Various apocryphal stories are told of Brian Camperdown’s doings on the night that Stargarde Turner promised to be his wife. It is said that his blood being in too much of a tumult to allow him to enter his house and go to sleep, he started on a joyful and eccentric pilgrimage around the peninsula on which the city of Halifax is built.

Not satisfied with tramping over the dark and muddy roads of the Park, and the quiet streets of the city, he is said to have proceeded along the shores of Bedford Basin, and on the spot where more than a hundred years ago dead French soldiers, unhappy members of the expedition of 1746, were discovered sitting under the trees, their useless muskets by their sides—he, by a fitful gleam of moonlight, carved his own and Stargarde’s initials on the smooth-coated bark of a maple.

A story also exists of his having been seen eight miles farther on, and of his startling a watcher by a sick-bed by a glimpse of his ecstatic face looking through the cottage window; but this one is uncertain, and has never been corroborated.

Certain it is, however, that at daylight he returned home neither footsore nor weary and still in his state of exaltation. He let himself in by means of a latch-key, made an elaborate and prolonged toilet, then restlessly haunted the lower rooms of the house, waiting for some one to wake up to whom he could impart his joyful intelligence.

Old Hannah was the first person to come downstairs. To her, blear-eyed and affectionate, he, with an agonized twisting of lips, in order that he might not shout his news to the entire household, announced the fact that he was shortly to be married.

His ancient nurse staggered back as if she had received a blow, and fell in a rickety heap of bones on the hall floor. He lifted her up, administered restoratives, and presently had the mortification of seeing her burst into tears and stumble down to the basement.

“And she professes to adore Stargarde,” he muttered, backing in discomfiture into the dining room to avoid the two smart maids, who were tripping down the staircase in snowy caps and aprons.

Warned by his experience with Hannah, he said nothing to Mrs. Trotley and Zilla beyond a polite “Good-morning,” till they were well on with their breakfast. Then, with a diminished spirit, he cautiously informed them of the approaching change in his condition.

Zilla had been talking volubly, but at his words she snapped off a sentence on her lips, let fall her porridge spoon, and gave him a look that made him quail.

Mrs. Trotley was more to be pitied than Zilla. At the close of a long and unhappy life the lines had fallen to her in pleasant places, and these pleasant places she naturally supposed she must forsake should her patron marry. Yet she had command enough over herself to endeavor to hide her feelings. Camperdown’s keen eyes, however, pierced through her disguise, and even while she was uttering her congratulations to him, and wishing that Stargarde might enjoy every happiness, he saw the two salt tears come rolling slowly down her cheeks.

She knew that he saw them, and was overcome by confusion. “We have been very happy together,” she murmured apologetically.

Zilla made no pretense at self-control. Pushing herself violently away from the table she ran upstairs, where Camperdown knew she would cry till she made herself ill.

“What a monster I am!” he soliloquized, excusing himself from the table and hastily making his way out of the house. “Only the author of all these troubles can heal them.”

He walked rapidly toward the Pavilion, stopping once on his way there to order a gift of fruit and flowers to be sent immediately to Mrs. Trotley and Zilla.

Stargarde was at breakfast, and laying a bunch of roses, flowers that she passionately loved, beside her, he drew up a chair and with a dismal face begged for a cup of chocolate.

“I have to give you up,” he said, swallowing the scalding liquor with alarming taste and rolling his twinkling eyes at her.

“Have you?” tranquilly.

“Yes; my family doesn’t approve,” and he related his domestic troubles to her.

“Dear things, how they love you!” and she gazed caressingly at him.

“I wonder what would make me give you up?” he muttered.

“I will go and see Mrs. Trotley and Zilla and poor old Hannah,” she said thoughtfully.

“You don’t wish them to leave my house, do you?”

“Oh, no, no; I am accustomed to a large family. We shall all live happily together.”

“Are you ever going to stop eating bread and butter?” he asked impatiently. “That is your fifth slice.”

“Why should I?” with a mischievous dimple showing itself in her cheek.

“This is malice aforethought,” he said firmly, sitting down beside her, and withdrawing a morsel of bread from her hands. “Now,” holding her wrists, “give me a kiss, sweet, passionate soul in a passionless body.”

