St. Julian, why—I pitied him, poor fellow! that was all.

Full of these sublime sensations—grown at least three feet in my varnished boots—I lounged into the ball-room, feeling supreme pity for ensigns who were chattering round the door, admiring those poor, pale garrison girls. They had not a duel and a Marchioness; they did not know what beauty meant—what life was!

I did not dance—I was above that sort of thing now—there was not a woman worth the trouble in the room; and about the second waltz I saw my would-be rival talking to Ruthven, a fellow in Ours. Little Grand did not look glum or dispirited, as he ought to have done after the interview he must have had; but probably that was the boy's brass. He would never look beaten if you had hit him till he was black and blue. Presently Ruthven came up to me. He was not over-used to his business, for he began the opening chapter in rather school-boy fashion.

"Hallo, Gus! so you and Little Grand have been falling out. Why don't you settle it with a little mill? A vast deal better than pistols. Duels always seem to me no fun. Two men stand up like fools, and——"

"Mr. Ruthven," said I, very haughtily, "if your principal desires to apologize——"

"Apologize! Bless your soul, no! But——"

"Then," said I, cutting him uncommonly short indeed, "you can have no necessity to address yourself to me, and I beg to refer you to my friend and second, Mr. Heavystone."

Wherewith I bowed, turned on my heel, and left him.

I did not sleep that night, though I tried hard, because I thought it the correct thing for heroes to sleep sweetly till the clock strikes the hour of their duel, execution, &c., or whatever it may hap. Egmont slept, Argyle slept, Philippe EgalitÉ, scores of them, but I could not. Not that I funked it, thank Heaven—I never had a touch of that—but because I was in such a delicious state of excitement, self-admiration, and heroism, which had not cooled when I found myself walking down to the appointed place by the beach with poor old Heavy, who was intensely impressed by being charged with about five quires of the best cream-laid, to be given to the Marchioness in case I fell. Little Grand and Ruthven came on the ground at almost the same moment, Little Grand eminently jaunty and most confoundedly handsome. We took off our caps with distant ceremony; the Castilian hidalgos were never more stately; but, then, what Knights of the Round Table ever splintered spears for such a woman?

The paces were measured, the pistols taken out of their case. We were just placed, and Ruthven, with a handkerchief in his hand, had just enumerated, in awful accents, "One! two!"—the "three!" yet hovered on his lips, when we heard a laugh—the third laugh that had chilled my blood in twenty-four hours. Somebody's hand was laid on Little Grand's shoulder, and Conran's voice interrupted the whole thing.

"Hallo, young ones! what farce is this?"

"Farce, sir!" retorted Little Grand, hotly—"farce! It is no farce. It is an affair of honor, and——"

"Don't make me laugh, my dear boy," smiled Conran; "it is so much too warm for such an exertion. Pray, why are you and your once sworn friend making popinjays of each other?"

"Mr. Grandison has grossly insulted me," I began, "and I demand satisfaction. I will not stir from the ground without it, and——"

"You sha'n't," shouted Little Grand. "Do you dare to pretend I want to funk, you little contemptible——"

Though it was too warm, Conran went off into a fit of laughter.

I dare say our sublimity had a comic touch in it of which we never dreamt. "My dear boys, pray don't, it is too fatiguing. Come, Grand, what is it all about?"

"I deny your right to question me, Major," retorted Little Grand, in a fury. "What have you to do with it? I mean to punish that young owl yonder—who didn't know how to drink anything but milk-and-water, didn't know how to say bo! to a goose, till I taught him—for very abominable impertinence, and I'll——"

"My impertinence! I like that!" I shouted. "It is your unwarrantable, overbearing self-conceit, that makes you the laughing-stock of all the mess, which——"

"Silence!" said Conran's still stern voice, which subdued us into involuntary respect. "No more of this nonsense! Put up those pistols, Ruthven. You are two hot-headed, silly boys, who don't know for what you are quarrelling. Live a few years longer, and you won't be so eager to get into hot water, and put cartridges into your best friends. No, I shall not hear any more about it. If you do not instantly give me your words of honor not to attempt to repeat this folly, as your senior officer I shall put you under arrest for six weeks."

