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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Christie Johnstone, by Charles Reade
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Christie Johnstone
+
+Author: Charles Reade
+
+Release Date: January, 2003  [Etext #3671]
+Posting Date: December 8, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIE JOHNSTONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James Rusk
+
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTIE JOHNSTONE
+
+A NOVEL
+
+By Charles Reade
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Italics are indicated by the underscore character.
+Acute accents are indicated by a single quote (') after the vowel,
+while grave accents have a single quote before the vowel. All other
+accents are ignored.
+
+
+I dedicate all that is good in this work to my mother.--C. R.,
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+THIS story was written three years ago, and one or two topics in it are
+not treated exactly as they would be if written by the same hand to-day.
+But if the author had retouched those pages with his colors of 1853, he
+would (he thinks) have destroyed the only merit they have, viz., that
+of containing genuine contemporaneous verdicts upon a cant that was
+flourishing like a peony, and a truth that was struggling for bare life,
+in the year of truth 1850.
+
+He prefers to deal fairly with the public, and, with this explanation
+and apology, to lay at its feet a faulty but genuine piece of work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+VISCOUNT IPSDEN, aged twenty-five, income eighteen thousand pounds per
+year, constitution equine, was unhappy! This might surprise some people;
+but there are certain blessings, the non-possession of which makes more
+people discontented than their possession renders happy.
+
+Foremost among these are "Wealth and Rank." Were I to add "Beauty" to
+the list, such men and women as go by fact, not by conjecture, would
+hardly contradict me.
+
+The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up
+to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds
+they were not worth so much trouble.
+
+Lord Ipsden started with nothing to win; and naturally lived for
+amusement. Now nothing is so sure to cease to please as pleasure--to
+amuse, as amusement. Unfortunately for himself he could not at this
+period of his life warm to politics; so, having exhausted his London
+clique, he rolled through the cities of Europe in his carriage, and
+cruised its shores in his yacht. But he was not happy!
+
+He was a man of taste, and sipped the arts and other knowledge, as he
+sauntered Europe round.
+
+But he was not happy.
+
+"What shall I do?" said _l'ennuye'._
+
+"Distinguish yourself," said one.
+
+"How?"
+
+No immediate answer.
+
+"Take a _prima donna_ over," said another.
+
+Well, the man took a _prima donna_ over, which scolded its maid from the
+Alps to Dover in the _lingua Toscana_ without the _bocca Romana,_ and
+sang in London without applause; because what goes down at La Scala does
+not generally go down at Il Teatro della Regina, Haymarket.
+
+So then my lord strolled into Russia; there he drove a pair of horses,
+one of whom put his head down and did the work; the other pranced and
+capricoled alongside, all unconscious of the trace. He seemed happier
+than his working brother; but the biped whose career corresponded with
+this playful animal's was not happy!
+
+At length an event occurred that promised to play an adagio upon Lord
+Ipsden 's mind. He fell in love with Lady Barbara Sinclair; and he had
+no sooner done this than he felt, as we are all apt to do on similar
+occasions, how wise a thing he had done!
+
+Besides a lovely person, Lady Barbara Sinclair had a character that
+he saw would make him; and, in fact, Lady Barbara Sinclair was, to an
+inexperienced eye, the exact opposite of Lord Ipsden.
+
+Her mental impulse was as plethoric as his was languid.
+
+She was as enthusiastic as he was cool.
+
+She took a warm interest in everything. She believed that government is
+a science, and one that goes with _copia verborum._
+
+She believed that, in England, government is administered, not by a set
+of men whose salaries range from eighty to five hundred pounds a year,
+and whose names are never heard, but by the First Lord of the Treasury,
+and other great men.
+
+Hence she inferred, that it matters very much to all of us in whose hand
+is the rudder of that state vessel which goes down the wind of public
+opinion, without veering a point, let who will be at the helm.
+
+She also cared very much who was the new bishop. Religion--if not
+religion, theology--would be affected thereby.
+
+She was enthusiastic about poets; imagined their verse to be some sort
+of clew to their characters, and so on.
+
+She had other theories, which will be indicated by and by; at present
+it is enough to say that her mind was young, healthy, somewhat original,
+full of fire and faith, and empty of experience.
+
+Lord Ipsden loved her! it was easy to love her.
+
+First, there was not, in the whole range of her mind and body, one grain
+of affectation of any sort.
+
+She was always, in point of fact, under the influence of some male mind
+or other, generally some writer. What young woman is not, more or less,
+a mirror? But she never imitated or affected; she was always herself, by
+whomsoever colored.
+
+Then she was beautiful and eloquent; much too high-bred to put a
+restraint upon her natural manner, she was often more _naive,_ and even
+brusk, than your would-be aristocrats dare to be; but what a charming
+abruptness hers was!
+
+I do not excel in descriptions, and yet I want to give you some carnal
+idea of a certain peculiarity and charm this lady possessed; permit me
+to call a sister art to my aid.
+
+There has lately stepped upon the French stage a charming personage,
+whose manner is quite free from the affectation that soils nearly all
+French actresses--Mademoiselle Madeleine Brohan! When you see this
+young lady play Mademoiselle La Segli'ere, you see high-bred sensibility
+personified, and you see something like Lady Barbara Sinclair.
+
+She was a connection of Lord Ipsden's, but they had not met for two
+years, when they encountered each other in Paris just before the
+commencement of this "Dramatic Story," "Novel" by courtesy.
+
+The month he spent in Paris, near her, was a bright month to Lord
+Ipsden. A bystander would not have gathered, from his manner, that he
+was warmly in love with this lady; but, for all that, his lordship was
+gradually uncoiling himself, and gracefully, quietly basking in the rays
+of Barbara Sinclair.
+
+He was also just beginning to take an interest in subjects of the
+day--ministries, flat paintings, controversial novels, Cromwell's
+spotless integrity, etc.--why not? They interested her.
+
+Suddenly the lady and her family returned to England. Lord Ipsden, who
+was going to Rome, came to England instead.
+
+She had not been five days in London, before she made her preparations
+to spend six months in Perthshire.
+
+This brought matters to a climax.
+
+Lord Ipsden proposed in form.
+
+Lady Barbara was surprised; she had not viewed his graceful attentions
+in that light at all. However, she answered by letter his proposal which
+had been made by letter.
+
+After a few of those courteous words a lady always bestows on a
+gentleman who has offered her the highest compliment any man has it in
+his power to offer any woman, she came to the point in the following
+characteristic manner:
+
+"The man I marry must have two things, virtues and vices--you have
+neither. You do nothing, and never will do anything but sketch and hum
+tunes, and dance and dangle. Forget this folly the day after to-morrow,
+my dear Ipsden, and, if I may ask a favor of one to whom I refuse that
+which would not be a kindness, be still good friends with her who will
+always be
+
+"Your affectionate _Cousin,_
+
+"BARBARA SINCLAIR."
+
+Soon after this effusion she vanished into Perthshire, leaving her
+cousin stunned by a blow which she thought would be only a scratch to
+one of his character.
+
+Lord Ipsden relapsed into greater listlessness than before he had
+cherished these crushed hopes. The world now became really dark and
+blank to him. He was too languid to go anywhere or do anything; a
+republican might have compared the settled expression of his handsome,
+hopeless face with that of most day-laborers of the same age, and
+moderated his envy of the rich and titled.
+
+At last he became so pale as well as languid that Mr. Saunders
+interfered.
+
+Saunders was a model valet and factotum; who had been with his master
+ever since he left Eton, and had made himself necessary to him in their
+journeys.
+
+The said Saunders was really an invaluable servant, and, with a world of
+obsequiousness, contrived to have his own way on most occasions. He had,
+I believe, only one great weakness, that of imagining a beau-ideal of
+aristocracy and then outdoing it in the person of John Saunders.
+
+Now this Saunders was human, and could not be eight years with this
+young gentleman and not take some little interest in him. He was
+flunky, and took a great interest in him, as stepping-stone to his own
+greatness. So when he saw him turning pale and thin, and reading one
+letter fifty times, he speculated and inquired what was the matter. He
+brought the intellect of Mr. Saunders to bear on the question at the
+following angle:
+
+"Now, if I was a young lord with 20,000 pounds a year, and all the world
+at my feet, what would make me in this way? Why, the liver! Nothing
+else.
+
+"And that is what is wrong with him, you may depend."
+
+This conclusion arrived at, Mr. Saunders coolly wrote his convictions
+to Dr. Aberford, and desired that gentleman's immediate attention to the
+case. An hour or two later, he glided into his lord's room, not without
+some secret trepidation, no trace of which appeared on his face. He
+pulled a long histrionic countenance. "My lord," said he, in soft,
+melancholy tones, "your lordship's melancholy state of health gives me
+great anxiety; and, with many apologies to your lordship, the doctor is
+sent for, my lord."
+
+"Why, Saunders, you are mad; there is nothing the matter with me."
+
+"I beg your lordship's pardon, your lordship is very ill, and Dr.
+Aberford sent for."
+
+"You may go, Saunders."
+
+"Yes, my lord. I couldn't help it; I've outstepped my duty, my lord, but
+I could not stand quiet and see your lordship dying by inches." Here Mr.
+S. put a cambric handkerchief artistically to his eyes, and glided out,
+having disarmed censure.
+
+Lord Ipsden fell into a reverie.
+
+"Is my mind or my body disordered? Dr. Aberford!--absurd!--Saunders is
+getting too pragmatical. The doctor shall prescribe for him instead of
+me; by Jove, that would serve him right." And my lord faintly chuckled.
+"No! this is what I am ill of"--and he read the fatal note again. "I
+do nothing!--cruel, unjust," sighed he. "I could have done, would
+have done, anything to please her. Do nothing! nobody does anything
+now--things don't come in your way to be done as they used centuries
+ago, or we should do them just the same; it is their fault, not ours,"
+argued his lordship, somewhat confusedly; then, leaning his brow upon
+the sofa, he wished to die. For, at that dark moment life seemed to this
+fortunate man an aching void; a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable tale; a
+faded flower; a ball-room after daylight has crept in, and music, motion
+and beauty are fled away.
+
+"Dr. Aberford, my lord."
+
+This announcement, made by Mr. Saunders, checked his lordship's reverie.
+
+"Insults everybody, does he not, Saunders?"
+
+"Yes, my lord," said Saunders, monotonously.
+
+"Perhaps he will me; that might amuse me," said the other.
+
+A moment later the doctor bowled into the apartment, tugging at his
+gloves, as he ran.
+
+The contrast between him and our poor rich friend is almost beyond human
+language.
+
+Here lay on a sofa Ipsden, one of the most distinguished young gentlemen
+in Europe; a creature incapable, by nature, of a rugged tone or a coarse
+gesture; a being without the slightest apparent pretension, but refined
+beyond the wildest dream of dandies. To him, enter Aberford, perspiring
+and shouting. He was one of those globules of human quicksilver one sees
+now and then for two seconds; they are, in fact, two globules; their
+head is one, invariably bald, round, and glittering; the body is another
+in activity and shape, _totus teres atque rotundus;_ and in fifty years
+they live five centuries. _Horum Rex Aberford_--of these our doctor was
+the chief. He had hardly torn off one glove, and rolled as far as the
+third flower from the door on his lordship's carpet, before he shouted:
+
+"This is my patient, lolloping in pursuit of health. Your hand," added
+he. For he was at the sofa long before his lordship could glide off it.
+
+"Tongue. Pulse is good. Breathe in my face."
+
+"Breathe in your face, sir! how can I do that?" (with an air of mild
+doubt.)
+
+"By first inhaling, and then exhaling in the direction required, or how
+can I make acquaintance with your bowels?"
+
+"My bowels?"
+
+"The abdomen, and the greater and lesser intestines. Well, never mind,
+I can get at them another way; give your heart a slap, so. That's your
+liver. And that's your diaphragm."
+
+His lordship having found the required spot (some people that I know
+could not) and slapped it, the Aberford made a circular spring and
+listened eagerly at his shoulder-blade; the result of this scientific
+pantomime seemed to be satisfactory, for he exclaimed, not to say
+bawled:
+
+"Halo! here is a viscount as sound as a roach! Now, young gentleman,"
+added he, "your organs are superb, yet you are really out of sorts; it
+follows you have the maladies of idle minds, love, perhaps, among the
+rest; you blush, a diagnostic of that disorder; make your mind easy,
+cutaneous disorders, such as love, etc., shall never kill a patient of
+mine with a stomach like yours. So, now to cure you!" And away went the
+spherical doctor, with his hands behind him, not up and down the room,
+but slanting and tacking, like a knight on a chess-board. He had not
+made many steps before, turning his upper globule, without affecting
+his lower, he hurled back, in a cold business-like tone, the following
+interrogatory:
+
+"What are your vices?"
+
+"Saunders," inquired the patient, "which are my vices?"
+
+"M'lord, lordship hasn't any vices," replied Saunders, with dull,
+matter-of-fact solemnity.
+
+"Lady Barbara makes the same complaint," thought Lord Ipsden.
+
+"It seems I have not any vices, Dr. Aberford," said he, demurely.
+
+"That is bad; nothing to get hold of. What interests you, then?"
+
+"I don't remember."
+
+"What amuses you?"
+
+"I forget."
+
+"What! no winning horse to gallop away your rents?"
+
+"No, sir!"
+
+"No opera girl to run her foot and ankle through your purse?"
+
+"No, sir! and I think their ankles are not what they were."
+
+"Stuff! just the same, from their ankles up to their ears, and down
+again to their morals; it is your eyes that are sunk deeper into your
+head. Hum! no horses, no vices, no dancers, no yacht; you confound one's
+notions of nobility, and I ought to know them, for I have to patch them
+all up a bit just before they go to the deuce."
+
+"But I have, Doctor Aberford."
+
+"What!"
+
+"A yacht! and a clipper she is, too."
+
+"Ah!--(Now I've got him.)"
+
+"In the Bay of Biscay she lay half a point nearer the wind than Lord
+Heavyjib."
+
+"Oh! bother Lord Heavyjib, and his Bay of Biscay."
+
+"With all my heart, they have often bothered me."
+
+"Send her round to Granton Pier, in the Firth of Forth."
+
+"I will, sir."
+
+"And write down this prescription." And away he walked again, thinking
+the prescription.
+
+"Saunders," appealed his master.
+
+"Saunders be hanged."
+
+"Sir!" said Saunders, with dignity, "I thank you."
+
+"Don't thank me, thank your own deserts," replied the modern
+Chesterfield. "Oblige me by writing it yourself, my lord, it is all the
+bodily exercise you will have had to-day, no doubt."
+
+The young viscount bowed, seated himself at a desk, and wrote from
+dictation:
+
+
+"DR. ABERFORD'S PRESCRIPTION."
+
+"Make acquaintance with all the people of low estate who have time to be
+bothered with you; learn their ways, their minds, and, above all, their
+troubles."
+
+"Won't all this bore me?" suggested the writer.
+
+"You will see. Relieve one fellow-creature every day, and let Mr.
+Saunders book the circumstances."
+
+"I shall like this part," said the patient, laying down his pen. "How
+clever of you to think of such things; may not I do two sometimes?"
+
+"Certainly not; one pill per day. Write, Fish the herring! (that beats
+deer-stalking.) Run your nose into adventures at sea; live on tenpence,
+and earn it. Is it down?"
+
+"Yes, it is down, but Saunders would have written it better."