“Don’t speak in that way,” she said, kissing him. “It sounds as if I had no feeling.”

“Well, you haven’t. You say ‘dear Brian,’” mimicking her, “and then it is ‘dear granny,’ and ‘dear Bobby,’ and ‘dear everybody.’”

She laughed merrily. “Would you have me striding to and fro and glaring at you, and looking daggers over my shoulder as you do?”

“No; but you might be a little more demonstrative. Women don’t know how to love. You’re nothing but a proper old maid. The time was when I would have cut my throat for a kiss. Lord, what agony!”

She looked at him sweetly, and as he would not release her hands gently laid her cheek against his face.

“You are a beauty and I am a beast,” he said abruptly; “aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Why should I be afraid of you, Brian? You don’t love me for what you are pleased to call my beauty, nor do I love you for what you are pleased to call your lack of it. There is something beyond that.”

“Yes, yes, my angel; I do thank the Lord that I have found one woman that can look into my soul.”

“In sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, in life and in death we are for each other now,” she said. “How lovingly you would cherish me were I suddenly to become old and ugly and unattractive. Brian, last night at the three-mile house when you looked up at me at the table——”

“Yes, darling.”

“I had been thinking about your patient; then the thought suddenly came to me, ‘Suppose this man too, should become ill—should die?’ My heart seemed to stand still. I thought I should suffocate. Oh, Brian, take good care of yourself. I fear that I could not say, ‘the Lord’s will be done,’ if anything should happen to you,” and burying her face in his shoulder she began sobbing violently.

“Come now, this is idolatry,” he said, looking down at her with a radiant face; “rank idolatry, and you will be punished for it according to your own pleasant theory. I wanted you to be demonstrative, sweetheart; but not along this line. When will you marry me?”

“Whenever you think best, Brian. I have given up worrying about this place. The Lord will provide some other person to take care of the people. We are none of us indispensable to him.”

“No,” he said gravely. “When will you marry me?”

“In three months, Brian.”

“In six weeks, beauty; and when shall I see you again?”

“To-morrow afternoon.”

“This evening, my charmer.”

“Brian,” she said, clinging lovingly to his arm, “I suppose nothing would induce you to live in the Pavilion.”

He made a wry face. “I’ll come if my wife refuses to live in any other place.”

“Your wife will do as you wish,” said Stargarde.

“You sweet creature, and blessed man that I am!” and with a final embrace he left her.

Stargarde spent as usual a busy day, and at six o’clock sat down to a brief and lively repast that Vivienne and Judy came in to share with her. After the tea things had been put away, she invited them to go with her to a large room used for general assembly purposes by the tenants of the Pavilion and called the kitchen.

The two girls gladly accompanied her, for the cheering and consoling of the different members of Stargarde’s enormous family had become their chief occupation. They walked along to the large apartment, glancing across as they did so to the bathroom, washhouses, and co-operative baking establishment, in the courtyard, with the working of which they had become quite familiar.

“Isn’t this jolly!” exclaimed Judy when the kitchen door was pushed open.

At one side of the extensive and irregularly shaped room, heaped-up logs blazed in a vast cavern of a fireplace. No other light was needed. The floor was a painted one, and the furniture consisted of a number of plain wooden rocking-chairs for children and grown people, a few small tables, and a piano situated in a dusky corner.

At this piano a red-coated soldier was seated, singing amorously, “I’m so ’appy; so terrible ’appy,” to a maiden hovering sentimentally over him. Some children sprawling on the floor were tossing jackstones, and two gray-haired men at a table were intent on draughts.

An old woman, known as “granny,” sat knitting by the fire. There was alway a granny in the Pavilion, for when one died Stargarde immediately got another, saying that the spectacle of an aged person among young ones, beloved and waited on by all, was one of the most humanizing experiments she had ever tried.

She gave a kind “good-evening” to the people in the room and then approached the old woman. “How are you, dear granny?”

The venerable knitter was in a bad frame of mind, and at first would vouchsafe no answer, but pretended to be greatly occupied with picking up a dropped stitch. In response to another appeal she said irritably that she was “cruel poorly,” and there was “death in the wind.”

“Draw the curtain behind granny,” said Stargarde, motioning one of the children to a window. “She doesn’t feel well. What can we do to cheer her?”