O Alexandra Dumas!—O Monte Cristo!—O heroes of yellow paper and pluck invincible! I ask pardon of your shades; I must record the fact, lowering and melancholy as it is, that before our senior officer our heroism melted like Vanille ice in the sun, our glories tumbled to the ground like twelfth-cake ornaments under children's fingers, and before the threat of arrest the lions lay down like lambs.

Conran sent us back, humbled, sulky, and crestfallen, and resumed his solitary patrol upon the beach, where, before the sun was fairly up, he was having a shot at curlews. But if he was a little stern, he was no less kind-hearted; and in the afternoon of that day, while he lay, after his siesta, smoking on his little bed, I unburdened myself to him. He did not laugh at me, though I saw a quizzical smile under his black moustaches.

"What is your divinity's name?" he asked, when I had finished.

"Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St. Julian."

"The Marchioness St. Julian! Oh!"

"Do you know her?" I inquired, somewhat perplexed by his tone.

He smiled straight out this time.

"I don't know her, but there are a good many Peeresses in Malta and Gibraltar, and along the line of the Pacific, as my brother Ned, in the Belisarius, will tell you. I could count two score such of my acquaintance off at this minute."

I wondered what he meant. I dare say he knew all the Peerage; but that had nothing to do with me, and I thought it strange that all the Duchesses, and Countesses, and Baronesses should quit their country-seats and town-houses to locate themselves along the line of the Pacific.

"She's a fine woman, St. John?" he went on.

"Fine!" I reiterated, bursting into a panegyric, with which I won't bore you as I bored him.

"Well, you're going there to-night, you say; take me with you, and we'll see what I think of your Marchioness."

I looked at his fine figure and features, recalled certain tales of his conquests, remembered that he knew French, Italian, German, and Spanish, but, not being very able to refuse, acquiesced with a reluctance I could not entirely conceal. Conran, however, did not perceive it, and after mess took his cap, and went with me to the Casa di Fiori.

The rooms were all right again, my Marchioness was en grande tenue, amber silk, black lace, diamonds, and all that sort of style. Fitzhervey and the other men were in evening dress, drinking coffee; there was not a trace of bottled porter anywhere, and it was all very brilliant and presentable. The Marchioness St. Julian rose with the warmest effusion, her dazzling white teeth showing in the sunniest of smiles, and both hands outstretched.

"Augustus, bien aimÉ, you are rather——"

"Late," I suppose she was going to say, but she stopped dead short, her teeth remained parted in a stereotyped smile, a blankness of dismay came over her luminous eyes. She caught sight of Conran, and I imagined I heard a very low-breathed "Curse the fellow!" from courteous Lord Dolph. Conran came forward, however, as if he did not notice it; there was only that queer smile lurking under his moustaches. I introduced him to them, and the Marchioness smiled again, and Fitzhervey almost resumed his wonted extreme urbanity. But they were somehow or other wonderfully ill at ease—wonderfully, for people in such high society; and I was ill at ease too, from being only able to attribute Eudoxia Adelaida's evident consternation at the sight of Conran to his having been some time or other an old love of hers. "Ah!" thought I, grinding my teeth, "that comes of loving a woman older than one's self."

The Major, however, seemed the only one who enjoyed himself. The Marchioness was beaming on him graciously, though her ruffled feathers were not quite smoothed down, and he was sitting by her with an intense amusement in his eyes, alternately talking to her about Stars and Garters, whom, by her answers, she did not seem to know so very intimately after all, and chatting with Fitzhervey about hunting, who, for a man that had hunted over every country, according to his own account, seemed to confuse Tom Edge with Tom Smith, the Burton with the Tedworth, a bullfinch with an ox-rail, in queer style, under Conran's cross-questioning. We had been in the room about ten minutes, when a voice, rich, low, sweet, rang out from some inner room, singing the glorious "Inflammatus." How strange it sounded in the Casa di Fiori!

Conran started, the dark blood rose over the clear bronze of his cheek. He turned sharply on to the Marchioness. "Good Heaven! whose voice is that?"

"My niece's," she answered, staring at him, and touching a hand-bell. "I will ask her to come and sing to us nearer. She has really a lovely voice."

Conran grew pale again, and sat watching the door with the most extraordinary anxiety. Some minutes went by; then Lucrezia entered, with the same haughty reserve which her soft young face always wore when with her aunt. It changed, though, when her glance fell on Conran, into the wildest rapture I ever saw on any countenance. He fixed his eyes on her with the look Little Grand says he's seen him wear in battle—a contemptuous smile quivering on his face.