+
+"If he hadn't he ought to be hanged," said the Aberford, inspecting the
+work. "I'm off, where's my hat? oh, there; where's my money? oh, here.
+Now look here, follow my prescription, and You will soon have Mens
+sana in corpore sano; And not care whether the girls say yes or say no;
+neglect it, and--my gloves; oh, in my pocket--you will be _blase'_ and
+_ennuye',_ and (an English participle, that means something as bad); God
+bless you!"
+
+And out he scuttled, glided after by Saunders, for whom he opened and
+shut the street door.
+
+Never was a greater effect produced by a doctor's visit; patient and
+physician were made for each other. Dr. Aberford was the specific for
+Lord Ipsden. He came to him like a shower to a fainting strawberry.
+
+Saunders, on his return, found his lord pacing the apartment.
+
+"Saunders," said he, smartly, "send down to Gravesend and order the
+yacht to this place--what is it?"
+
+"Granton Pier. Yes, my lord."
+
+"And, Saunders, take clothes, and books, and violins, and telescopes,
+and things--and me--to Euston Square, in an hour."
+
+"Impossible,' my lord," cried Saunders, in dismay. "And there is no
+train for hours."
+
+His master replied with a hundred-pound note, and a quiet, but wickedish
+look; and the prince of gentlemen's gentleman had all the required items
+with him, in a special train, within the specified time, and away they
+flashed, northward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+IT is said that opposite characters make a union happiest; and perhaps
+Lord Ipsden, diffident of himself, felt the value to him of a creature
+so different as Lady Barbara Sinclair; but the lady, for her part, was
+not so diffident of herself, nor was she in search of her opposite. On
+the contrary, she was waiting patiently to find just such a man as she
+was, or fancied herself, a woman.
+
+Accustomed to measure men by their characters alone, and to treat with
+sublime contempt the accidents of birth and fortune, she had been a
+little staggered by the assurance of this butterfly that had proposed to
+settle upon her hand--for life.
+
+In a word, the beautiful writer of the fatal note was honestly romantic,
+according to the romance of 1848, and of good society; of course she
+was not affected by hair tumbling back or plastered down forward, and a
+rolling eye went no further with her than a squinting one.
+
+Her romance was stern, not sickly. She was on the lookout for iron
+virtues; she had sworn to be wooed with great deeds, or never won; on
+this subject she had thought much, though not enough to ask herself
+whether great deeds are always to be got at, however disposed a lover
+may be.
+
+No matter; she kept herself in reserve for some earnest man, who was
+not to come flattering and fooling to her, but look another way and do
+exploits.
+
+She liked Lord Ipsden, her cousin once removed, but despised him for
+being agreeable, handsome, clever, and nobody.
+
+She was also a little bitten with what she and others called the Middle
+Ages, in fact with that picture of them which Grub Street, imposing on
+the simplicity of youth, had got up for sale by arraying painted glass,
+gilt rags, and fancy, against fact.
+
+With these vague and sketchy notices we are compelled to part, for the
+present, with Lady Barbara. But it serves her right; she has gone to
+establish her court in Perthshire, and left her rejected lover on our
+hands.
+
+Journeys of a few hundred miles are no longer described.
+
+You exchange a dead chair for a living chair, Saunders puts in your hand
+a new tale like this; you mourn the superstition of booksellers, which
+still inflicts uncut leaves upon humanity, though tailors do not send
+home coats with the sleeves stitched up, nor chambermaids put travelers
+into apple-pie beds as well as damp sheets. You rend and read, and are
+at Edinburgh, fatigued more or less, but not by the journey.
+
+Lord Ipsden was, therefore, soon installed by the Firth side, full of
+the Aberford.
+
+The young nobleman not only venerated the doctor's sagacity, but half
+admired his brusquerie and bustle; things of which he was himself never
+guilty.
+
+As for the prescription, that was a Delphic Oracle. Worlds could not
+have tempted him to deviate from a letter in it.
+
+He waited with impatience for the yacht; and, meantime, it struck him
+that the first part of the prescription could be attacked at once.
+
+It was the afternoon of the day succeeding his arrival. The Fifeshire
+hills, seen across the Firth from his windows, were beginning to take
+their charming violet tinge, a light breeze ruffled the blue water into
+a sparkling smile, the shore was tranquil, and the sea full of noiseless
+life, with the craft of all sizes gliding and dancing and courtesying on
+their trackless roads.
+
+The air was tepid, pure and sweet as heaven; this bright afternoon,
+Nature had grudged nothing that could give fresh life and hope to such
+dwellers in dust and smoke and vice as were there to look awhile on her
+clean face and drink her honeyed breath.
+
+This young gentleman was not insensible to the beauty of the scene.
+He was a little lazy by nature, and made lazier by the misfortune of
+wealth, but he had sensibilities; he was an artist of great natural
+talent; had he only been without a penny, how he would have handled the
+brush! And then he was a mighty sailor; if he had sailed for biscuit a
+few years, how he would have handled a ship!
+
+As he was, he had the eye of a hawk for Nature's beauties, and the sea
+always came back to him like a friend after an absence.
+
+This scene, then, curled round his heart a little, and he felt the good
+physician was wiser than the tribe that go by that name, and strive to
+build health on the sandy foundation of drugs.
+
+"Saunders! do you know what Dr. Aberford means by the lower classes?"
+
+"Perfectly, my lord."
+
+"Are there any about here?"
+
+"I am sorry to say they are everywhere, my lord."
+
+"Get me some"--_(cigarette)._
+
+Out went Saunders, with his usual graceful _empressement,_ but an
+internal shrug of his shoulders.
+
+He was absent an hour and a half; he then returned with a double
+expression on his face--pride at his success in diving to the very
+bottom of society, and contempt of what he had fished up thence.
+
+He approached his lord mysteriously, and said, _sotto voce,_ but
+impressively, "This is low enough, my lord." Then glided back, and
+ushered in, with polite disdain, two lovelier women than he had ever
+opened a door to in the whole course of his perfumed existence.
+
+On their heads they wore caps of Dutch or Flemish origin, with a broad
+lace border, stiffened and arched over the forehead, about three inches
+high, leaving the brow and cheeks unencumbered.
+
+They had cotton jackets, bright red and yellow, mixed in patterns,
+confined at the waist by the apron-strings, but bobtailed below the
+waist; short woolen petticoats, with broad vertical stripes, red and
+white, most vivid in color; white worsted stockings, and neat, though
+high-quartered shoes. Under their jackets they wore a thick spotted
+cotton handkerchief, about one inch of which was visible round the lower
+part of the throat. Of their petticoats, the outer one was kilted, or
+gathered up toward the front, and the second, of the same color, hung in
+the usual way.
+
+Of these young women, one had an olive complexion, with the red blood
+mantling under it, and black hair, and glorious black eyebrows.
+
+The other was fair, with a massive but shapely throat, as white as milk;
+glossy brown hair, the loose threads of which glittered like gold, and
+a blue eye, which, being contrasted with dark eyebrows and lashes, took
+the luminous effect peculiar to that rare beauty.
+
+Their short petticoats revealed a neat ankle, and a leg with a noble
+swell; for Nature, when she is in earnest, builds beauty on the ideas of
+ancient sculptors and poets, not of modern poetasters, who, with their
+airy-like sylphs and their smoke-like verses, fight for want of flesh in
+woman and want of fact in poetry as parallel beauties.
+
+_They are,_ my lads.--_Continuez!_
+
+These women had a grand corporeal trait; they had never known a corset!
+so they were straight as javelins; they could lift their hands above
+their heads!--actually! Their supple persons moved as Nature intended;
+every gesture was ease, grace and freedom.
+
+What with their own radiance, and the snowy cleanliness and brightness
+of their costume, they came like meteors into the apartment.
+
+Lord Ipsden, rising gently from his seat, with the same quiet politeness
+with which he would have received two princes of the blood, said, "How
+do you do?" and smiled a welcome.
+
+"Fine! hoow's yoursel?" answered the dark lass, whose name was Jean
+Carnie, and whose voice was not so sweet as her face.
+
+"What'n lord are ye?" continued she; "are you a juke? I wad like fine to
+hae a crack wi' a juke."
+
+Saunders, who knew himself the cause of this question, replied, _sotto
+voce,_ "His lordship is a viscount."
+
+"I didna ken't," was Jean's remark. "But it has a bonny soond."
+
+"What mair would ye hae?" said the fair beauty, whose name was Christie
+Johnstone. Then, appealing to his lordship as the likeliest to know, she
+added, "Nobeelity is jist a soond itsel, I'm tauld."
+
+The viscount, finding himself expected to say something on a topic he
+had not attended much to, answered dryly: "We must ask the republicans,
+they are the people that give their minds to such subjects."
+
+"And yon man," asked Jean Carnie, "is he a lord, too?"
+
+"I am his lordship's servant," replied Saunders, gravely, not without a
+secret misgiving whether fate had been just.
+
+"Na!" replied she, not to be imposed upon, "ye are statelier and prooder
+than this ane."
+
+"I will explain," said his master. "Saunders knows his value; a servant
+like Saunders is rarer than an idle viscount."
+
+"My lord, my lord!" remonstrated Saunders, with a shocked and most
+disclamatory tone. "Rather!" was his inward reflection.
+
+"Jean," said Christie, "ye hae muckle to laern. Are ye for herrin' the
+day, vile count?"
+
+"No! are you for this sort of thing?"
+
+At this, Saunders, with a world of _empressement,_ offered the Carnie
+some cake that was on the table.
+
+She took a piece, instantly spat it out into her hand, and with more
+energy than delicacy flung it into the fire.
+
+"Augh!" cried she, "just a sugar and saut butter thegither; buy nae mair
+at yon shoep, vile count."
+
+"Try this, out of Nature's shop," laughed their entertainer; and he
+offered them, himself, some peaches and things.
+
+"Hech! a medi--cine!" said Christie.
+
+"Nature, my lad," said Miss Carnie, making her ivory teeth meet in their
+first nectarine, "I didna ken whaur ye stoep, but ye beat the other
+confectioners, that div ye."
+
+The fair lass, who had watched the viscount all this time as demurely as
+a cat cream, now approached him.
+
+This young woman was the thinker; her voice was also rich, full, and
+melodious, and her manner very engaging; it was half advancing, half
+retiring, not easy to resist or to describe.
+
+"Noo," said she, with a very slight blush stealing across her face, "ye
+maun let me catecheeze ye, wull ye?"
+
+The last two words were said in a way that would have induced a bear to
+reveal his winter residence.
+
+He smiled assent. Saunders retired to the door, and, excluding every
+shade of curiosity from his face, took an attitude, half majesty, half
+obsequiousness.
+
+Christie stood by Lord Ipsden, with one hand on her hip (the knuckles
+downward), but graceful as Antinous, and began.
+
+"Hoo muckle is the queen greater than y' are?"
+
+His lordship was obliged to reflect.
+
+"Let me see--as is the moon to a wax taper, so is her majesty the queen
+to you and me, and the rest."
+
+"An' whaur does the Juke* come in?"
+
+     * Buceleuch.
+
+"On this particular occasion, the Duke** makes one of us, my pretty
+maid."
+
+     **Wellington
+
+"I see! Are na yeawfu' prood o' being a lorrd?"
+
+"What an idea!"
+
+"His lordship did not go to bed a spinning-jenny, and rise up a lord,
+like some of them," put in Saunders.
+
+"Saunders," said the peer, doubtfully, "eloquence rather bores people."
+
+"Then I mustn't speak again, my lord," said Saunders, respectfully.
+
+"Noo," said the fair inquisitor, "ye shall tell me how ye came to be
+lorrds, your faemily?"
+
+"Saunders!"
+
+"Na! ye manna flee to Sandy for a thing, ye are no a bairn, are ye?"
+
+Here was a dilemma, the Saunders prop knocked rudely away, and obliged
+to think for ourselves.
+
+But Saunders would come to his distressed master's assistance. He
+furtively conveyed to him a plump book--this was Saunders's manual of
+faith; the author was Mr. Burke, not Edmund.
+
+Lord Ipsden ran hastily over the page, closed the book, and said, "Here
+is the story.
+
+"Five hundred years ago--"
+
+"Listen, Jean," said Christie; "we're gaun to get a boeny story. 'Five
+hundre' years ago,'" added she, with interest and awe.
+
+"Was a great battle," resumed the narrator, in cheerful tones, as one
+larking with history, "between a king of England and his rebels. He was
+in the thick of the fight--"
+
+"That's the king, Jean, he was in the thick o't."
+
+"My ancestor killed a fellow who was sneaking behind him, but the next
+moment a man-at-arms prepared a thrust at his majesty, who had his hands
+full with three assailants."
+
+"Eh! that's no fair," said Christie, "as sure as deeth."
+
+"My ancestor dashed forward, and, as the king's sword passed through one
+of them, he clove another to the waist with a blow."
+
+"Weel done! weel done!"
+
+Lord Ipsden looked at the speaker, her eyes were glittering, and her
+cheek flushing.
+
+"Good Heavens!" thought he; "she believes it!" So he began to take more
+pains with his legend.
+
+"But for the spearsman," continued he, "he had nothing but his body;
+he gave it, it was his duty, and received the death leveled at his
+sovereign."
+
+"Hech! puir mon." And the glowing eyes began to glisten.
+
+"The battle flowed another way, and God gave victory to the right; but
+the king came back to look for him, for it was no common service."
+
+"Deed no!"
+
+Here Lord Ipsden began to turn his eye inward, and call up the scene. He
+lowered his voice.
+
+"They found him lying on his back, looking death in the face.
+
+"The nobles, by the king's side, uncovered as soon as he was found, for
+they were brave men, too. There was a moment's silence; eyes met eyes,
+and said, this is a stout soldier's last battle.
+
+"The king could not bid him live."
+
+"Na! lad, King Deeth has ower strong a grrip."
+
+"But he did what kings can do, he gave him two blows with his royal
+sword."
+
+"Oh, the robber, and him a deeing mon."
+
+"Two words from his royal mouth, and he and we were Barons of Ipsden and
+Hawthorn Glen from that day to this."
+
+"But the puir dying creature?"
+
+"What poor dying creature?"
+
+"Your forbear, lad."
+
+"I don't know why you call him poor, madam; all the men of that day are
+dust; they are the gold dust who died with honor.
+
+"He looked round, uneasily, for his son--for he had but one--and when
+that son knelt, unwounded, by him, he said, 'Goodnight, Baron Ipsden;'
+and so he died, fire in his eye, a smile on his lip, and honor on his
+name forever. I meant to tell you a lie, and I've told you the truth."
+
+"Laddie," said Christie, half admiringly, half reproachfully, "ye gar
+the tear come in my een. Hech! look at yon lassie! how could you think
+t'eat plums through siccan a bonny story?"
+
+"Hets," answered Jean, who had, in fact, cleared the plate, "I aye
+listen best when my ain mooth's stappit."
+
+"But see, now," pondered Christie, "twa words fra a king--thir titles
+are just breeth."
+
+"Of course," was the answer. "All titles are. What is popularity? ask
+Aristides and Lamartine--the breath of a mob--smells of its source--and
+is gone before the sun can set on it. Now the royal breath does smell of
+the Rose and Crown, and stays by us from age to age."
+
+The story had warmed our marble acquaintance. Saunders opened his eyes,
+and thought, "We shall wake up the House of Lords some evening--_we_
+shall."
+
+His lordship then added, less warmly, looking at the girls:
+
+"I think I should like to be a fisherman."