“Make some sweet stuff,” said Judy, who was philosophically inspecting the drawn and crabbed face. “That“That will tickle her palate—and her vanity too," in a lower key.

“Happy thought!” said Stargarde. “Dick and Mary, will you go to my rooms and get a saucepan?”

Ten minutes later a pot of candy simmered on the coals sending out a fragrant cloud of steam that the old woman sniffed appreciatively.

Soon other people began to come in—more soldiers and more girls, happy in the knowledge that they might carry on legitimate love-making in shadowy corners under Stargarde’s vigilant but sympathetic eye.

The boys of the Pavilion took turns at doorkeeping, for the kitchen was kept open at all hours. This evening a small red-eyed lad officiated, and to his shrill remarks Vivienne and Judy listened in concealed amusement.

“You can’t come in,” he said abruptly to a lad of his own size who was shouldering his way past him.

“Why not?” fiercely; “you ain’t Miss Turner.”

“I’m her doorkeeper, and she’ll not have you.”

“Why not?”

“Cause you’re dirty.”

“Yer lie.”

“Can’t I smell?” said the other indignantly. “If you don’t go and take a warm bath, which you can have for nuthin’,” pointing to the courtyard, “you can’t come in here. Now get.”

“I sha’n’t; I’m comin’ in.”

The doorkeeper stood his ground. “You don’t need fine duds to come here,” he said eloquently; “Miss Turner’ll stand rags or anythin’, but you’ve got to be clean. She hates dirt.”

The boy silently withdrew, but presently came back his face shining with a cleanliness that was evidently unusual and painful to him.

Just as the door closed behind him Dr. Camperdown and Mr. Armour entered, both irresistibly drawn thither by the presence of the women they loved.

Camperdown stepped in boldly and confidently. He was a frequent visitor to the place. Armour came in more quietly and looked about him with some curiosity.

It was an interesting scene. The flames of the enormous fire brightly illumined the faces and figures of Stargarde, Vivienne, Judy, granny, and the children, who were in the foreground, and the groups at the various tables in the middle of the room. The retiring few who had withdrawn to the window seats and corner benches were not so plainly to be observed.

All were on an equality. There was no sharp drawing of class lines possible in Stargarde’s vicinity, and every face in the room was for the time a contented face.

Armour and Camperdown sat down near Stargarde and looked about them while listening to the overpowering strains of a melancholy swan song that came sobbing and crying from the fiddle of a blind man who sat in a corner of the room.

A club-footed boy, hitching himself over the shining floor, occasionally stirred the molasses in the pot on the stove, and after a time, to the great delight of the children, poured it out in a number of shallow buttered plates and took it out to the veranda to cool.

Shortly after the exit of the taffy plates, the doorkeeper, who was a lad not deficient in a sense of humor, caught sight of a new guest, and with an exaggerated flourish announced in his shrillest tones, “Lord Skitanglebags!”

MacDaly stepped gallantly forward, smirking and bowing to the assembled company and taking in good part their subdued laughter and humorous salutations.

He had arrayed himself in white stockings and tan shoes, a faded red military jacket, a parti-colored sash and a pair of shiny black trousers. In one hand he carried a sword, and in the other a black silk hat. This hat he adroitly turned upside down, thereby allowing to fall upon the floor in front of Stargarde a small roll of manuscript.

“MacDaly,” she exclaimed, surveying in amusement his beaming face and the gray locks brushed smoothly upon each side of his gleaming bald pate, “You don’t mean to say that you wish to give us another lecture?”

“A topical lecture, lady,” meekly.

“It is better to be frank, isn’t it?” she continued.

“Yes, lady; oh, yes. Frankness is the privilege of great minds.”

“Your last lecture was too long,” she said. “Two mortal hours we had to sit here and listen to you. It wasn’t fair, MacDaly, for we are all tired people and come to the kitchen for relaxation. We don’t want a formal programme, and though it is very interesting to hear about Napoleon and St. Helena, you shouldn’t entrap us into listening to you when our minds aren’t in a receptive condition.”

“True, lady, true, most unfortunately true; but yet,” depositing his tall hat and his sword on the table, and tentatively unfolding his manuscript with a roguish gleam in the tail of his eye, “yet if I might be graciously vouchsafed just one humble corner wherein to amble away in figures of speech those listening who felt in that manner disposed, those not attending who felt in any way so inclined, I might, could, would, and should——”

“Go on, man,” said Camperdown with an imperious gesture, “and don’t bore people to death.”