"Sing us something, Lucrezia dear," began the Marchioness. "You shouldn't be like the nightingales, and give your music only to night and solitude."

Lucrezia seemed not to hear her. She had never taken her eyes off Conran, and she went, as dreamily as that dear little Amina in the "Sonnambula," to her seat under the jasmines in the window. For a few minutes Conran, who didn't seem to care two straws what the society in general thought of him, took his leave, to the relief, apparently, of Fitzhervey and Guatamara.

As he went across the veranda—that memorable veranda!—I sitting in dudgeon near the other window, while Fitzhervey was proposing ÉcartÉ to Heavy, whom we had found there on our entrance, and the Marchioness had vanished into her boudoir for a moment, I saw the Roman girl spring out after him, and catch hold of his arm:

"Victor! Victor! for pity's sake!—I never thought we should meet like this!"

"Nor did I."

"Hush! hush! you will kill me. In mercy, say some kinder words!"

"I can say nothing that it would be courteous to you to say."

I couldn't have been as inflexible, whatever her sins might have been, with her hands clasped on me, and her face raised so close to mine. Lucrezia's voice changed to a piteous wail:

"You love me no longer, then?"

"Love!" said Conran, fiercely—"love! How dare you speak to me of love? I held you to be fond, innocent, true as Heaven; as such, you were dearer to me than life—as dear as honor. I loved you with as deep a passion as ever a man knew—Heaven help me! I love you now! How am I rewarded? By finding you the companion of blackguards, the associate of swindlers, one of the arch-intrigantes who lead on youths to ruin with base smiles and devilish arts. Then you dare talk to me of love!"

With those passionate words he threw her off him. She fell at his feet with a low moan. He either did not hear, or did not heed it; and I, bewildered by what I heard, mechanically went and lifted her from the ground. Lucrezia had not fainted, but she looked so wild, that I believed the Marchioness, and set her down as mad; but then Conran must be mad as well, which seemed too incredible a thing for me to swallow—our cool Major mad!

"Where does he live?" asked Lucrezia of me, in a breathless whisper.

"He? Who?"

"Victor—your officer—Signor Conran."

"Why, he lives in Valetta, of course."

"Can I find him there?"

"I dare say, if you want him."

"Want him! Oh, Santa Maria! is not his absence death? Can I find him?"

"Oh, yes, I dare say. Anybody will show you Conran's rooms."

"Thank you."

With that, this mysterious young lady left me, and I turned in through the window again. Heavy and the men were playing at lansquenet, that most perilous, rapid, and bewitching of all the resistless Card Circes. There was no Marchioness, and having done it once with impunity, I thought I might do it again, and lifted the amber curtain that divided the boudoir from the drawing-room. What did I behold? Oh! torture unexampled! Oh! fiendish agony! There was Little Grand—self-conceited, insulting, impertinent, abominable, unendurable Little Grand—on the amber satin couch, with the Marchioness leaning her head on his shoulder, and looking up in his thrice-confounded face with her most adorable smile, my smile, that had beamed, and, as I thought, beamed only upon me!

If Mephistopheles had been by to tempt me, I would have sold my soul to have wreaked vengeance on them both. Neither saw me, thank Heaven! and I had self-possession enough not to give them the cruel triumph of witnessing my anguish. I withdrew in silence, dropped the curtain, and rushed to bury my wrongs and sorrows in the friendly bosom of the gentle night. It was my first love, and I had made a fool of myself. The two are synonymous.

How I reached the barracks I never knew. All the night long I sat watching the stars out, raving to them of Eudoxia Adelaida, and cursing in plentiful anathemas my late Orestes. How should I bear his impudent grin every mortal night of my life across the mess-table? I tore up into shreds about a ream of paper, inscribed with tender sonnets to my faithless idol. I trampled into fifty thousand shreds a rosette off her dress, for which, fool-like, I had begged the day before. I smashed the looking-glass, which could only show me the image of a pitiful donkey. I called on Heaven to redress my wrongs. Oh! curse it! never was a fellow at once so utterly done for and so utterly done brown!