+
+So saying, my lord yawned slightly.
+
+To this aspiration the young fishwives deigned no attention, doubting,
+perhaps, its sincerity; and Christie, with a shade of severity, inquired
+of him how he came to be a vile count.
+
+"A baron's no' a vile count, I'm sure," said she; "sae tell me how ye
+came to be a vile count."
+
+"Ah!" said he, "that is by no means a pretty story like the other; you
+will not like it, I am sure.
+
+"Ay, will I--ay, will I; I'm aye seeking knoewledge."
+
+"Well, it is soon told. One of us sat twenty years on one seat, in the
+same house, so one day he got up a--viscount."
+
+"Ower muckle pay for ower little wark."
+
+"Now don't say that; I wouldn't do it to be Emperor of Russia."
+
+"Aweel, I hae gotten a heap out o' ye; sae noow I'll gang, since ye are
+no for herrin'; come away, Jean."
+
+At this their host remonstrated, and inquired why bores are at one's
+service night and day, and bright people are always in a hurry; he was
+informed in reply, "Labor is the lot o' man. Div ye no ken that muckle?
+And abune a' o' women."*
+
+     * A local idea, I suspect.--C. R.
+
+"Why, what can two such pretty creatures have to do except to be
+admired?"
+
+This question coming within the dark beauty's scope, she hastened to
+reply.
+
+"To sell our herrin'--we hae three hundre' left in the creel."
+
+"What is the price?"
+
+At this question the poetry died out of Christie Johnstone's face,
+she gave her companion a rapid look, indiscernible by male eye, and
+answered:
+
+"Three a penny, sirr; they are no plenty the day," added she, in smooth
+tones that carried conviction.
+
+(Little liar; they were selling six a penny everywhere.)
+
+"Saunders, buy them all, and be ever so long about it; count them, or
+some nonsense."
+
+"He's daft! he's daft! Oh, ye ken, Jean, an Ennglishman and a lorrd, twa
+daft things thegither, he could na' miss the road. Coont them, lassie."
+
+"Come away, Sandy, till I count them till ye," said Jean.
+
+Saunders and Jean disappeared.
+
+Business being out of sight, curiosity revived.
+
+"An' what brings ye here from London, if ye please?" recommenced the
+fair inquisitor.
+
+"You have a good countenance; there is something in your face. I could
+find it in my heart to tell you, but I should bore you."
+
+"De'el a fear! Bore me, bore me! wheat's thaat, I wonder?"
+
+"What is your name, madam? Mine is Ipsden."
+
+"They ca' me Christie Johnstone."
+
+"Well, Christie Johnstone, I am under the doctor's hands."
+
+"Puir lad. What's the trouble?" (solemnly and tenderly.)
+
+"Ennui!" (rather piteously.)
+
+"Yawn-we? I never heerd tell o't."
+
+"Oh, you lucky girl," burst out he; "but the doctor has undertaken to
+cure me; in one thing you could assist me, if I am not presuming too far
+on our short acquaintance. I am to relieve one poor distressed person
+every day, but I mustn't do two. Is not that a bore?"
+
+"Gie's your hand, gie's your hand. I'm vexed for ca'ing you daft. Hech!
+what a saft hand ye hae. Jean, I'm saying, come here, feel this."
+
+Jean, who had run in, took the viscount's hand from Christie.
+
+"It never wroucht any," explained Jean. "And he has bonny hair," said
+Christie, just touching his locks on the other side.
+
+"He's a bonny lad," said Jean, inspecting him scientifically, and
+pointblank.
+
+"Ay, is he," said the other. "Aweel, there's Jess Rutherford, a widdy,
+wi' four bairns, ye meicht do waur than ware your siller on her."
+
+"Five pounds to begin?" inquired his lordship.
+
+"Five pund! Are ye made o' siller? Ten schell'n!"
+
+Saunders was rung for, and produced a one-pound note.
+
+"The herrin' is five and saxpence; it's four and saxpence I'm awin ye,"
+said the young fishwife, "and Jess will be a glad woman the neicht."
+
+The settlement was effected, and away went the two friends, saying:
+
+"Good-boye, vile count."
+
+Their host fell into thought.
+
+"When have I talked so much?" asked he of himself.
+
+"Dr. Aberford, you are a wonderful man; I like your lower classes
+amazingly."
+
+"Me'fiez vous, Monsieur Ipsden!" should some mentor have said.
+
+As the Devil puts into a beginner's hands ace, queen, five trumps, to
+give him a taste for whist, so these lower classes have perhaps put
+forward one of their best cards to lead you into a false estimate of the
+strength of their hand.
+
+Instead, however, of this, who should return, to disturb the equilibrium
+of truth, but this Christina Johnstone? She came thoughtfully in, and
+said:
+
+"I've been taking a thoucht, and this is no what yon gude physeecian
+meaned; ye are no to fling your chaerity like a bane till a doeg; ye'll
+gang yoursel to Jess Rutherford; Flucker Johnstone, that's my brother,
+will convoy ye."
+
+"But how is your brother to know me?"
+
+"How? Because I'll gie him a sair sair hiding, if he lets ye gang by."
+
+Then she returned the one-pound note, a fresh settlement was effected,
+and she left him. At the door she said: "And I am muckle obleeged to ye
+for your story and your goodness."
+
+While uttering these words, she half kissed her hand to him, with a
+lofty and disengaged gesture, such as one might expect from a queen, if
+queens did not wear stays; and was gone.
+
+When his lordship, a few minutes after, sauntered out for a stroll, the
+first object he beheld was an exact human square, a handsome boy, with
+a body swelled out apparently to the size of a man's, with blue flannel,
+and blue cloth above it, leaning against a wall, with his hands in his
+pockets--a statuette of _insouciance._
+
+This marine puff-ball was Flucker Johnstone, aged fourteen.
+
+Stain his sister's face with diluted walnut-juice, as they make the
+stage gypsy and Red Indian (two animals imagined by actors to be one),
+and you have Flucker's face.
+
+A slight moral distinction remains, not to be so easily got over.
+
+She was the best girl in the place, and he a baddish boy.
+
+He was, however, as sharp in his way as she was intelligent in hers.
+
+This youthful mariner allowed his lordship to pass him, and take twenty
+steps, but watched him all the time, and compared him with a description
+furnished him by his sister.
+
+He then followed, and brought him to, as he called it.
+
+"I daur say it's you I'm to convoy to yon auld faggitt!" said this
+baddish boy.
+
+On they went, Flucker rolling and pitching and yawing to keep up with
+the lordly galley, for a fisherman's natural waddle is two miles an
+hour.
+
+At the very entrance of Newhaven, the new pilot suddenly sung out,
+"Starboard!"
+
+Starboard it was, and they ascended a filthy "close," or alley they
+mounted a staircase which was out of doors, and, without knocking,
+Flucker introduced himself into Jess Rutherford's house.
+
+"Here a gentleman to speak till ye, wife."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE widow was weather-beaten and rough. She sat mending an old net.
+
+"The gentleman's welcome," said she; but there was no gratification in
+her tone, and but little surprise.
+
+His lordship then explained that, understanding there were worthy people
+in distress, he was in hopes he might be permitted to assist them, and
+that she must blame a neighbor of hers if he had broken in upon her
+too abruptly with this object. He then, with a blush, hinted at ten
+shillings, which he begged she would consider as merely an installment,
+until he could learn the precise nature of her embarrassments, and the
+best way of placing means at her disposal.
+
+The widow heard all this with a lackluster mind.
+
+For many years her life had been unsuccessful labor; if anything had
+ever come to her, it had always been a misfortune; her incidents had
+been thorns--her events, daggers.
+
+She could not realize a human angel coming to her relief, and she did
+not realize it, and she worked away at her net.
+
+At this, Flucker, to whom his lordship's speech appeared monstrously
+weak and pointless, drew nigh, and gave the widow, in her ear, his
+version, namely, his sister's embellished. It was briefly this: That the
+gentleman was a daft lord from England, who had come with the bank in
+his breeks, to remove poverty from Scotland, beginning with her. "Sae
+speak loud aneuch, and ye'll no want siller," was his polite corollary.
+
+His lordship rose, laid a card on a chair, begged her to make use of
+him, et cetera; he then, recalling the oracular prescription, said, "Do
+me the favor to apply to me for any little sum you have a use for, and,
+in return, I will beg of you (if it does not bore you too much) to make
+me acquainted with any little troubles you may have encountered in the
+course of your life."
+
+His lordship, receiving no answer, was about to go, after bowing to her,
+and smiling gracefully upon her.
+
+His hand was on the latch, when Jess Rutherford burst into a passion of
+tears.
+
+He turned with surprise.
+
+"My _troubles,_ laddie," cried she, trembling all over. "The sun wad
+set, and rise, and set again, ere I could tell ye a' the trouble I hae
+come through.
+
+"Oh, ye need na vex yourself for an auld wife's tears; tears are a
+blessin', lad, I shall assure ye. Mony's the time I hae prayed for them,
+and could na hae them Sit ye doon! sit ye doon! I'll no let ye gang fra
+my door till I hae thankit ye--but gie me time, gie me time. I canna
+greet a' the days of the week."
+
+Flucker, _aetat._ 14, opened his eyes, unable to connect ten shillings
+and tears.
+
+Lord Ipsden sat down, and felt very sorry for her.
+
+And she cried at her ease.
+
+If one touch of nature make the whole world kin, methinks that sweet and
+wonderful thing, sympathy, is not less powerful. What frozen barriers,
+what ice of centuries, it can melt in a moment!
+
+His bare mention of her troubles had surprised the widowed woman's
+heart, and now she looked up and examined his countenance; it was soon
+done.
+
+A woman, young or old, high or low, can discern and appreciate
+sensibility in a man's face, at a single glance.
+
+What she saw there was enough. She was sure of sympathy. She recalled
+her resolve, and the tale of her sorrows burst from her like a flood.
+
+Then the old fishwife told the young aristocrat how she had borne twelve
+children, and buried six as bairns; how her man was always unlucky; how
+a mast fell on him, and disabled him a whole season; how they could
+but just keep the pot boiling by the deep-sea fishing, and he was not
+allowed to dredge for oysters, because his father was not a Newhaven
+man. How, when the herring fishing came, to make all right, he never
+had another man's luck; how his boat's crew would draw empty nets, and
+a boat alongside him would be gunwale down in the water with the fish.
+How, at last, one morning, the 20th day of November, his boat came in to
+Newhaven Pier without him, and when he was inquired for, his crew said,
+"He had stayed at home, like a lazy loon, and not sailed with them
+the night before." How she was anxious, and had all the public houses
+searched. "For he took a drop now and then, nae wonder, and him aye
+in the weather." Poor thing! when he was alive she used to call him a
+drunken scoundrel to his face. How, when the tide went down, a mad wife,
+whose husband had been drowned twenty years ago, pointed out something
+under the pier that the rest took for sea-weed floating--how it was the
+hair of her man's head, washed about by the water, and he was there,
+drowned without a cry or a struggle, by his enormous boots, that
+kept him in an upright position, though he was dead; there he
+stood--dead--drowned by slipping from the slippery pier, close to his
+comrades' hands, in a dark and gusty night; how her daughter married,
+and was well to do, and assisted her; how she fell into a rapid decline,
+and died, a picture of health to inexperienced eyes. How she, the
+mother, saw and knew, and watched the treacherous advance of disease
+and death; how others said gayly, "Her daughter was better," and she
+was obliged to say, "Yes." How she had worked, eighteen hours a day,
+at making nets; how, when she let out her nets to the other men at the
+herring fishing, they always cheated her, because her man was gone. How
+she had many times had to choose between begging her meal and going to
+bed without it, but, thank Heaven! she had always chosen the latter.
+
+She told him of hunger, cold, and anguish. As she spoke they became real
+things to him; up to that moment they had been things in a story-book.
+And as she spoke she rocked herself from side to side.
+
+Indeed, she was a woman "acquainted with grief." She might have said,
+"Here I and sorrow sit. This is my throne, bid kings come and bow to
+it!"
+
+Her hearer felt this, and therefore this woman, poor, old, and ugly,
+became sacred in his eye; it was with a strange sort of respect that he
+tried to console her. He spoke to her in tones gentle and sweet as the
+south wind on a summer evening.
+
+"Madam," said he, "let me be so happy as to bring you some comfort. The
+sorrows of the heart I cannot heal; they are for a mightier hand; but a
+part of your distress appears to have been positive need; that we can at
+least dispose of, and I entreat you to believe that from this hour want
+shall never enter that door again. Never! upon my honor!"
+
+The Scotch are icebergs, with volcanoes underneath; thaw the Scotch ice,
+which is very cold, and you shall get to the Scotch fire, warmer than
+any sun of Italy or Spain.
+
+His lordship had risen to go. The old wife had seemed absorbed in her
+own grief; she now dried her tears.
+
+"Bide ye, sirr," said she, "till I thank ye."
+
+So she began to thank him, rather coldly and stiffly.
+
+"He says ye are a lord," said she; "I dinna ken, an' I dinna care; but
+ye're a gentleman, I daur say, and a kind heart ye hae."
+
+Then she began to warm.
+
+"And ye'll never be a grain the poorer for the siller ye hae gien me;
+for he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord."
+
+Then she began to glow.
+
+"But it's no your siller; dinna think it--na, lad, na! Oh, fine! I ken
+there's mony a supper for the bairns and me in yon bits metal; but I
+canna feel your siller as I feel your winsome smile--the drop in your
+young een--an' the sweet words ye gied me, in the sweet music o' your
+Soothern tongue, Gude bless ye!" (Where was her ice by this time?) "Gude
+bless ye! and I bless ye!"
+
+And she did bless him; and what a blessing it was; not a melodious
+generality, like a stage parent's, or papa's in a damsel's novel. It was
+like the son of Barak on Zophim.
+
+She blessed him, as one who had the power and the right to bless or
+curse.
+
+She stood on the high ground of her low estate, and her afflictions--and
+demanded of their Creator to bless the fellow-creature that had come to
+her aid and consolation.
+
+This woman had suffered to the limits of endurance; yesterday she had
+said, "Surely the Almighty does na _see_ me a' these years!"
+
+So now she blessed him, and her heart's blood seemed to gush into words.
+
+She blessed him by land and water.
+
+She knew most mortal griefs; for she had felt them.
+
+She warned them away from him one by one.
+
+She knew the joys of life; for she had felt their want.
+
+She summoned them one by one to his side.
+
+"And a fair wind to your ship," cried she, "and the storms aye ten miles
+to leeward o' her."
+
+Many happy days, "an' weel spent," she wished him.
+
+"His love should love him dearly, or a better take her place."
+
+"Health to his side by day; sleep to his pillow by night."
+
+A thousand good wishes came, like a torrent of fire, from her lips, with
+a power that eclipsed his dreams of human eloquence; and then, changing
+in a moment from the thunder of a Pythoness to the tender music of some
+poetess mother, she ended:
+
+"An' oh, my boenny, boenny lad, may ye be wi' the rich upon the airth a'
+your days--AND WI' THE PUIR IN THE WARLD TO COME!"
+
+His lordship's tongue refused him the thin phrases of society.
+
+"Farewell for the present," said he, and he went quietly away.
+
+He paced thoughtfully home.
+
+He had drunk a fact with every sentence; and an idea with every fact.
+
+For the knowledge we have never realized is not knowledge to us--only
+knowledge's shadow.