MacDaly blinked maliciously at him, stationed himself against the wall at a short distance from the fire, and drawing a reading desk toward him placed his manuscript on it.

“Does the time serve my presumption?” he asked presently, peering about the room through a pair of spectacles.

No one heard him. The soldiers were playing games at the tables with their sweethearts, and the other men and women were engaged in conversation. Stargarde, Vivienne, and Dr. Camperdown were talking to a sad-faced girl who had just come in; Judy had slipped to a cushion on the floor and was being initiated into the mysteries of jackstones; and Mr. Armour was absently stroking his mustache and looking into the fire.

Nothing daunted MacDaly cleared his throat and began, “Be it known to all men that somebody said something about Lady Stargarde Turner and her systematic family——”

“Hear him,” said Dr. Camperdown; “he’s talking about you, Miss Turner.”

“MacDaly,” called Stargarde in her clear sweet voice, “you mustn’t be personal.”

“Oh, no, lady, no, not for worlds.”

“It is better not to mention names,” she went on.

“To hear is to obey, lady, as the Turks say when their wives talk to them. We’ll conclude that the subject of this brief discourse is a person called Nameless, otherwise Bombo Elephanto.”

“Very well,” she replied turning back to the girl.

MacDaly, sighing heavily, ran his finger down his manuscript, obliged by Stargarde’s dictum to skip a paragraph of proper names. “Well, time rolled on,” he said at last, “and as it is customary in the finishing-up dance, be it as it may, war dance or otherwise, some one has to pay the piper, this great Mohawk or Mogul as I may call him, Bombo Elephanto, ferociously sets to work teeth and toenails to kill a crow for himself.”

“What under the sun is he at?” growled Camperdown.

“Hush,” whispered Stargarde; “I fear he is on the subject of Colonel Armour. MacDaly has a grudge against him because he sneers at this establishment of the Pavilion, and this is the way he has of settling it. If he is too explicit I shall have to stop him.”

“Bombo Elephanto,” resumed MacDaly, “being aroused into some of the mental affections to which he is recently subject, professionally entitled to be periodical hemidemicrania——”

“H’m; this sounds interesting,” muttered Camperdown.

MacDaly eyed him cunningly. “Ha, the gentleman with the beetling brows is more interested now than he was at first.”

“Does he mean me, the rascal?” growled Camperdown.

Stargarde, suppressing a smile, laid a finger on his arm, and MacDaly in high glee that he had begun to attract the attention of the people in the room, hitched his desk a little nearer to the fire and continued rapidly. “This is firmly believed on account of his many times talking aloud incoherently to himself, and showing a triumph by swaying his hand with great violence as he walks along in company with some unsightly sprite or other in commune with him. Shame, shame, I say, as all do say, upon him who would foully and peevishly urge wrong from his rancoured breast to falsely gratify his own appetite and earthly wicked desires by such assiduous passions.”

“Oh, oh,” groaned Dr. Camperdown; “said the pot to the kettle, thou art blacker than I.”

“Such a being,” pursued MacDaly with uplifted voice, “cannot expect much else than to meet a bad end. Yea, melt like butter before the sun. Only picture the awful end of such a man and in comparison with the terrific state of Turkey, where there is to come an overpowering smashup and the dethroning of the sultan. How will this country be governed? I prophesy that on account of the graceful form, figure, and noble bearing of Lady Stargarde Turner,” he felt himself now far enough in the favor of his awakened audience to disregard the command about proper names, “her chances are many of being made sultana.”

The habituÉs of the kitchen highly approving of the honor proposed for their patroness interrupted MacDaly by such a clapping of hands that he paused for an instant to mop his gratified face.

“Anticipating her ruling such a barbarous, uncouthed people with a steady rod,” he hurried on, “and reducing the price of raisins and figs, I would cast a prophetic glance into that future and prophesy again that Mr. Stanton Armour——”

Armour withdrew his eyes from the fire and cast a haughty glance at the speaker, which was totally disregarded.