And in the vicarage, as I learnt afterwards, when my letter was received at home, there was great glorification and pleasure. My mother and the girls were enraptured at the high society darling Gussy was moving in; "but then, you know, mamma, dear Gussy's manners are so gentle, so gentleman-like, they are sure to please wherever he goes!" Wherewith my mother cried, and dried her eyes, and cried again, over that abominable letter copied from Little Grand's, and smelling of vilest tobacco.

Then entered a rectoress of a neighboring parish, to whom my mother and the girls related with innocent exultation of my grand friends at Malta; how Lord A. Fitzhervey was my sworn ally, and the Marchioness St. Julian had quite taken me under her wing. And the rectoress, having a son of her own, who was not doing anything so grand at Cambridge, but principally sotting beer at a Cherryhinton public, smiled and was wrathful, and said to her lord at dinner:

"My dear, did you ever hear of a Marchioness St. Julian?"

"No, my love, I believe not—never."

"Is there one in the peerage?"

"Can't say, my dear. Look in Burke."

So the rectoress got Burke and closed it, after deliberate inspection, with malignant satisfaction.

"I thought not. How ridiculous those St. Johns are about that ugly boy Augustus. As if Tom were not worth a hundred of him!"

I was too occupied with my own miseries then to think about Conran and Lucrezia, though some time after I heard all about it. It seems, that, a year before, Conran was on leave in Rome, and at Rome, loitering about the Campagna one day, he made a chance acquaintance with an Italian girl, by getting some flowers for her she had tried to reach and could not. She was young, enthusiastic, intensely interesting, and had only an old Roman nurse, deaf as a post and purblind, with her. The girl was Lucrezia da Guari, and Lucrezia was lovely as one of her own myrtle or orange flowers. Somehow or other Conran went there the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on for a good many days, and always found Lucrezia. Now, Conran had at bottom a touch of unstirred romance, and, moreover, his own idea of what sort of woman he could love. Something in this untrained yet winning Campagna flower answered to both. He was old to trust his own discernment, and, after a month or two's walks and talks, Conran, one of the proudest men going, offered himself and his name to a Roman girl of whom he knew nothing, except that she seemed to care for him as he had had a fancy to be cared for all his life. It was a deucedly romantic thing—however, he did it! Lucrezia had told him her father was a military officer, but somehow or other this father never came to light, and when he called at their house—or rather rooms—Conran always found him out, which he thought queer, but, on the whole, rather providential, and he set the accident down to a foreigner's roaming habits.

The day Conran had really gone the length of offering to make an unknown Italian his wife, he went, for the first time in the evening, to Da Guari's house. The servant showed him in unannounced to a brightly-lighted chamber, reeking with wine and smoke, where a dozen men were playing trente et quarante at an amateur bank, and two or three others were gathered round what he had believed his own fair and pure Campagna flower. He understood it all; he turned away with a curse upon him. He wanted love and innocence; adventuresses he could have by the score, and he was sick to death of them. From that hour he never saw her again till he met her at the Casa di Fiori.

The next day I went to Conran while he was breakfasting, and unburdened my mind to him. He looked ill and haggard, but he listened to me very kindly, though he spoke of the people at the Casa di Fiori in a hard, brief, curious manner.

"Plenty have been taken in like you, Gus," he said "I was, years ago, in my youth, when I joined the Army. There are scores of such women, as I told you, down the line of the Pacific, and about here; anywhere, in fact, where the army and navy give them fresh pigeons to be gulled. They take titles that sound grand in boys' ears, and fascinate them till they've won all their money, and then—send them to the dogs. Your Marchioness St. Julian's real name is Sarah Briggs."

I gave an involuntary shriek. Sarah Briggs finished me. It was the death-stroke, that could never be got over.

"She was a ballet-girl in London," continued Conran; "then, when she was sixteen, married that Fitzhervey, alias Briggs, alias Smith, alias what you please, and set up in her present more lucrative employment with her three or four confederates. Saint-Jeu was expelled from Paris for keeping a hell in the ChaussÉe d'Antin, Fitzhervey was a leg at Newmarket, Orangia Magnolia a lawyer's clerk, who was had up for forgery, Guatamara is—by another name—a scoundrel of Rome. There is the history of your Maltese Peerage, Gussy. Well, you'll be wider awake next time. Wait, there is somebody at my door. Stay here a moment, I'll come back to you."