+
+With the banished duke, he now began to feel, "we are not alone
+unhappy." This universal world contains other guess sorrows than yours,
+viscount--_scilicet_ than unvarying health, unbroken leisure, and
+incalculable income.
+
+Then this woman's eloquence! bless me! he had seen folk murmur politely
+in the Upper House, and drone or hammer away at the Speaker down below,
+with more heat than warmth.
+
+He had seen nine hundred wild beasts fed with peppered tongue, in a
+menagerie called _L'Assemble' Nationale._
+
+His ears had rung often enough, for that matter. This time his heart
+beat.
+
+He had been in the principal courts of Europe; knew what a handful
+of gentlefolks call "the World"; had experienced the honeyed words of
+courtiers, the misty nothings of diplomatists, and the innocent prattle
+of mighty kings.
+
+But hitherto he seemed to have undergone gibberish and jargon:
+
+Gibberish and jargon--Political!
+
+Gibberish and jargon--Social!
+
+Gibberish and jargon--Theological!
+
+Gibberish and jargon--Positive!
+
+People had been prating--Jess had spoken.
+
+But, it is to be observed, he was under the double effect of eloquence
+and novelty; and, so situated, we overrate things, you know.
+
+That night he made a provision for this poor woman, in case he should
+die before next week.
+
+"Who knows?" said he, "she is such an unlucky woman." Then he went to
+bed, and whether from the widow's blessing, or the air of the place, he
+slept like a plowboy.
+
+Leaving Richard, Lord Ipsden, to work out the Aberford problem--to
+relieve poor people, one or two of whom, like the Rutherford, were
+grateful, the rest acted it to the life--to receive now and then a visit
+from Christina Johnstone, who borrowed every mortal book in his house,
+who sold him fish, invariably cheated him by the indelible force of
+habit, and then remorsefully undid the bargain, with a peevish entreaty
+that "he would not be so green, for there was no doing business with
+him"--to be fastened upon by Flucker, who, with admirable smoothness
+and cunning, wormed himself into a cabin-boy on board the yacht, and
+man-at-arms ashore.
+
+To cruise in search of adventures, and meet nothing but disappointments;
+to acquire a browner tint, a lighter step, and a jacket, our story moves
+for a while toward humbler personages.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+JESS RUTHERFORD, widow of Alexander Johnstone--for Newhaven wives, like
+great artists, change their conditions without changing their names--was
+known in the town only as a dour wife, a sour old carline. Whose fault?
+
+Do wooden faces and iron tongues tempt sorrow to put out its snails'
+horns?
+
+She hardly spoke to any one, or any one to her, but four days after the
+visit we have described people began to bend looks of sympathy on her,
+to step out of their way to give her a kindly good-morrow; after a bit,
+fish and meal used to be placed on her table by one neighbor or another,
+when she was out, and so on. She was at first behindhand in responding
+to all this, but by degrees she thawed to those who were thawing to her.
+Next, Saunders called on her, and showed her a settlement, made for her
+benefit, on certain lands in Lanarkshire. She was at ease for life.
+
+The Almighty had seen her all these years.
+
+But how came her neighbors to melt?
+
+Because a nobleman had visited her.
+
+Not exactly, dear novel-reader.
+
+This was it.
+
+That same night, by a bright fire lighting up snowy walls, burnished
+copper, gleaming candlesticks, and a dinner-table floor, sat the
+mistress of the house, Christie Johnstone, and her brother, Flucker.
+
+She with a book, he with his reflections opposite her.
+
+"Lassie, hae ye ony siller past ye?"
+
+"Ay, lad; an' I mean to keep it!" The baddish boy had registered a vow
+to the contrary, and proceeded to bleed his flint (for to do Christie
+justice the process was not very dissimilar). Flucker had a versatile
+genius for making money; he had made it in forty different ways, by land
+and sea, tenpence at a time.
+
+"I hae gotten the life o' Jess Rutherford till ye," said he.
+
+"Giest then."
+
+"I'm seeking half a crown for 't," said he.
+
+Now, he knew he should never get half a crown, but he also knew that if
+he asked a shilling, he should be beaten down to fourpence.
+
+So half a crown was his first bode.
+
+The enemy, with anger at her heart, called up a humorous smile, and
+saying, "An' ye'll get saxpence," went about some household matter; in
+reality, to let her proposal rankle in Flucker.
+
+Flucker lighted his pipe slowly, as one who would not do a sister the
+injustice to notice so trivial a proposition.
+
+He waited fresh overtures.
+
+They did not come.
+
+Christie resumed her book.
+
+Then the baddish boy fixed his eye on the fire, and said softly and
+thoughtfully to the fire, "Hech, what a heap o' troubles yon woman has
+come through."
+
+This stroke of art was not lost. Christie looked up from her book;
+pretended he had spoken to her, gave a fictitious yawn, and renewed the
+negotiation with the air of one disposed to kill time.
+
+She was dying for the story.
+
+Commerce was twice broken off and renewed by each power in turn.
+
+At last the bargain was struck at fourteen-pence.
+
+Then Flucker came out, the honest merchant.
+
+He had listened intently, with mercantile views.
+
+He had the widow's sorrows all off pat.
+
+He was not a bit affected himself, but by pure memory he remembered
+where she had been most agitated or overcome.
+
+He gave it Christie, word for word, and even threw in what dramatists
+call "the business," thus:
+
+"Here ye suld greet--"
+
+"Here ye'll play your hand like a geraffe."
+
+"Geraffe? That's a beast, I'm thinking."
+
+"Na; it's the thing on the hill that makes signals."
+
+"Telegraph, ye fulish goloshen!"
+
+"Oo ay, telegraph! Geraffe 's sunest said for a'."
+
+Thus Jess Rutherford's life came into Christie Johnstone's hands.
+
+She told it to a knot of natives next day; it lost nothing, for she was
+a woman of feeling, and by intuition an artist of the tongue. She was
+the best _raconteur_ in a place where there are a hundred, male and
+female, who attempt that art.
+
+The next day she told it again, and then inferior narrators got hold of
+it, and it soon circulated through the town.
+
+And this was the cause of the sudden sympathy with Jess Rutherford.
+
+As our prigs would say:
+
+"Art had adopted her cause and adorned her tale."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE fishing village of Newhaven is an unique place; it is a colony
+that retains distinct features; the people seldom intermarry with their
+Scotch neighbors.
+
+Some say the colony is Dutch, some Danish, some Flemish. The character
+and cleanliness of their female costume points rather to the latter.
+
+Fish, like horse-flesh, corrupts the mind and manners.
+
+After a certain age, the Newhaven fishwife is always a blackguard, and
+ugly; but among the younger specimens, who have not traded too much, or
+come into much contact with larger towns, a charming modesty, or else
+slyness (such as no man can distinguish from it, so it answers every
+purpose), is to be found, combined with rare grace and beauty.
+
+It is a race of women that the northern sun peachifies instead of
+rosewoodizing.
+
+On Sundays the majority sacrifice appearance to fashion; these turn out
+rainbows of silk, satin and lace. In the week they were all grace, and
+no stays; now they seem all stays and no grace. They never look so ill
+as when they change their "costume" for "dress."
+
+The men are smart fishermen, distinguished from the other fishermen of
+the Firth chiefly by their "dredging song."
+
+This old song is money to them; thus:
+
+Dredging is practically very stiff rowing for ten hours.
+
+Now both the Newhaven men and their rivals are agreed that this song
+lifts them through more work than untuned fishermen can manage.
+
+I have heard the song, and seen the work done to it; and incline to
+think it helps the oar, not only by keeping the time true, and the
+spirit alive, but also by its favorable action on the lungs. It is sung
+in a peculiar way; the sound is, as it were, expelled from the chest in
+a sort of musical ejaculations; and the like, we know, was done by the
+ancient gymnasts; and is done by the French bakers, in lifting their
+enormous dough, and by our paviors.
+
+The song, in itself, does not contain above seventy stock verses, but
+these perennial lines are a nucleus, round which the men improvise the
+topics of the day, giving, I know not for what reason, the preference to
+such as verge upon indelicacy.
+
+The men and women are musical and narrative; three out of four can sing
+a song or tell a story, and they omit few opportunities.
+
+Males and females suck whisky like milk, and are quarrelsome in
+proportion. The men fight (round-handed), the women fleicht or scold, in
+the form of a teapot--the handle fixed and the spout sawing the air.
+
+A singular custom prevails here.
+
+The maidens have only one sweetheart apiece!!!
+
+So the whole town is in pairs.
+
+The courting is all done on Saturday night, by the lady's fire. It is
+hard to keep out of a groove in which all the town is running; and the
+Johnstone had possessed, as mere property--a lad!
+
+She was so wealthy that few of them could pretend to aspire to her, so
+she selected for her chattel a young man called Willy Liston; a youth
+of an unhappy turn--he contributed nothing to hilarity, his face was
+a kill-joy--nobody liked him; for this female reason Christie
+distinguished him.
+
+He found a divine supper every Saturday night in her house; he ate, and
+sighed! Christie fed him, and laughed at him.
+
+Flucker ditto.
+
+As she neither fed nor laughed at any other man, some twenty were
+bitterly jealous of Willy Liston, and this gave the blighted youth a
+cheerful moment or two.
+
+But the bright alliance received a check some months before our tale.
+
+Christie was _heluo librorum!_ and like others who have that taste, and
+can only gratify it in the interval of manual exercise, she read very
+intensely in her hours of study. A book absorbed her. She was like a
+leech on these occasions, _non missura cutem._ Even Jean Carnie, her
+co-adjutor or "neebor," as they call it, found it best to keep out of
+her way till the book was sucked.
+
+One Saturday night Willy Liston's evil star ordained that a gentleman
+of French origin and Spanish dress, called Gil Blas, should be the
+Johnstone's companion.
+
+Willy Liston arrived.
+
+Christie, who had bolted the door, told him from the window, civilly
+enough, but decidedly, "She would excuse his company that night."
+
+"Vara weel," said Willy, and departed.
+
+Next Saturday--no Willy came.
+
+Ditto the next. Willy was waiting the _amende._
+
+Christie forgot to make it.
+
+One day she was passing the boats, Willy beckoned her mysteriously; he
+led her to his boat, which was called "The Christie Johnstone"; by the
+boat's side was a paint pot and brush.
+
+They had not supped together for five Saturdays.
+
+Ergo, Mr. Liston had painted out the first four letters of "Christie,"
+he now proceeded to paint out the fifth, giving her to understand, that,
+if she allowed the whole name to go, a letter every blank Saturday, her
+image would be gradually, but effectually, obliterated from the heart
+Listonian.
+
+My reader has done what Liston did not, anticipate her answer. She
+recommended him, while his hand was in, to paint out the entire name,
+and, with white paint and a smaller brush, to substitute some other
+female appellation. So saying, she tripped off.
+
+Mr. Liston on this was guilty of the following inconsistency; he
+pressed the paint carefully out of the brush into the pot. Having thus
+economized his material, he hurled the pot which contained his economy
+at "the Johnstone," he then adjourned to the "Peacock," and "away at
+once with love and reason."
+
+Thenceforth, when men asked who was Christie Johnstone's lad, the answer
+used to be, "She's seeking ane." _Quelle horreur!!_
+
+Newhaven doesn't know everything, but my intelligent reader suspects,
+and, if confirming his suspicions can reconcile him to our facts, it
+will soon be done.
+
+But he must come with us to Edinburgh; it's only three miles.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+A LITTLE band of painters came into Edinburgh from a professional walk.
+Three were of Edinburgh--Groove, aged fifty; Jones and Hyacinth, young;
+the latter long-haired.
+
+With them was a young Englishman, the leader of the expedition, Charles
+Gatty.
+
+His step was elastic, and his manner wonderfully animated, without
+loudness.
+
+"A bright day," said he. "The sun forgot where he was, and shone;
+everything was in favor of art."
+
+"Oh, dear, no," replied old Groove, "not where I was"
+
+"Why, what was the matter?"
+
+"The flies kept buzzing and biting, and sticking in the work. That's the
+worst of out o' doors!"
+
+"The flies! is that all? Swear the spiders in special constables next
+time," cried Gatty. "We shall win the day;" and light shone into his
+hazel eye.
+
+"The world will not always put up with the humbugs of the brush, who,
+to imitate Nature, turn their back on her. Paint an out o' door scene
+indoors! I swear by the sun it's a lie! the one stupid, impudent lie
+that glitters among the lies of vulgar art, like Satan among Belial,
+Mammon and all those beggars.
+
+"Now look here; the barren outlines of a scene must be looked at, to be
+done; hence the sketching system slop-sellers of the Academy! but the
+million delicacies of light, shade, and color can be trusted to memory,
+can they?
+
+"It's a lie big enough to shake the earth out of her course; if any part
+of the work could be trusted to memory or imagination, it happens to be
+the bare outlines, and they can't. The million subtleties of light and
+color; learn them by heart, and say them off on canvas! the highest
+angel in the sky must have his eye upon them, and look devilish sharp,
+too, or he shan't paint them. I give him Charles Gatty's word for that."
+
+"That's very eloquent, I call it," said Jones.
+
+"Yes," said poor old Groove, "the lad will never make a painter."
+
+"Yes, I shall, Groove; at least I hope so, but it must be a long time
+first."
+
+"I never knew a painter who could talk and paint both," explained Mr.
+Groove.
+
+"Very well," said Gatty. "Then I'll say but one word more, and it is
+this. The artifice of painting is old enough to die; it is time the art
+was born. Whenever it does come into the world, you will see no more
+dead corpses of trees, grass and water, robbed of their life, the
+sunlight, and flung upon canvas in a studio, by the light of a cigar,
+and a lie--and--"
+
+"How much do you expect for your picture?" interrupted Jones.
+
+"What has that to do with it? With these little swords" (waving his
+brush), "we'll fight for nature-light, truth light, and sunlight against
+a world in arms--no, worse, in swaddling clothes."
+
+"With these little swerrds," replied poor old Groove, "we shall cut our
+own throats if we go against people's prejudices."
+
+The young artist laughed the old daubster a merry defiance, and then
+separated from the party, for his lodgings were down the street.
+
+He had not left them long, before a most musical voice was heard,
+crying:
+
+"A caallerr owoo!"
+
+And two young fishwives hove in sight. The boys recognized one of them
+as Gatty's sweetheart.
+
+"Is he in love with her?" inquired Jones.
+
+Hyacinth the long-haired undertook to reply.
+
+"He loves her better than anything in the world except Art. Love and Art
+are two beautiful things," whined Hyacinth.
+
+"She, too, is beautiful. I have done her," added he, with a simper.
+
+"In oil?" asked Groove.
+
+"In oil? no, in verse, here;" and he took out a paper.
+
+"Then hadn't we better cut? you might propose reading them," said poor
+old Groove.
+
+"Have you any oysters?" inquired Jones of the Carnie and the Johnstone,
+who were now alongside.
+
+"Plenty," answered Jean. "Hae ye ony siller?"
+
+The artists looked at one another, and didn't all speak at once.
+
+"I, madam," said old Groove, insinuatingly, to Christie, "am a friend of
+Mr. Gatty's; perhaps, on that account, you would _lend_ me an oyster or
+two."
+
+"Na," said Jean, sternly.
+
+"Hyacinth," said Jones, sarcastically, "give them your verses, perhaps
+that will soften them."
+
+Hyacinth gave his verses, descriptive of herself, to Christie. This
+youngster was one of those who mind other people's business.