“Will be prime minister,” continuedcontinued MacDaly. “And Dr. Brian Camperdown,” he pronounced the words with a mischievous relish and a gasping emphasis, “will be chosen by the sultana as her sultan.”

Deafening and violent applause broke out, for the news of Stargarde’s engagement to Dr. Camperdown had spread through the city with almost incredible rapidity.

Blushing slightly she noted the grim, contented pride displayed on Camperdown’s face, then listened to MacDaly, who was hastening on.

“Oh, what a mighty change will be in that realm! I may say that cruel Turkey will be divided and subdivided into a large number of provinces and that a parliament will be produced by the brilliant ascendency of its future sultana.”

“Stick to your text, man,” interpolated Camperdown. “We don’t want to hear nonsense about Turkey. Keep to Halifax.”

“Now, my most noble and illustrious audience,” uttered MacDaly suavely, “before I close, may I express the humble hope that as in the contingency of future events we may not all of us ever meet again under this ardent and hospitable roof, yet we may confront each other where high and low society are also not visibly recognized, but where all who are immaculate enough to get there get into good society, where, to use a homely and worldly phrase, Jack is as good as his master, oftentimes better, my friends, that is, if poor Jack has got a depraved individual for his master, as many of us have. Here, in this most noteworthy family, where again to use a domestic and wooden proverb as I may call it, signifying that every tub must stand on its own bottom, poor Jack can never hope to be as good as his master, for he has been felicitous enough to have for master the Lady Stargarde Turner, who always speaks in the most amply persuasive and gentle tones to her inferiors at all times and who is bountiful in the largeness of her heart and the wonderful magnificence of her nature.”

MacDaly paused here to bow profoundly to Stargarde, then casting an observing glance upon his amused audience, decided that a further dose of her praises would be acceptable.

“Before exclaiming farewell,” he said, again lashing himself into a state of ardor, “let me ask what further thing I can say of this noble lady who has ever wielded the battle-axe of moral suasion on behalf of helpless and attenuated humanity. Perhaps I should not use the word battle-axe in connection with a lady of such refinement who has so long protected the weak, fed the hungry” (here he looked over his manuscript with a grin and said, “I can prove that”), “clothed the naked” (he grinned again and said, “I can prove that too”), “and magnificently struck out for the right. Therefore trusting that she may pardon her humble and obsequious servant when he says that the mighty things she has accomplished have struck terror into the hearts of evil-doers, comparatively speaking, and can only properly be compared to work done with an axe—yea, and a mighty work at that. In conclusion, I may say that I hope we shall meet many times more in health and wealth, happiness and abundance of affectionate recollections of our past and present meetings. So farewell for the present; and believe me to be, ladies and gentlemen, your very well-wishing and obliged servant, Derrick Edward Fitz-James O’Grady MacDaly. Thanks, very much.”

The lecturer bowed, put his manuscript in his pocket, and mingling affably with his hearers received with modesty the joking compliments showered upon him.

Stargarde watched him in intense amusement.

“Why is he fiddling with that sword?” asked Camperdown, sauntering up to her.

“Oh the entertainment is only half over,” and she framed an announcement that she wished him to make.

Camperdown rose and proclaimed in a stentorian voice, “The future sultana of Turkey orders an exhibition of sword exercise by Professor MacDaly.”

Everybody sat down, and the Irish Nova Scotian modestly retiring behind the reading desk from which a perfectly clear view could be had of his proceedings, stripped off his red jacket and drew his sword from its scabbard. Striding to the middle of the room he looked in Stargarde’s direction, and began prancing on one foot and then on the other ejaculating, “Right guard, left guard, cut, thrust, parry,” etc., and swinging himself backward and forward with such startling rapidity that the lookers-on were obliged to tumble into corners and nearly fall over each other into the fire to avoid what seemed to be an avenging weapon.

It was a frolic for MacDaly, and the fun grew fast and furious, till Stargarde, noticing Armour sheltering Vivienne and Judy behind a heap of chairs, and looking as if he thought the performance a trifle undignified, gave the signal to stop.

The children present were shrieking with laughter, but their faces were sobered when the doorkeeper flung the startling announcement into the room that the candy had been stolen from the veranda.

“Buy more,” exclaimed Camperdown. “Off to the restaurant with you! Here’s money—and order cake and coffee for the grown-ups.”