Accordingly, I stayed in his bedroom, where I had found him writing, and he went into his sitting-room, of which, from the diminutiveness of his domicile, I commanded a full view, sit where I would. What was my astonishment to see Lucrezia! I went to his bedroom door; it was locked from the outside, so I perforce remained where I was, to, nolens volens, witness the finish of last night's interview.

Stern to the last extent and deadly pale, Conran stood, too surprised to speak, and most probably at a loss for words.

Lucrezia came up to him nevertheless with the abandonment of youth and southern blood.

"Victor! Victor! let me speak to you. You shall listen; you shall not judge me unheard."

"Signorina, I have judged you by only too ample evidence."

He had recovered himself now, and was as cool as needs be.

"I deny it. But you love me still?"

"Love you? More shame on me! A laugh, a compliment, a caress, a cashmere, is as much as such women as you are worth. Love becomes ridiculous named in the same breath with you."

She caught hold of his hand and crushed it in both her own.

"Kill me you will. Death would have no sting from your hand, but never speak such words to me."

His voice trembled.

"How can I choose but speak them? You know that I believed you in Italy, and how on that belief I offered you my name—a name never yet stained, never yet held unworthy. I lost you, to find you in society which stamped you for ever. A lovely fiend, holding raw boys enchained, that your associates might rifle their purses with marked cards and cogged dice. I hoped to have found a diamond, without spot or flaw. I discovered my error too late; it was only glass, which all men were free to pick up and trample on at their pleasure."

He tried to wrench his hand away, but she would not let it go.

"Hush! hush! listen to me first. If you once thought me worthy of your love, you may, surely, now accord me pity. I shall not trouble you long. After this, you need see me no more. I am going back to my old convent. You and the world will soon forget me, but I shall remember you, and pray for you, as dearer than my own soul."

Conran's head was bent down now, and his voice was thick, as he answered briefly,

"Go on."

This scene half consoled me for Eudoxia Adelaida—(I mean, O Heavens, Sarah Briggs!)—it was so exquisitely romantic, and Conran and Lucrezia wouldn't have done at all badly for Monte Cristo and that dear little Haidee. I was fearfully poetic in those days.

"When I met you in Rome," Lucrezia went on, in obedience to his injunction, "two years ago, you remember I had only left my convent and lived with my father but a month or two. I told you he was an officer. I only said what I had been told, and I knew no more than you that he was the keeper of a gambling house."

She shuddered as she paused, and leaned her forehead on Conran's hand. He did not repulse her, and she continued, in her broken, simple English:

"The evening you promised me what I should have needed to have been an angel to be worthy of—your love and your name—that very evening, when I reached home, my father bade me dress for a soirÉe he was going to give. I obeyed him, of course. I knew nothing but what he told me, and I went down, to find a dozen young nobles and a few Englishmen drinking and playing on a table covered with green cloth. Some few of them came up to me, but I felt frightened; their looks, their tones, their florid compliments, were so different to yours. But my father kept his eye on me, and would not let me leave. While they were leaning over my chair, and whispering in my ear, you came to the door of the salon, and I went towards you, and you looked cold, and harsh, as I had never seen you before, and put me aside, and turned away without a word. Oh, Victor! why did you not kill me then? Death would have been kindness. Your Othello was kinder to Desdemona; he slew her—he did not leave her. From that hour I never saw you, and from that hour my father persecuted me because I would never join in his schemes, nor enter his vile gaming-rooms. Yet I have lived with him, because I could not get away. I have been too carefully watched. We Italians are not free, like your happy English girls. A few weeks ago we were compelled to leave Rome, the young Contino di Firenze had been stilettoed leaving my father's rooms, and he could stay in Italy no longer. We came here, and joined that hateful woman, who calls herself Marchioness St. Julian; and, because she could not bend me to her will, gives out that I am her niece, and mad! I wonder I am not mad, Victor. I wish hearts would break, as the romancers make them; but how long one suffers and lives on! Oh, my love, my soul, my life, only say that you believe me, and look kindly at me once again, then I will never trouble you again, I will only pray for you. But believe me, Victor. The Mother Superior of my convent will tell you it is the truth that I speak. Oh, for the love of Heaven, believe me! Believe me or I shall die!"