+
+_Alienis studiis delectatus contempsit suum._
+
+His destiny was to be a bad painter, so he wanted to be an execrable
+poet.
+
+All this morning he had been doggreling, when he ought to have been
+daubing; and now he will have to sup off a colored print, if he sups at
+all.
+
+Christie read, blushed, and put the verses in her bosom.
+
+"Come awa, Custy," said Jean.
+
+"Hets," said Christie, "gie the puir lads twarree oysters, what the waur
+will we be?"
+
+So they opened the oysters for them; and Hyacinth the long-haired
+looked down on the others with sarcastico-benignant superiority. He had
+conducted a sister art to the aid of his brother brushes.
+
+"The poet's empire, all our hearts allow; But doggrel's power was never
+known till now."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+AT the commencement of the last chapter, Charles Gatty, artist, was
+going to usher in a new state of things, true art, etc. Wales was to be
+painted in Wales, not Poland Street.
+
+He and five or six more youngsters were to be in the foremost files of
+truth, and take the world by storm.
+
+This was at two o'clock; it is now five; whereupon the posture of
+affairs, the prospects of art, the face of the world, the nature of
+things, are quite the reverse.
+
+In the artist's room, on the floor, was a small child, whose movements,
+and they were many, were viewed with huge dissatisfaction by Charles
+Gatty, Esq. This personage, pencil in hand, sat slouching and morose,
+looking gloomily at his intractable model.
+
+Things were going on very badly; he had been waiting two hours for an
+infantine pose as common as dirt, and the little viper would die first.
+
+Out of doors everything was nothing, for the sun was obscured, and to
+all appearance extinguished forever.
+
+"Ah! Mr. Groove," cried he, to that worthy, who peeped in at that
+moment; "you are right, it is better to plow away upon canvas blindfold,
+as our grandfathers--no, grandmothers--used, than to kill ourselves
+toiling after such coy ladies as Nature and Truth."
+
+"Aweel, I dinna ken, sirr," replied Groove, in smooth tones. "I didna
+like to express my warm approbation of you before the lads, for fear of
+making them jealous."
+
+"They be--No!"
+
+"I ken what ye wad say, sirr, an it wad hae been a vara just an'
+sprightly observation. Aweel, between oursels, I look upon ye as a
+young gentleman of amazing talent and moedesty. Man, ye dinna do yoursel
+justice; ye should be in th' Academy, at the hede o' 't."
+
+"Mr. Groove, I am a poor fainting pilgrim on the road, where stronger
+spirits have marched erect before me."
+
+"A faintin' pelgrim! Deil a frights o' ye, ye're a brisk and bonny lad.
+Ah, sirr, in my juvenile days, we didna fash wi nature, and truth, an
+the like."
+
+"The like! What is like nature and truth, except themselves?"
+
+"Vara true, sirr; vara true, and sae I doot I will never attain the
+height o' profeeciency ye hae reached. An' at this vara moment, sir,"
+continued Groove, with delicious solemnity and mystery, "ye see before
+ye, sir, a man wha is in maist dismal want--o' ten shellen!" (A pause.)
+"If your superior talent has put ye in possession of that sum, ye would
+obleege me infinitely by a temporary accommodation, Mr. Gaattie."
+
+"Why did you not come to the point at once?" cried Gatty, bruskly,
+"instead of humbling me with undeserved praise. There." Groove held out
+his hand, but made a wry face when, instead of money, Gatty put a sketch
+into his hand.
+
+"There," said Gatty, "that is a lie!"
+
+"How can it be a lee?" said the other, with sour inadvertence. "How can
+it be a lee, when I hae na spoken?"
+
+"You don't understand me. That sketch is a libel on a poor cow and an
+unfortunate oak-tree. I did them at the Academy. They had never done me
+any wrong, poor things; they suffered unjustly. You take them to a shop,
+swear they are a tree and a cow, and some fool, that never really looked
+into a cow or a tree, will give you ten shillings for them."
+
+"Are ye sure, lad?"
+
+"I am sure. Mr. Groove, sir, if you can not sell a lie for ten shillings
+you are not fit to live in this world; where is the lie that will not
+sell for ten shillings?"
+
+"I shall think the better o' lees all my days; sir, your words are
+inspeeriting." And away went Groove with the sketch.
+
+Gatty reflected and stopped him.
+
+"On second thoughts, Groove, you must not ask ten shillings; you must
+ask twenty pounds for that rubbish."
+
+"Twenty pund! What for will I seek twenty pund?"
+
+"Simply because people that would not give you ten shillings for it will
+offer you eleven pounds for it if you ask twenty pounds."
+
+"The fules," roared Groove. "Twenty pund! hem!" He looked closer into
+it. "For a'," said he, "I begin to obsairve it is a work of great merit.
+I'll seek twenty pund, an' I'll no tak less than fifteen schell'n, at
+present."
+
+The visit of this routine painter did not cheer our artist.
+
+The small child got a coal and pounded the floor with it like a machine
+incapable of fatigue. So the wished-for pose seemed more remote than
+ever.
+
+The day waxed darker instead of lighter; Mr. Gatty's reflections took
+also a still more somber hue.
+
+"Even Nature spites us," thought he, "because we love her."
+
+"Then cant, tradition, numbers, slang and money are against us; the
+least of these is singly a match for truth; we shall die of despair or
+paint cobwebs in Bedlam; and I am faint, weary of a hopeless struggle;
+and one man's brush is truer than mine, another's is bolder--my hand and
+eye are not in tune. Ah! no! I shall never, never, never be a painter."
+
+These last words broke audibly from him as his head went down almost to
+his knees.
+
+A hand was placed on his shoulder as a flake of snow falls on the water.
+It was Christie Johnstone, radiant, who had glided in unobserved.
+
+"What's wrang wi' ye, my lad?"
+
+"The sun is gone to the Devil, for one thing."
+
+"Hech! hech! ye'll no be long ahint him; div ye no think shame."
+
+"And I want that little brute just to do so, and he'd die first."
+
+"Oh, ye villain, to ca' a bairn a brute; there's but ae brute here, an'
+it's no you, Jamie, nor me--is it, my lamb?"
+
+She then stepped to the window.
+
+"It's clear to windward; in ten minutes ye'll hae plenty sun. Tak your
+tools noo." And at the word she knelt on the floor, whipped out a paper
+of sugar-plums and said to him she had christened "Jamie." "Heb! Here's
+sweeties till ye." Out went Jamie's arms, as if he had been a machine
+and she had pulled the right string.
+
+"Ah, that will do," said Gatty, and sketched away.
+
+Unfortunately, Jamie was quickly arrested on the way to immortality by
+his mother, who came in, saying:
+
+"I maun hae my bairn--he canna be aye wasting his time here."
+
+This sally awakened the satire that ever lies ready in piscatory bosoms.
+
+"Wasting his time! ye're no blate. Oh, ye'll be for taking him to the
+college to laern pheesick--and teach maenners."
+
+"Ye need na begin on me," said the woman. "I'm no match for Newhaven."
+
+So saying she cut short the dispute by carrying off the gristle of
+contention.
+
+"Another enemy to art," said Gatty, hurling away his pencil.
+
+The young fishwife inquired if there were any more griefs. What she had
+heard had not accounted, to her reason, for her companion's depression.
+
+"Are ye sick, laddy?" said she.
+
+"No, Christie, not sick, but quite, quite down in the mouth."
+
+She scanned him thirty seconds.
+
+"What had ye till your dinner?"
+
+"I forget."
+
+"A choep, likely?"
+
+"I think it was."
+
+"Or maybe it was a steak?"
+
+"I dare say it was a steak."
+
+"Taste my girdle cake, that I've brought for ye."
+
+She gave him a piece; he ate it rapidly, and looked gratefully at her.
+
+"Noo, div ye no think shame to look me in the face? Ye hae na dined
+ava." And she wore an injured look.
+
+"Sit ye there; it's ower late for dinner, but ye'll get a cup tea. Doon
+i' the mooth, nae wonder, when naething gangs doon your--"
+
+In a minute she placed a tea-tray, and ran into the kitchen with a
+teapot.
+
+The next moment a yell was heard, and she returned laughing, with
+another teapot.
+
+"The wife had maskit tea till hersel'," said this lawless forager.
+
+Tea and cake on the table--beauty seated by his side--all in less than a
+minute.
+
+He offered her a piece of cake.
+
+"Na! I am no for any."
+
+"Nor I then," said he.
+
+"Hets! eat, I tell ye."
+
+He replied by putting a bit to her heavenly mouth.
+
+"Ye're awfu' opinionated," said she, with a countenance that said
+nothing should induce her, and eating it almost contemporaneously.
+
+"Put plenty sugar," added she, referring to the Chinese infusion; "mind,
+I hae a sweet tooth."
+
+"You have a sweet set," said he, approaching another morsel.
+
+They showed themselves by way of smile, and confirmed the accusation.
+
+"Aha! lad," answered she; "they've been the death o' mony a herrin'!"
+
+"Now, what does that mean in English, Christie?"
+
+"My grinders--(a full stop.)
+
+"Which you approve--(a full stop.)
+
+"Have been fatal--(a full stop.)
+
+"To many fishes!"
+
+Christie prided herself on her English, which she had culled from books.
+
+Then he made her drink from the cup, and was ostentatious in putting his
+lips to the same part of the brim.
+
+Then she left the table, and inspected all things.
+
+She came to his drawers, opened one, and was horror-struck.
+
+There were coats and trousers, with their limbs interchangeably
+intertwined, waistcoats, shirts, and cigars, hurled into chaos.
+
+She instantly took the drawer bodily out, brought it, leaned it against
+the tea-table, pointed silently into it, with an air of majestic
+reproach, and awaited the result.
+
+"I can find whatever I want," said the unblushing bachelor, "except
+money."
+
+"Siller does na bide wi' slovens! hae ye often siccan a gale o' wind in
+your drawer?"
+
+"Every day! Speak English!"
+
+"Aweel! How _do_ you _do?_ that's Ennglish! I daur say."
+
+"Jolly!" cried he, with his mouth full. Christie was now folding up and
+neatly arranging his clothes.
+
+"Will you ever, ever be a painter?"
+
+"I am a painter! I could paint the Devil pea-green!"
+
+"Dinna speak o' yon lad, Chairles, it's no canny."
+
+"No! I am going to paint an angel; the prettiest, cleverest girl in
+Scotland, 'The Snowdrop of the North.'"
+
+And he dashed into his bedroom to find a canvas.
+
+"Hech!" reflected Christie. "Thir Ennglish hae flattering tongues, as
+sure as Dethe; 'The Snawdrap o' the Norrth!'"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+GATTY'S back was hardly turned when a visitor arrived, and inquired, "Is
+Mr. Gatty at home?"
+
+"What's your will wi' him?" was the Scottish reply.
+
+"Will you give him this?"
+
+"What est?"
+
+"Are you fond of asking questions?" inquired the man.
+
+"Ay! and fules canna answer them," retorted Christie.
+
+The little document which the man, in retiring, left with Christie
+Johnstone purported to come from one Victoria, who seemed, at first
+sight, disposed to show Charles Gatty civilities. "Victoria--to Charles
+Gatty, greeting! (salutem)." Christie was much struck with this instance
+of royal affability; she read no further, but began to think, "Victoree!
+that's the queen hersel. A letter fra the queen to a painter lad!
+Picters will rise i' the mairket--it will be an order to paint the
+bairns. I hae brought him luck; I am real pleased." And on Gatty's
+return, canvas in hand, she whipped the document behind her, and said
+archly, "I hae something for ye, a tecket fra a leddy, ye'll no want
+siller fra this day."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Ay! indeed, fra a great leddy; it's vara gude o' me to gie ye it; heh!
+tak it."
+
+He did take it, looked stupefied, looked again, sunk into a chair, and
+glared at it.
+
+"Laddy!" said Christie.
+
+"This is a new step on the downward path," said the poor painter.
+
+"Is it no an orrder to paint the young prence?" said Christie, faintly.
+
+"No!" almost shrieked the victim. "It's a writ! I owe a lot of money.
+
+"Oh, Chairles!"
+
+"See! I borrowed sixty pounds six months ago of a friend, so now I owe
+eighty!"
+
+"All right!" giggled the unfriendly visitor at the door, whose departure
+had been more or less fictitious.
+
+Christie, by an impulse, not justifiable, but natural, drew her
+oyster-knife out, and this time the man really went away.
+
+"Hairtless mon!" cried she, "could he no do his am dirrty work, and no
+gar me gie the puir lad th' action, and he likeit me sae weel!" and she
+began to whimper.
+
+"And love you more now," said he; "don't you cry, dear, to add to my
+vexation."
+
+"Na! I'll no add to your vexation," and she gulped down her tears.
+
+"Besides, I have pictures painted worth two hundred pounds; this is only
+for eighty. To be sure you can't sell them for two hundred pence when
+you want. So I shall go to jail, but they won't keep me long."
+
+Then he took a turn, and began to fall into the artistic, or true view
+of matters, which, indeed, was never long absent from him.
+
+"Look here, Christie," said he, "I am sick of conventional assassins,
+humbugging models, with dirty beards, that knit their brows, and try to
+look murder; they never murdered so much as a tom-cat. I always go in
+for the real thing, and here I shall find it."
+
+"Dinna gang in there, lad, for ony favor."
+
+"Then I shall find the accessories of a picture I have in my
+head--chains with genuine rust and ancient mouldering stones with the
+stains of time." His eye brightened at the prospect.
+
+"You among fiefs, and chains, and stanes! Ye'll break my hairt, laddy,
+ye'll no be easy till you break my hairt." And this time the tears would
+not be denied.
+
+"I love you for crying; don't cry;" and he fished from the chaotic
+drawer a cambric handkerchief, with which he dried her tears as they
+fell.
+
+It is my firm belief she cried nearly twice as much as she really wanted
+to; she contrived to make the grief hers, the sympathy his. Suddenly she
+stopped, and said:
+
+"I'm daft; ye'll accept a lane o' the siller fra me, will ye no?"
+
+"No!" said he. "And where could you find eighty pound?"
+
+"Auchty pund," cried she, "it's no auchty pund that will ding Christie
+Johnstone, laddy. I hae boats and nets worth twa auchtys; and I hae
+forty pund laid by; and I hae seven hundred pund at London, but that I
+canna meddle. My feyther lent it the king or the queen, I dinna justly
+mind; she pays me the interest twice the year. Sac ye ken I could na be
+sae dirty as seek my siller, when she pays me th' interest. To the very
+day, ye ken. She's just the only one o' a' my debtors that's hoenest,
+but never heed, ye'll no gang to jail."
+
+"I'll hold my tongue, and sacrifice my pictures," thought Charles.
+
+"Cheer up!" said Christie, mistaking the nature of his thoughts, "for it
+did na come fra Victoree hersel'. It wad smell o' the musk, ye ken. Na,
+it's just a wheen blackguards at London that makes use o' her name to
+torment puir folk. Wad she pairsecute a puir lad? No likely."
+
+She then asked questions, some of which were embarrassing. One thing he
+could never succeed in making her understand, how, since it was sixty
+pounds he borrowed, it could be eighty pounds he owed.
+
+Then once more she promised him her protection, bade him be of good
+cheer, and left him.
+
+At the door she turned, and said: "Chairles, here's an auld wife seeking
+ye," and vanished.
+
+These two young people had fallen acquainted at a Newhaven wedding.