MacDaly approached Stargarde with a mincing step and murmured something about his confident audacity that would seize the passing moment.

“Certainly,” she replied, “but coppers only. I’ll take the silver away from you.”

The delighted man accordingly made a circuit of the room, his heart gladdened by the clash of Canadian cents descending into the capacious receptacle of his tall hat.

Upon the arrival of the refreshments a time of feasting began in the kitchen. The soldiers, with the efficiency of trained waiters, took charge of the coffee and cake. The children revolved huge lumps of taffy in their mouths, and Armour with something like dismay watched the alarming disposition of sweets by the aged granny.

Stargarde was just about to send the rioting children bedward, when her attention was attracted by a commotion at the door.

Camperdown sprang up, but he was too late. What he had dreaded for weeks, with an agony of shame and dread, had come to pass. Of no avail now his lavish bribes and ceaseless supervision.

The astonished doorkeeper had received a blow on the chest, and had gone spinning into a corner of the fireplace, whence he skipped nimbly and stared at his assailant; tattered, unspeakably dirty, Mrs. Frispi, who towered in the doorway wrathful and menacing, mumbling something in a drunken fury at him, which no one understood.

With a low, joyful cry Stargarde sprang up and went to her. At last the woman had come to the Pavilion of her own accord.

“You be a beauty, bain’t you?” said the woman thickly, “barrin’ the door to yer own mother.”

Stargarde did not quite catch her words. Camperdown did, and tried to draw his fiancÉe back.

“No, Brian,” she said firmly. “I have waited a long time for this. Let us get her in by the fire.”

Close at the woman’s heels, like a cowed, sulky dog, walked the small man, her husband. “Come in too,” said Stargarde, extending a hand to him.

“We be turned out,” he said, with a covert glance about the room, and hanging his head as if the bright light hurt his eyes. “No money; big man say, ‘You go to de streeta.‘”

The woman in exasperation at the withdrawal of attention from her, seized Stargarde by the shoulder. “Don’t you hear?” she gasped hoarsely. “I—be—your—mother.”

The words were audible, though indistinct. A surprised, incredulous look overspread Stargarde’s beautiful face. “Brian,” she said, turning to him as if she could not trust the evidence of her own sense of hearing, “what does she say?”

He would not repeat the words, but in his ashamed, mortified face she received confirmation of her own half-born idea.

“My mother!” she exclaimed, still in a dazed state of semi-belief; “my mother that I have searched for so long!”

“Yes; you be my daughter, and what be daughters for but to work for their mothers?” snarled Mrs. Frispi, suddenly collapsing and sinking into a chair. “And—who’s that?” she stammered, turning her swollen, distorted face toward Stanton Armour, who stood in handsome, deathly pallor, and as motionless as a statue beyond her.

“Oh, my God!” and mouthing, swearing, unutterably foul and repulsive, she groveled from her chair to the floor.

“Oh, tell me, some one,” cried Stargarde wildly, “what is it she says? Is it true?”

“It be true,” said Frispi eagerly. Then stepping forward he plunged his hand among the rags over his wife’s broad chest and withdrew a filthy envelope, out of which he drew a photograph that he handed to Stargarde.

It was a picture of Mrs. Frispi, taken in her palmy days. Stargarde laid a hand on her own fluttering breast. There was a counterpart of this florid, sensuous face that she had treasured for years.

She drew out her own photograph. It was exactly like the other; her intense blue eyes darted to the floor. There in that tall form, in the evil face, she could see a faint, disfigured likeness to herself.

“O God, I thank thee!” she said, and fell on her knees to put her arms about the degraded creature before her.

Where was the terror, the repulsion, the anguish that the sight was to cause her? Camperdown gazed at her in distracted astonishment, then hopelessly surveyed the hushed, motionless ring of people beyond them.

“Brian,” said Stargarde, in tones of ineffable love, “we must take her home.”

At the first shock of her words, he started back with a gesture of utter detestation. He loved her, but he could not touch her mother.

Then he sprang forward, but he was too late. Neither disappointed nor surprised by his refusal, Stargarde gathered the loathsome and disgraceful specimen of fallen womanhood to her own tender bosom, and lovingly enwrapping it in her arms went out in the night.