It was not in the nature of man to resist her; there was truth in the girl's voice and face, if ever truth walked abroad on earth. And Conran did believe her, and told her so in a few unconnected words, lifting her up in his arms, and vowing, with most unrighteous oaths, that her father should never have power to persecute her again as long as he himself lived to shelter and take care of her.

I was so interested in my Monte Cristo and Haidee (it was so like a chapter out of a book), that I entirely forgot my durance vile, and my novel and excessively disgraceful, though enforced, occupation of spy; and there I stayed, alternating between my interest in them and my agonies at the revelations concerning my Eudoxia Adelaida—oh, hang it! I mean Sarah Briggs—till, after a most confounded long time, Conran saw fit to take Lucrezia off, to get asylum for her with the Colonel's wife for a day or two, that "those fools might not misconstrue her." By which comprehensive epithet he, I suppose, politely designated "Ours."

Then I went my ways to my own room, and there I found a scented, mauve-hued, creamy billet-doux, in uncommon bad handwriting, though, from my miserable Eudoxia Adelaida to the "friend and lover of her soul." Confound the woman!—how I swore at that daintily-perfumed and most vilely-scrawled letter. To think that where that beautiful signature stretched from one side to the other—"Eudoxia Adelaida St. Julian"—there ought to have been that short, vile, low-bred, hideous, Billingsgate cognomen of "Sarah Briggs!"

In the note she reproached me—the wretched hypocrite!—for my departure the previous night, "without one farewell to your Eudoxia, O cruel Augustus!" and asked me to give her a rendezvous at some vineyards lying a little way off the Casa di Fiori, on the road to Melita. Now, being a foolish boy, and regarding myself as having been loved and wronged, whereas I had only been playing the very common rÔle of pigeon, I could not resist the temptation of going, just to take one last look of that fair, cruel face, and upbraid her with being the first to sow the fatal seeds of lifelong mistrust and misery in my only too fond and faithful, &c. &c. &c.

So, at the appointed hour, just when the sun was setting over the far-away Spanish shore, and the hush of night was sinking over the little, rocky, peppery, military-thick, Mediterranean isle, I found myself en route to the vineyards; which, till I came to Malta, had been one of my delusions, Idea picturing them in wreaths and avenues, Reality proving them hop-sticks and parched earth. I drew near; it was quite dark now, the sun had gone to sleep under the blue waves, and the moon was not yet up. Though I knew she was Sarah Briggs, and an adventuress who had made game of me, two facts that one would fancy might chill the passion out of anybody, so mad was I about that woman, that, if I had met her then and there, I should have let her wheedle me over, and gone back to the Casa di Fiori with her and been fleeced again: I am sure I should, sir, and so would you, if, at eighteen, new to life, you had fallen in with Eudox——pshaw!—with Sarah Briggs, my Marchioness St Julian.

I drew near the vineyards: my heart beat thick, I could not see, but I was certain I heard the rustle of her dress, caught the perfume of her hair. All her sins vanished: how could I upbraid her, though she were three times over Sarah Briggs? Yes, she was coming; I felt her near; an electric thrill rushed through me as soul met soul. I heard a murmured "Dearest, sweetest!" I felt the warm clasp of two arms, but—a cold row of undress waistcoat-buttons came against my face, and a voice I knew too well cried out, as I rebounded from him, impelled thereto by a not gentle kick,—

"The devil! get out! Who the deuce are you?"

We both stopped for breath. At that minute up rose the silver moon, and in its tell-tale rays we glared on one another, I and Little Grand.

That silence was sublime: the pause between Beethoven's andante allegro—the second before the Spanish bull rushes upon the torreador.

"You little miserable wretch!" burst out Grand, slowly and terribly; "you little, mean, sneaking, spying, contemptible milksop! I should like to know what you mean by bringing out your ugly phiz at this hour, when you used to be afraid of stirring out for fear of nurse's bogies? And to dare to come lurking after me!"

"After you, Mr. Grandison!" I repeated, with grandiloquence. "Really you put too much importance on your own movements. I came by appointment to meet the Marchioness St. Julian, whom, I presume, as you are well acquainted with her, you know in her real name of Sarah Briggs, and to——"

"Sarah Briggs!—you come by appointment?" stammered Little Grand.

"Yes, sir; if you disbelieve my word of honor, I will condescend to show you my invitation."