+Christie, belonging to no one, had danced with him all the night, they
+had walked under the stars to cool themselves, for dancing reels, with
+heart and soul, is not quadrilling.
+
+Then he had seen his beautiful partner in Edinburgh, and made a
+sketch of her, which he gave her; and by and by he used to run down to
+Newhaven, and stroll up and down a certain green lane near the town.
+
+Next, on Sunday evenings, a long walk together, and then it came to
+visits at his place now and then.
+
+And here. Raphael and Fornarina were inverted, our artist used to work,
+and Christie tell him stories the while.
+
+And, as her voice curled round his heart, he used to smile and look, and
+lay inspired touches on his subject.
+
+And she, an artist of the tongue (without knowing herself one), used to
+make him grave, or gay, or sad, at will, and watch the effect of her
+art upon his countenance; and a very pretty art it is--the _viva voce_
+story-teller's--and a rare one among the nations of Europe.
+
+Christie had not learned it in a day; when she began, she used to
+tell them like the other Newhaven people, with a noble impartiality of
+detail, wearisome to the hearer.
+
+But latterly she had learned to seize the salient parts of a narrative;
+her voice had compass, and, like all fine speakers, she traveled over
+a great many notes in speaking; her low tones were gorgeously rich, her
+upper tones full and sweet; all this, and her beauty, made the hours she
+gave him very sweet to our poor artist.
+
+He was wont to bask in her music, and tell her in return how he loved
+her, and how happy they were both to be as soon as he had acquired
+a name, for a name was wealth, he told her. And although Christie
+Johnstone did not let him see how much she took all this to heart and
+believed it, it was as sweet music to her as her own honeysuckle breath
+to him.
+
+She improved him.
+
+He dropped cigars, and medical students, and similar abominations.
+
+Christie's cool, fresh breath, as she hung over him while painting,
+suggested to him that smoking might, peradventure, be a sin against
+nature as well as against cleanliness.
+
+And he improved her; she learned from art to look into nature (the usual
+process of mind).
+
+She had noticed too little the flickering gold of the leaves at evening,
+the purple hills, and the shifting stories and glories of the sky; but
+now, whatever she saw him try to imitate, she learned to examine. She
+was a woman, and admired sunset, etc., for this boy's sake, and her
+whole heart expanded with a new sensation that softened her manner to
+all the world, and brightened her personal rays.
+
+This charming picture of mutual affection had hitherto been admired only
+by those who figured in it.
+
+But a visitor had now arrived on purpose to inspect it, etc., attracted
+by report.
+
+A friend had considerately informed Mrs. Gatty, the artist's mother, and
+she had instantly started from Newcastle.
+
+This was the old lady Christie discovered on the stairs.
+
+Her sudden appearance took her son's breath away.
+
+No human event was less likely than that she should be there, yet there
+she was.
+
+After the first surprise and affectionate greetings, a misgiving crossed
+him, "she must know about the writ"--it was impossible; but our minds
+are so constituted--when we are guilty, we fear that others know what we
+know. Now Gatty was particularly anxious she should not know about this
+writ, for he had incurred the debt by acting against her advice.
+
+Last year he commenced a picture in which was Durham Cathedral; his
+mother bade him stay quietly at home, and paint the cathedral and its
+banks from a print, "as any other painter would," observed she.
+
+But this was not the lad's system; he spent five months on the spot, and
+painted his picture, but he had to borrow sixty pounds to do this; the
+condition of this loan was, that in six months he should either pay
+eighty pounds, or finish and hand over a certain half-finished picture.
+
+He did neither; his new subject thrust aside his old one, and he had
+no money, ergo, his friend, a picture-dealer, who had found artists
+slippery in money matters, followed him up sharp, as we see.
+
+"There is nothing the matter, I hope, mother. What is it?"
+
+"I'm tired, Charles." He brought her a seat; she sat down.
+
+"I did not come from Newcastle, at my age, for nothing; you have formed
+an improper acquaintance."
+
+"I, who? Is it Jack Adams?"
+
+"Worse than any Jack Adams!"
+
+"Who can that be? Jenkyns, mother, because he does the same things as
+Jack, and pretends to be religious."
+
+"It is a female--a fishwife. Oh, my son!"
+
+"Christie Johnstone an improper acquaintance," said he; "why! I was good
+for nothing till I knew her; she has made me so good, mother; so steady,
+so industrious; you will never have to find fault with me again."
+
+"Nonsense--a woman that sells fish in the streets!"
+
+"But you have not seen her. She is beautiful, her mind is not in fish;
+her mind grasps the beautiful and the good--she is a companion for
+princes! What am I that she wastes a thought or a ray of music on me?
+Heaven bless her. She reads our best authors, and never forgets a word;
+and she tells me beautiful stories--sometimes they make me cry, for her
+voice is a music that goes straight to my heart."
+
+"A woman that does not even wear the clothes of a lady."
+
+"It is the only genuine costume in these islands not beneath a painter's
+notice."
+
+"Look at me, Charles; at your mother."
+
+"Yes, mother," said he, nervously.
+
+"You must part with her, or kill me."
+
+He started from his seat and began to flutter up and down the room;
+poor excitable creature. "Part with her!" cried he; "I shall never be a
+painter if I do; what is to keep my heart warm when the sun is hid, when
+the birds are silent, when difficulty looks a mountain and success a
+molehill? What is an artist without love? How is he to bear up against
+his disappointments from within, his mortification from without? the
+great ideas he has and cannot grasp, and all the forms of ignorance that
+sting him, from stupid insensibility down to clever, shallow criticism?"
+
+"Come back to common sense," said the old lady, coldly and grimly.
+
+He looked uneasy. Common sense had often been quoted against him, and
+common sense had always proved right.
+
+"Come back to common sense. She shall not be your mistress, and she
+cannot bear your name; you must part some day, because you cannot come
+together, and now is the best time."
+
+"Not be together? all our lives, all our lives, ay," cried he, rising
+into enthusiasm, "hundreds of years to come will we two be together
+before men's eyes--I will be an immortal painter, that the world and
+time may cherish the features I have loved. I love her, mother," added
+he, with a tearful tenderness that ought to have reached a woman's
+heart; then flushing, trembling, and inspired, he burst out, "And I wish
+I was a sculptor and a poet too, that Christie might live in stone and
+verse, as well as colors, and all who love an art might say, 'This woman
+cannot die, Charles Gatty loved her.'"
+
+He looked in her face; he could not believe any creature could be
+insensible to his love, and persist to rob him of it.
+
+The old woman paused, to let his eloquence evaporate.
+
+The pause chilled him; then gently and slowly, but emphatically, she
+spoke to him thus:
+
+"Who has kept you on her small means ever since you were ten years and
+seven months old?"
+
+"You should know, mother, dear mother."
+
+"Answer me, Charles."
+
+"My mother."
+
+"Who has pinched herself, in every earthly thing, to make you an
+immortal painter, and, above all, a gentleman?"
+
+"My mother."
+
+"Who forgave you the little faults of youth, before you could ask
+pardon?"
+
+"My mother! Oh, mother, I ask pardon now for all the trouble I ever gave
+the best, the dearest, the tenderest of mothers."
+
+"Who will go home to Newcastle, a broken-hearted woman, with the one
+hope gone that has kept her up in poverty and sorrow so many weary
+years, if this goes on?"
+
+"Nobody, I hope."
+
+"Yes, Charles; your mother."
+
+"Oh, mother; you have been always my best friend."
+
+"And am this day."
+
+"Do not be my worst enemy now. It is for me to obey you; but it is for
+you to think well before you drive me to despair."
+
+And the poor womanish heart leaned his head on the table, and began to
+sorrow over his hard fate.
+
+Mrs. Gatty soothed him. "It need not be done all in a moment. It must be
+done kindly, but firmly. I will give you as much time as you like."
+
+This bait took; the weak love to temporize.
+
+It is doubtful whether he honestly intended to part with Christie
+Johnstone; but to pacify his mother he promised to begin and gradually
+untie the knot.
+
+"My mother will go," whispered his deceitful heart, "and, when she is
+away, perhaps I shall find out that in spite of every effort I cannot
+resign my treasure."
+
+He gave a sort of half-promise for the sake of peace.
+
+His mother instantly sent to the inn for her boxes.
+
+"There is a room in this same house," said she, "I will take it; I will
+not hurry you, but until it is done, I stay here, if it is a twelvemonth
+about."
+
+He turned pale.
+
+"And now hear the good news I have brought you from Newcastle."
+
+Oh! these little iron wills, how is a great artist to fight three
+hundred and sixty-five days against such an antagonist?
+
+Every day saw a repetition of these dialogues, in which genius made
+gallant bursts into the air, and strong, hard sense caught him on his
+descent, and dabbed glue on his gauzy wings.
+
+Old age and youth see life so differently. To youth, it is a story-book,
+in which we are to command the incidents, and be the bright exceptions
+to one rule after another.
+
+To age it is an almanac, in which everything will happen just as it has
+happened so many times.
+
+To youth, it is a path through a sunny meadow.
+
+To age, a hard turnpike:
+
+Whose travelers must be all sweat and dust, when they are not in mud and
+drenched:
+
+Which wants mending in many places, and is mended with sharp stones.
+
+Gatty would not yield to go down to Newhaven and take a step against his
+love, but he yielded so far as to remain passive, and see whether this
+creature was necessary to his existence or not. Mrs. G. scouted the
+idea. "He was to work, and he would soon forget her." Poor boy! he
+wanted to work; his debt weighed on him; a week's resolute labor might
+finish his first picture and satisfy his creditor. The subject was
+an interior. He set to work, he stuck to work, he glued to work, his
+body--but his heart?
+
+Ah, my poor fellow, a much slower horse than Gatty will go by you,
+ridden as you are by a leaden heart.
+
+Tu nihil invita facies pingesve Minerva.
+
+
+It would not lower a mechanical dog's efforts, but it must yours.
+
+He was unhappy. He heard only one side for days; that side was
+recommended by his duty, filial affection, and diffidence of his own
+good sense.
+
+He was brought to see his proceedings were eccentric, and that it is
+destruction to be eccentric.
+
+He was made a little ashamed of what he had been proud of.
+
+He was confused and perplexed; he hardly knew what to think or do; he
+collapsed, and all his spirit was fast leaving him, and then he felt
+inclined to lean on the first thing he could find, and nothing came to
+hand but his mother.
+
+Meantime, Christie Johnstone was also thinking of him, but her single
+anxiety was to find this eighty pounds for him.
+
+It is a Newhaven idea that the female is the natural protector of the
+male, and this idea was strengthened in her case.
+
+She did not fully comprehend his character and temperament, but she
+saw, by instinct, that she was to be the protector. Besides, as she
+was twenty-one, and he only twenty-two, she felt the difference between
+herself, a woman, and him, a boy, and to leave him to struggle unaided
+out of his difficulties seemed to her heartless.
+
+Twice she opened her lips to engage the charitable "vile count" in his
+cause, but shame closed them again; this would be asking a personal
+favor, and one on so large a scale.
+
+Several days passed thus; she had determined not to visit him without
+good news.
+
+She then began to be surprised, she heard nothing from him.
+
+And now she felt something that prevented her calling on him.
+
+But Jean Carnie was to be married, and the next day the wedding party
+were to spend in festivity upon the island of Inch Coombe.
+
+She bade Jean call on him, and, without mentioning her, invite him to
+this party, from which, he must know, she would not be absent.
+
+Jean Carnie entered his apartment, and at her entrance his mother, who
+took for granted this was his sweetheart, whispered in his ear that he
+should now take the first step, and left him.
+
+What passed between Jean Carnie and Charles Gatty is for another
+chapter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+A YOUNG viscount with income and person cannot lie _perdu_ three miles
+from Edinburgh.
+
+First one discovers him, then another, then twenty, then all the world,
+as the whole clique is modestly called.
+
+Before, however, Lord Ipsden was caught, he had acquired a browner tint,
+a more elastic step, and a stouter heart.
+
+The Aberford prescription had done wonders for him.
+
+He caught himself passing one whole day without thinking of Lady Barbara
+Sinclair.
+
+But even Aberford had misled him; there were no adventures to be found
+in the Firth of Forth; most of the days there was no wind to speak of;
+twice it blew great guns, and the men were surprised at his lordship
+going out, but nobody was in any danger except himself; the fishermen
+had all slipped into port before matters were serious.
+
+He found the merchantmen that could sail creeping on with three reefs in
+their mainsail; and the Dutchmen lying to and breasting it, like ducks
+in a pond, and with no more chance of harm.
+
+On one of these occasions he did observe a little steam-tug, going about
+a knot an hour, and rolling like a washing-tub. He ran down to her,
+and asked if he could assist her; she answered, through the medium of
+a sooty animal at her helm, that she was (like our universities)
+"satisfied with her own progress"; she added, being under intoxication,
+"that, if any danger existed, her scheme was to drown it in the
+bo-o-owl;" and two days afterward he saw her puffing and panting, and
+fiercely dragging a gigantic three-decker out into deep water, like an
+industrious flea pulling his phaeton.
+
+And now it is my office to relate how Mr. Flucker Johnstone comported
+himself on one occasion.
+
+As the yacht worked alongside Granton Pier, before running out, the said
+Flucker calmly and scientifically drew his lordship's attention to three
+points:
+
+The direction of the wind--the force of the wind--and his opinion, as a
+person experienced in the Firth, that it was going to be worse instead
+of better; in reply, he received an order to step forward to his place
+in the cutter--the immediate vicinity of the jib-boom. On this, Mr.
+Flucker instantly burst into tears.
+
+His lordship, or, as Flucker called him ever since the yacht came down,
+"the skipper," deeming that the higher appellation, inquired, with some
+surprise, what was the matter with the boy.
+
+One of the crew, who, by the by, squinted, suggested, "It was a slight
+illustration of the passion of fear."
+
+Flucker confirmed the theory by gulping out: "We'll never see Newhaven
+again."
+
+On this the skipper smiled, and ordered him ashore, somewhat
+peremptorily.
+
+Straightway he began to howl, and, saying, "It was better to be drowned
+than be the laughing-stock of the place," went forward to his place; on
+his safe return to port, this young gentleman was very severe on
+open boats, which, he said "bred womanish notions in hearts naturally
+dauntless. Give me a lid to the pot," added he, "and I'll sail with Old
+Nick, let the wind blow high or low."
+
+The Aberford was wrong when he called love a cutaneous disorder.
+
+There are cutaneous disorders that take that name, but they are no more
+love than verse is poetry;
+
+Than patriotism is love of country;
+
+Than theology is religion;
+
+Than science is philosophy;
+
+Than paintings are pictures;
+
+Than reciting on the boards is acting;
+
+Than physic is medicine
+
+Than bread is bread, or gold gold--in shops.
+
+Love is a state of being; the beloved object is our center; and our
+thoughts, affections, schemes and selves move but round it.
+
+We may diverge hither or thither, but the golden thread still holds us.
+
+Is fair or dark beauty the fairest? The world cannot decide; but love
+shall decide in a moment.
+
+A halo surrounds her we love, and makes beautiful to us her movements,
+her looks, her virtues, her faults, her nonsense, her affectation and
+herself; and that's love, doctor!
+
+Lord Ipsden was capable of loving like this; but, to do Lady Barbara
+justice, she had done much to freeze the germ of noble passion; she had
+not killed, but she had benumbed it.