"You little ape!" swore Grand, coming back to his previous wrath; "it is a lie, a most abominable, unwarrantable lie! I came by appointment, sir; you did no such thing. Look there!"

And he flaunted before my eyes in the moonlight the fac-simile of my letter, verbatim copy, save that in his Cosmo was put in the stead of Augustus.

"Look there!" said I, giving him mine.

Little Grand snatched it, read it over once, twice, thrice, then drooped his head, with a burning color in his face, and was silent.

The "knowing hand" was done!

We were both of us uncommonly quiet for ten minutes, neither of us liked to be the first to give in.

At last Little Grand looked up and held out his hand, no more nonsense about him now.

"Simon, you and I have been two great fools; we can't chaff one another. She's a cursed actress, and—let's make it up, old boy."

We made it up accordingly—when Little Grand was not conceited he was a very jolly fellow—and then I gave him my whole key to the mysteries, intricacies, and charms of our Casa di Fiori. We could not chaff one another, but poor Little Grand was pitiably sore then, and for long afterwards. He, the "old bird," the cool hand, the sharp one of Ours, to have been done brown, to be the joke of the mess, the laugh of all the men, down to the weest drummer-boy! Poor Little Grand! He was too done up to swagger, too thoroughly angry with himself to swear at anybody else. He only whispered to me, "Why the dickens could she want you and me to meet our selves?"

"To give us a finishing hoax, I suppose," I suggested.

Little Grand drew his cap over his eyes, and hung his head down in abject humiliation.

"I suppose so. What fools we have been, Simon! And, I say, I've borrowed three hundred of old Miraflores, and it's all gone up at that devilish Casa; and how I shall get it from the governor, Heaven knows, for I don't."

"I'm in the same pickle, Grand," I groaned. "I've given that old rascal notes of hand for two hundred pounds, and, if it don't drop from the clouds, I shall never pay it. Oh, I say, Grand, love comes deucedly expensive."

"Ah!" said he, with a sympathetic shiver, "think what a pair of hunters we might have had for the money!" With which dismal and remorseful remembrance the old bird, who had been trapped like a young pigeon, swore mightily, and withdrew into humbled and disgusted silence.

Next morning we heard, to our comfort—what lots of people there always are to tell us how to lock our stable-door when our solitary mare has been stolen—that, with a gentle hint from the police, the Marchioness St. Julian, with her confrÈres, had taken wing to the Ionian Isles, where, at Corfu or Cephalonia, they will re-erect the Casa di Fiori, and glide gently on again from vingt-et-un to loo, and from loo to lansquenet, under eyes as young and blinded as our own. They went without Lucrezia. Conran took her into his own hands. Any other man in the regiment would have been pretty well ridiculed at taking a bride out of the Casa di Fiori; but the statements made by the high-born Abbess of her Roman convert were so clear, and so to the girl's honor, and he had such a way of holding his own, of keeping off liberties from himself and anything belonging to him, and was, moreover, known to be of such fastidious honor, that his young wife was received as if she had been a Princess in her own right. With her respected parent Conran had a brief interview previous to his flight from Malta, in which, with a few gentle hints, he showed that worthy it would be wiser to leave his daughter unmolested for the future, and I doubt if Mr. Orangia Magnolia, alias Pepe Guari, would know his own child in the joyous, graceful, daintily-dressed mistress of Conran's handsome Parisian establishment.

Little Grand and I suffered cruelly. We were the butts of the mess for many a long month afterwards, when every idiot's tongue asked us on every side after the health of the Marchioness St. Julian? when we were going to teach them lansquenet? how often we heard from the aristocratic members of the Maltese Peerage? with like delightful pleasantries, which the questioners deemed high wit. We paid for it, too, to that arch old screw Balthazar; but I doubt very much if the money were not well lost, and the experience well gained. It cured me of my rawness and Little Grand of his self-conceit, the only thing that had before spoilt that good-hearted, quick-tempered, and clever-brained little fellow. Oh, Pater and Materfamilias, disturb not yourselves so unnecessarily about the crop of wild oats which your young ones are sowing broadcast. Those wild oats often spring from a good field of high spirit, hot courage, and thoughtless generosity, that are the sign and basis of nobler virtues to come, and from them very often rise two goodly plants—Experience and Discernment.