+
+"Saunders," said Lord Ipsden, one morning after breakfast, "have you
+entered everything in your diary?"
+
+"Yes, my lord."
+
+"All these good people's misfortunes?"
+
+"Yes, my lord."
+
+"Do you think you have spelled their names right?"
+
+"Where it was impossible, my lord, I substituted an English appellation,
+hidentical in meaning."
+
+"Have you entered and described my first interview with Christie
+Johnstone, and somebody something?"
+
+"Most minutely, my lord."
+
+"How I turned Mr. Burke into poetry--how she listened with her eyes all
+glistening--how they made me talk--how she dropped a tear, he! he!
+he! at the death of the first baron--how shocked she was at the king
+striking him when he was dying, to make a knight-banneret of the poor
+old fellow?"
+
+"Your lordship will find all the particulars exactly related," said
+Saunders, with dry pomp.
+
+"How she found out that titles are but breath--how I answered--some
+nonsense?"
+
+"Your lordship will find all the topics included."
+
+"How she took me for a madman? And you for a prig?"
+
+"The latter circumstance eluded my memory, my lord."
+
+"But when I told her I must relieve only one poor person by day, she
+took my hand."
+
+"Your lordship will find all the items realized in this book, my lord."
+
+"What a beautiful book!"
+
+"Alba are considerably ameliorated, my lord."
+
+"Alba?"
+
+"Plural of album, my lord," explained the refined factotum, "more
+delicate, I conceive, than the vulgar reading."
+
+Viscount Ipsden read from
+
+"MR. SAUNDERS'S ALBUM.
+
+"To illustrate the inelegance of the inferior classes, two juvenile
+venders of the piscatory tribe were this day ushered in, and
+instantaneously, without the accustomed preliminaries, plunged into a
+familiar conversation with Lord Viscount Ipsden.
+
+"Their vulgarity, shocking and repulsive to myself, appeared to afford
+his lordship a satisfaction greater than he derives from the graceful
+amenities of fashionable association--"
+
+"Saunders, I suspect you of something."
+
+"Me, my lord!"
+
+"Yes. Writing in an annual."
+
+"I do, my lord," said he, with benignant _hauteur._ "It appears every
+month--_The Polytechnic."_
+
+"I thought so! you are polysyllabic, Saunders; _en route!"_
+
+"In this hallucination I find it difficult to participate; associated
+from infancy with the aristocracy, I shrink, like the sensitive plant,
+from contact with anything vulgar."
+
+"I see! I begin to understand you, Saunders. Order the dog-cart, and
+Wordsworth's mare for leader; we'll give her a trial. You are an ass,
+Saunders."
+
+"Yes, my lord; I will order Robert to tell James to come for your
+lordship's commands about your lordship's vehicles. (What could he
+intend by a recent observation of a discourteous character?)"
+
+His lordship soliloquized.
+
+"I never observed it before, but Saunders is an ass! La Johnstone is one
+of Nature's duchesses, and she has made me know some poor people that
+will be richer than the rich one day; and she has taught me that honey
+is to be got from bank-notes--by merely giving them away."
+
+Among the objects of charity Lord Ipsden discovered was one Thomas
+Harvey, a maker and player of the violin. This man was a person of
+great intellect; he mastered every subject he attacked. By a careful
+examination of all the points that various fine-toned instruments had
+in common, he had arrived at a theory of sound; he made violins to
+correspond, and was remarkably successful in insuring that which had
+been too hastily ascribed to accident--a fine tone.
+
+This man, who was in needy circumstances, demonstrated to his lordship
+that ten pounds would make his fortune; because with ten pounds he could
+set up a shop, instead of working out of the world's sight in a room.
+
+Lord Ipsden gave him ten pounds!
+
+A week after, he met Harvey, more ragged and dirty than before.
+
+Harvey had been robbed by a friend whom he had assisted. Poor Harvey!
+Lord Ipsden gave him ten pounds more!
+
+Next week, Saunders, entering Harvey's house, found him in bed at noon,
+because he had no clothes to wear.
+
+Saunders suggested that it would be better to give his wife the next
+money, with strict orders to apply it usefully.
+
+This was done!
+
+The next day, Harvey, finding his clothes upon a chair, his tools
+redeemed from pawn, and a beefsteak ready for his dinner, accused his
+wife of having money, and meanly refusing him the benefit of it. She
+acknowledged she had a little, and appealed to the improved state of
+things as a proof that she knew better than he the use of money. He
+demanded the said money. She refused--he leathered her--she put him in
+prison.
+
+This was the best place for him. The man was a drunkard, and all the
+riches of Egypt would never have made him better off.
+
+And here, gentlemen of the lower classes, a word with you. How can
+you, with your small incomes, hope to be well off, if you are more
+extravagant than those who have large ones?
+
+"Us extravagant?" you reply.
+
+Yes! your income is ten shillings a week; out of that you spend three
+shillings in drink; ay! you, the sober ones. You can't afford it, my
+boys. Find me a man whose income is a thousand a year; well, if he
+imitates you, and spends three hundred upon sensuality, I bet you the
+odd seven hundred he does not make both ends meet; the proportion is too
+great. And _two-thirds of the distress of the lower orders is owing to
+this--that they are more madly prodigal than the rich; in the worst,
+lowest and most dangerous item of all human prodigality!_
+
+Lord Ipsden went to see Mrs. Harvey; it cost him much to go; she lived
+in the Old Town, and he hated disagreeable smells; he also knew from
+Saunders that she had two black eyes, and he hated women with black eyes
+of that sort. But this good creature did go; did relieve Mrs. Harvey;
+and, bare-headed, suffered himself to be bedewed ten minutes by her
+tearful twaddle.
+
+For once Virtue was rewarded. Returning over the North Bridge, he met
+somebody whom but for his charity he would not have met.
+
+He came in one bright moment plump upon--Lady Barbara Sinclair. She
+flushed, he trembled, and in two minutes he had forgotten every human
+event that had passed since he was by her side.
+
+She seemed pleased to see him, too; she ignored entirely his obnoxious
+proposal; he wisely took her cue, and so, on this secret understanding,
+they were friends. He made his arrangements, and dined with her family.
+It was a family party. In the evening Lady Barbara allowed it to
+transpire that she had made inquiries about him.
+
+(He was highly flattered.) And she had discovered he was lying hid
+somewhere in the neighborhood.
+
+"Studying the guitar?" inquired she.
+
+"No," said he, "studying a new class of the community. Do you know any
+of what they call the 'lower classes'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Monstrous agreeable people, are they not?"
+
+"No, very stupid! I only know two old women--except the servants, who
+have no characters. They imitate us, I suspect, which does not say much
+for their taste."
+
+"But some of my friends are young women; that makes all the difference."
+
+"It does! and you ought to be ashamed. If you want a low order of mind,
+why desert our own circle?"
+
+"My friends are only low in station; they have rather lofty minds, some
+of them."
+
+"Well, amuse yourself with these lofty minds. Amusement is the end of
+being, you know, and the aim of all the men of this day."
+
+"We imitate the ladies," said he, slyly.
+
+"You do," answered she, very dryly; and so the dialogue went on, and
+Lord Ipsden found the pleasure of being with his cousin compensate him
+fully for the difference of their opinions; in fact, he found it simply
+amusing that so keen a wit as his cousins s could be entrapped into
+the humor of decrying the time one happens to live in, and admiring any
+epoch one knows next to nothing about, and entrapped by the notion of
+its originality, above all things; the idea being the stale commonplace
+of asses in every age, and the manner of conveying the idea being a mere
+imitation of the German writers, not the good ones, _bien entendu,_ but
+the quill-drivers, the snobs of the Teutonic pen.
+
+But he was to learn that follies are not always laughable, that _eadem
+sentire_ is a bond, and that, when a clever and pretty woman chooses to
+be a fool, her lover, if he is wise, will be a greater--if he can.
+
+The next time they met, Lord Ipsden found Lady Barbara occupied with
+a gentleman whose first sentence proclaimed him a pupil of Mr. Thomas
+Carlyle, and he had the mortification to find that she had neither an
+ear nor an eye for him.
+
+Human opinion has so many shades that it is rare to find two people
+agree.
+
+But two people may agree wonderfully, if they will but let a third think
+for them both.
+
+Thus it was that these two ran so smoothly in couples.
+
+Antiquity, they agreed, was the time when the world was old, its hair
+gray, its head wise. Every one that said, "Lord, Lord!" two hundred
+years ago was a Christian. There were no earnest men now; Williams,
+the missionary, who lived and died for the Gospel, was not earnest
+in religion; but Cromwell, who packed a jury, and so murdered his
+prisoner--Cromwell, in whose mouth was heaven, and in his heart temporal
+sovereignty--was the pattern of earnest religion, or, at all events,
+second in sincerity to Mahomet alone, in the absence of details
+respecting Satan, of whom we know only that his mouth is a Scripture
+concordance, and his hands the hands of Mr. Carlyle's saints.
+
+Then they went back a century or two, and were eloquent about the great
+antique heart, and the beauty of an age whose samples were Abbot Sampson
+and Joan of Arc.
+
+Lord Ipsden hated argument; but jealousy is a brass spur, it made even
+this man fluent for once.
+
+He suggested "that five hundred years added to a world's life made it
+just five hundred years older, not younger--and if older, grayer--and if
+grayer, wiser.
+
+"Of Abbot Sampson," said he, "whom I confess both a great and a
+good man, his author, who with all his talent belongs to the class
+muddle-head, tells us that when he had been two years in authority his
+red hair had turned gray, fighting against the spirit of his age; how
+the deuce, then, could he be a sample of the spirit of his age?
+
+"Joan of Arc was burned by acclamation of her age, and is admired by our
+age. Which fact identifies an age most with a heroine, to give her your
+heart, or to give her a blazing fagot and death?"
+
+"Abbot Sampson and Joan of Arc," concluded he, "prove no more in favor
+of their age, and no less against it, than Lot does for or against
+Sodom. Lot was in Sodom, but not of it; and so were Sampson and Joan in,
+but not of, the villainous times they lived in.
+
+"The very best text-book of true religion is the New Testament, and I
+gather from it, that the man who forgives his enemies while their
+ax descends on his head, however poor a creature he may be in other
+respects, is a better Christian than the man who has the God of Mercy
+forever on his lips, and whose hands are swift to shed blood.
+
+"The earnest men of former ages are not extinct in this," added he.
+"Whenever a scaffold is erected outside a prison-door, if you are
+earnest in pursuit of truth, and can put up with disgusting objects, you
+shall see a relic of ancient manners hanged.
+
+"There still exist, in parts of America, rivers on whose banks are
+earnest men who shall take your scalp, the wife's of your bosom, and the
+innocent child's of her bosom.
+
+"In England we are as earnest as ever in pursuit of heaven, and of
+innocent worldly advantages. If, when the consideration of life and
+death interposes, we appear less earnest in pursuit of comparative
+trifles such as kingdoms or dogmas, it is because cooler in action we
+are more earnest in thought--because reason, experience, and conscience
+are things that check the unscrupulousness or beastly earnestness of
+man.
+
+"Moreover, he who has the sense to see that questions have three sides
+is no longer so intellectually as well as morally degraded as to be able
+to cut every throat that utters an opinion contrary to his own.
+
+"If the phrase 'earnest man' means man imitating the beasts that are
+deaf to reason, it is to be hoped that civilization and Christianity
+will really extinguish the whole race for the benefit of the earth."
+
+Lord Ipsden succeeded in annoying the fair theorist, but not in
+convincing her.
+
+The mediaeval enthusiasts looked on him as some rough animal that had
+burst into sacred grounds unconsciously, and gradually edged away from
+him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+LORD IPSDEN had soon the mortification of discovering that this Mr. ----
+was a constant visitor at the house; and, although his cousin gave him
+her ear in this man's absence, on the arrival of her fellow-enthusiast
+he had ever the mortification of finding himself _de trop._
+
+Once or twice he demolished this personage in argument, and was rewarded
+by finding himself more _de trop._
+
+But one day Lady Barbara, being in a cousinly humor, expressed a wish
+to sail in his lordship's yacht, and this hint soon led to a party
+being organized, and a sort of picnic on the island of Inch Coombe; his
+lordship's cutter being the mode of conveyance to and from that spot.
+
+Now it happened on that very day Jean Carnie's marriage was celebrated
+on that very island by her relations and friends.
+
+So that we shall introduce our readers to
+
+THE RIVAL PICNICS.
+
+We begin with _Les gens comme il faut._
+
+PICNIC NO. 1.
+
+The servants were employed in putting away dishes into hampers.
+
+There was a calm silence. "Hem!" observed Sir Henry Talbot.
+
+"Eh?" replied the Honorable Tom Hitherington.
+
+"Mamma," said Miss Vere, "have you brought any work?"
+
+"No, my dear."
+
+"At a picnic," said Mr. Hitherington, "isn't it the thing for
+somebody--aw--to do something?"
+
+"Ipsden," said Lady Barbara, "there is an understanding _between_ you
+and Mr. Hitherington. I condemn you to turn him into English."
+
+"Yes, Lady Barbara; I'll tell you, he means---do you mean anything,
+Tom?"
+
+_Hitherington._ "Can't anybody guess what I mean?"
+
+_Lady Barbara._ "Guess first yourself, you can't be suspected of being
+in the secret."
+
+_Hither._ "What I mean is, that people sing a song, or run races, or
+preach a sermon, or do something funny at a picnic--aw--somebody gets up
+and does something."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "Then perhaps Miss Vere, whose singing is famous, will have
+the complaisance to sing to us."
+
+_Miss Vere._ "I should be happy, Lady Barbara, but I have not brought my
+music."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "Oh, we are not critical; the simplest air, or even a
+fragment of melody; the sea and the sky will be a better accompaniment
+than Broadwood ever made."
+
+_Miss V._ "I can't sing a note without book."
+
+_Sir H. Talbot._ "Your music is in your soul--not at your fingers'
+ends."
+
+_Lord Ipsden, to Lady Bar._ "It is in her book, and not in her soul."
+
+_Lady Bar., to Lord Ips._ "Then it has chosen the better situation of
+the two."
+
+_Ips._ "Miss Vere is to the fine art of music what the engrossers are
+to the black art of law; it all filters through them without leaving any
+sediment; and so the music of the day passes through Miss Vere's mind,
+but none remains--to stain its virgin snow."
+
+He bows, she smiles.
+
+_Lady Bar., to herself._ "Insolent. And the little dunce thinks he is
+complimenting her."
+
+_Ips._ "Perhaps Talbot will come to our rescue--he is a fiddler."
+
+_Tal._ "An amateur of the violin."
+
+_Ips._ "It is all the same thing."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "I wish it may prove so."
+
+[Note: original has music notation here]
+
+_Miss V._ "Beautiful."
+
+_Mrs. Vere._ "Charming."
+
+_Hither._ "Superb!"
+
+_Ips._ "You are aware that good music is a thing to be wedded to
+immortal verse, shall I recite a bit of poetry to match Talbot's
+strain?"
+
+_Miss V._ "Oh, yes! how nice."
+
+_Ips. (rhetorically)._ "A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. I. J. K. L. M. N. O. P.
+Q. R. S. T. U. V. W. X. Y. Z. Y. X. W. V. U. T. S. O. N. M. L. K. J. I.
+H. G. F. A. M. little p. little t."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "Beautiful! Superb! Ipsden has been taking lessons on the
+thinking instrument."
+
+_Hither._ "He has been _perdu_ among vulgar people."
+
+_Tal._ "And expects a pupil of Herz to play him tunes!"
+
+_Lady Bar._ "What are tunes, Sir Henry?"
+
+_Tal._ "Something I don't play, Lady Barbara."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "I understand you; something we ought to like."
+
+_Ips._ "I have a Stradivarius violin at home. It is yours, Talbot, if
+you can define a tune."
+
+_Tal._ "A tune is--everybody knows what."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "A tune is a tune, that is what you meant to say."
+
+_Tal._ "Of course it is."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "Be reasonable, Ipsden; no man can do two things at once;
+how can the pupil of Herz condemn a thing and know what it means
+contemporaneously?"
+
+_Ips._ "Is the drinking-song in 'Der Freischutz' a tune?"
+
+_Lady Bar._ "It is."
+
+_Ips._ "And the melodies of Handel, are they tunes?"
+
+_Lady Bar. (pathetically)._ "They are! They are!"
+
+_Ips._ "And the 'Russian Anthem,' and the 'Marseillaise,' and 'Ah,
+Perdona'?"
+
+_Tal._ "And 'Yankee Doodle'?"
+
+_Lady Bar._ "So that Sir Henry, who prided himself on his ignorance, has
+a wide field for its dominion."
+
+_Tal._ "All good violin players do like me; they prelude, not play
+tunes."
+
+_Ips._ "Then Heaven be thanked for our blind fiddlers. You like
+syllables of sound in unmeaning rotation, and you despise its words, its
+purposes, its narrative feats; carry out your principle, it will show
+you where you are. Buy a dirty palette for a picture, and dream the
+alphabet is a poem."
+
+_Lady Bar., to herself._ "Is this my cousin Richard?"
+
+_Hither._ "Mind, Ipsden, you are a man of property, and there are such
+things as commissions _de lunatico."_
+
+_Lady Bar._ "His defense will be that his friends pronounced him insane."
+
+_Ips._ "No; I shall subpoena Talbot's fiddle, cross-examination will get
+nothing out of that but, do, re, mi, fa."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "Yes, it will; fa, mi, re, do."
+
+_Tal._ "Violin, if you please."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "Ask Fiddle's pardon, directly."
+
+_Sound of fiddles is heard in the distance._
+
+_Tal._ "How lucky for you, there are fiddles and tunes, and the natives
+you are said to favor, why not join them?"
+
+_Ips. (shaking his head solemnly)._ "I dread to encounter another
+prelude."
+
+_Hither._ "Come, I know you would like it; it is a wedding-party--two
+sea monsters have been united. The sailors and fishermen are all blue
+cloth and wash-leather gloves."
+
+_Miss V._ "He! he!"
+
+_Tal._ "The fishwives unite the colors of the rainbow--"
+
+_Lady Bar._ "(And we all know how hideous they are)--to vulgar, blooming
+cheeks, staring white teeth, and sky-blue eyes."
+
+_Mrs. V._ "How satirical you are, especially you, Lady Barbara."
+
+Here Lord Ipsden, after a word to Lady Barbara, the answer to which did
+not appear to be favorable, rose, gave a little yawn, looked steadily at
+his companions without seeing them, and departed without seeming aware
+that he was leaving anybody behind him.
+
+_Hither._ "Let us go somewhere where we can quiz the natives without
+being too near them."
+
+_Lady Bar._ "I am tired of this unbroken solitude, I must go and think
+to the sea," added she, in a mock soliloquy; and out she glided with the
+same unconscious air as his lordship had worn.
+
+The others moved off slowly together.
+
+"Mamma," said Miss Vere, "I can't understand half Barbara Sinclair
+says."
+
+"It is not necessary, my love," replied mamma; "she is rather eccentric,
+and I fear she is spoiling Lord Ipsden."
+
+"Poor Lord Ipsden," murmured the lovely Vere, "he used to be so nice,
+and do like everybody else. Mamma, I shall bring some work the next
+time."
+
+"Do, my love."
+
+PICNIC NO. 2.
+
+In a house, two hundred yards from this scene, a merry dance, succeeding
+a merry song, had ended, and they were in the midst of an interesting
+story; Christie Johnstone was the narrator. She had found the tale in
+one of the viscount's books--it had made a great impression on her.
+
+The rest were listening intently. In a room which had lately been all
+noise, not a sound was now to be heard but the narrator's voice.
+
+"Aweel, lasses, here are the three wee kists set, the lads are to
+chuse--the ane that chuses reicht is to get Porsha, an' the lave to
+get the bag, and dee baitchelars--Flucker Johnstone, you that's sae
+clever--are ye for gowd, or siller, or leed?"
+
+_1st Fishwife._ "Gowd for me!"
+
+_2d ditto._ "The white siller's my taste."
+
+_Flucker._ "Na! there's aye some deevelish trick in thir lassie's
+stories. I shall ha to, till the ither lads hae chused; the mair part
+will put themsels oot, ane will hit it off reicht maybe, then I shall
+gie him a hidin' an' carry off the lass. You-hoo!"
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "That's you, Flucker."
+
+_Christie Johnstone._ "And div ye really think we are gawn to let you
+see a' the world chuse? Na, lad, ye are putten oot o' the room, like
+witnesses."
+
+_Flucker._ "Then I'd toss a penny; for gien ye trust to luck, she whiles
+favors ye, but gien ye commence to reason and argefy--ye're done!"
+
+_Christie._ "The suitors had na your wit, my manny, or maybe they had na
+a penny to toss, sae ane chused the gowd, ane the siller; but they got
+an awfu' affront. The gold kist had just a skull intil't, and the siller
+a deed cuddy's head!"
+
+_Chorus of Females._ "He! he! he!"
+
+_Ditto of Males._ "Haw! haw! haw! haw! Ho!"
+
+_Christie._ "An' Porsha puttit the pair of gowks to the door. Then came
+Bassanio, the lad fra Veeneece, that Porsha loed in secret. Veeneece,
+lasses, is a wonderful city; the streets o' 't are water, and the
+carriages are boats--that's in Chambers'."
+
+_Flucker._ "Wha are ye making a fool o'?"
+
+_Christie._ "What's wrang?"
+
+_Flucker._ "Yon's just as big a lee as ever I heerd."
+
+The words were scarcely out of his mouth ere he had reason to regret
+them; a severe box on the ear was administered by his indignant sister.
+Nobody pitied him.
+
+_Christie._ "I'll laern yet' affront me before a' the company."
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "Suppose it's a lee, there's nae silver to pay for it,
+Flucker."
+
+_Christie._ "Jean, I never telt a lee in a' my days."
+
+_Jean._ "There's ane to begin wi' then. Go ahead, Custy."
+
+_Christie._ "She bade the music play for him, for music brightens
+thoucht; ony way, he chose the leed kist. Open'st and wasn't there
+Porsha's pictur, and a posy, that said:
+
+'If you be well pleased with this, And hold your fortune for your bliss;
+Turn you where your leddy iss, And greet her wi' a loving--'" _(Pause)._
+
+"Kess," roared the company.
+
+_Chorus, led by Flucker._ "Hurraih!"
+
+_Christie (pathetically)._ "Flucker, behave!"
+
+_Sandy Liston (drunk)._ "Hur-raih!" He then solemnly reflected. "Na!
+but it's na hurraih, decency requires amen first an' hurraih afterward;
+here's kissin plenty, but I hear nae word o' the minister. Ye'll
+obsairve, young woman, that kissin's the prologue to sin, and I'm a
+decent mon, an' a gray-headed mon, an' your licht stories are no for me;
+sae if the minister's no expeckit I shall retire--an' tak my quiet gill
+my lane."
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "And div ye really think a decent cummer like Custy wad
+let the lad and lass misbehave thirsels? Na! lad, the minister's at the
+door, but" (sinking her voice to a confidential whisper) "I daurna let
+him in, for fear he'd see ye hae putten the enemy in your mooth sae
+aerly. (That's Custy's word.)"
+
+"Jemmy Drysel," replied Sandy, addressing vacancy, for Jemmy was
+mysteriously at work in the kitchen, "ye hae gotten a thoughtfu' wife."
+(Then, with a strong revulsion of feeling.) "Dinna let the blackguard*
+in here," cried he, "to spoil the young folk's sporrt."
+
+     * At present this is a spondee in England--a trochee in
+     Scotland The pronunciation of this important word ought to
+     be fixed, representing, as it does, so large a portion of
+     the community in both countries.
+
+_Christie._ "Aweel, lassies, comes a letter to Bassanio; he reads it,
+and turns as pale as deeth."
+
+_A Fishwife._ "Gude help us."
+
+_Christie._ "Poorsha behooved to ken his grief, wha had a better reicht?
+'Here's a letter, leddy,' says he, 'the paper's the boedy of my freend,
+like, and every word in it a gaping wound.'"
+
+_A Fisherman._ "Maircy on us."
+
+_Christie._ "Lad, it was fra puir Antonio, ye mind o' him, Lasses. Hech!
+the ill luck o' yon man, no a ship come hame; ane foundered at sea,
+coming fra Tri-po-lis; the pirates scuttled another, an' ane ran ashore
+on the Goodwins, near Bright-helm-stane, that's in England itsel', I
+daur say. Sae he could na pay the three thoosand ducats, an' Shylock had
+grippit him, an' sought the pund o' flesh aff the breest o' him, puir
+body."
+
+_Sandy Liston._ "He would na be the waur o' a wee bit hiding, yon
+thundering urang-utang; let the man alane, ye cursed old cannibal."
+
+_Christie._ "Poorsha keepit her man but ae hoor till they were united,
+an' then sent him wi' a puckle o' her ain siller to Veeneece, and
+Antonio--think o' that, lassies--pairted on their wedding-day."
+
+_Lizzy Johnstone, a Fishwife, aged 12._ "Hech! hech! it's lamentable."
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "I'm saying, mairriage is quick wark, in some
+pairts--here there's an awfu' trouble to get a man."
+
+_A young Fishwife._ "Ay, is there."
+
+_Omnes._ "Haw! haw! haw!" (The fish-wife hides.)
+
+_Christie._ "Fill your taupsels, lads and lasses, and awa to Veneece."
+
+_Sandy Liston (sturdily)._ "I'll no gang to sea this day."
+
+_Christie._ "Noo, we are in the hall o' judgment. Here are set the
+judges, awfu' to behold; there, on his throne, presides the Juke."
+
+_Flucker._ "She's awa to her Ennglish."
+
+_Lizzy Johnstone._ "Did we come to Veeneece to speak Scoetch, ye useless
+fule?"
+
+_Christie._ "Here, pale and hopeless, but resigned, stands the broken
+mairchant, Antonio; there, wi scales and knives, and revenge in his
+murderin' eye, stands the crewel Jew Shylock."
+
+"Aweel," muttered Sandy, considerately, "I'll no mak a disturbance on a
+wedding day."
+
+_Christie._ "They wait for Bell--I dinna mind his mind--a laerned
+lawyer, ony way; he's sick, but sends ane mair laerned still, and, when
+this ane comes, he looks not older nor wiser than mysel."
+
+_Flucker._ "No possible!"
+
+_Christie._ "Ye needna be sae sarcy, Flucker, for when he comes to his
+wark he soon lets 'em ken--runs his een like lightening ower the boend.
+'This bond's forfeit. Is Antonio not able to dischairge the money?'
+'Ay!' cries Bassanio, 'here's the sum thrice told.' Says the young judge
+in a bit whisper to Shylock, 'Shylock, there's thrice thy money offered
+thee. Be mairceful,' says he, out loud. 'Wha'll mak me?' says the Jew
+body. 'Mak ye!' says he; 'maircy is no a thing ye strain through a
+sieve, mon; it droppeth like the gentle dew fra' heaven upon the place
+beneath; it blesses him that gives and him that taks; it becomes the
+king better than his throne, and airthly power is maist like God's power
+when maircy seasons justice.'"
+
+_Robert Haw, Fisherman._ "Dinna speak like that to me, onybody, or I
+shall gie ye my boat, and fling my nets intil it, as ye sail awa wi'
+her."
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "Sae he let the puir deevil go. Oh! ye ken wha could
+stand up against siccan a shower o' Ennglish as thaat."
+
+_Christie._ "He just said, 'My deeds upon my heed. I claim the law,'
+says he; 'there is no power in the tongue o' man to alter me. I stay
+here on my boend.'"
+
+_Sandy Liston._ "I hae sat quiet!--quiet I hae sat against my will,
+no to disturb Jamie Drysel's weddin'; but ye carry the game ower far,
+Shylock, my lad. I'll just give yon bluidy-minded urang-utang a hidin',
+and bring Tony off, the gude, puir-spirited creature. And him, an' me,
+an' Bassanee, an' Porshee, we'll all hae a gill thegither."
+
+He rose, and was instantly seized by two of the company, from whom he
+burst furiously, after a struggle, and the next moment was heard to fall
+clean from the top to the bottom of the stairs. Flucker and Jean ran
+out; the rest appealed against the interruption.
+
+_Christie._ "Hech! he's killed. Sandy Liston's brake his neck."
+
+"What aboot it, lassy?" said a young fisherman; "it's Antonio I'm feared
+for; save him, lassy, if poessible; but I doot ye'll no get him clear o'
+yon deevelich heathen.
+
+"Auld Sandy's cheap sairved," added he, with all the indifference a
+human tone could convey.
+
+"Oh, Cursty," said Lizzie Johnstone, with a peevish accent, "dinna break
+the bonny yarn for naething."
+
+_Flucker (returning)._ "He's a' reicht."
+
+_Christie._ "Is he no dead?"
+
+_Flucker._ "Him deed? he's sober--that's a' the change I see."
+
+_Christie._ "Can he speak? I'm asking ye."
+
+_Flucker._ "Yes, he can speak."
+
+_Christie._ "What does he say, puir body?"
+
+_Flucker._ "He sat up, an' sought a gill fra' the wife--puir body!"
+
+_Christie._ "Hech! hech! he was my pupil in the airt o'
+sobriety!--aweel, the young judge rises to deliver the sentence of the
+coort. Silence!" thundered Christie. A lad and a lass that were slightly
+flirting were discountenanced.
+
+_Christie._ "'A pund o' that same mairchant's flesh is thine! the coort
+awards it, and the law does give it.'"
+
+_A young Fishwife._ "There, I thoucht sae; he's gaun to cut him, he's
+gaun to cut him; I'll no can bide." _(Exibat.)_
+
+_Christie._ "There's a fulish goloshen. 'Have by a doctor to stop the
+blood.'--'I see nae doctor in the boend,' says the Jew body."
+
+_Flucker._ "Bait your hook wi' a boend, and ye shall catch yon carle's
+saul, Satin, my lad."
+
+_Christie (with dismal pathos)._ "Oh, Flucker, dinna speak evil o'
+deegneties--that's maybe fishing for yoursel' the noo!---'An' ye shall
+cut the flesh frae off his breest.'--'A sentence,' says Shylock, 'come,
+prepare.'"
+
+Christie made a dash _en Shylock,_ and the company trembled.
+
+_Christie._ "'Bide a wee,' says the judge, 'this boend gies ye na a drap
+o' bluid; the words expressly are, a pund o' flesh!'"
+
+_(A Dramatic Pause.)_
+
+_Jean Carnie (drawing her breath)._ "That's into your mutton, Shylock"
+
+_Christie (with dismal pathos)._ "Oh, Jean! yon's an awfu' voolgar
+exprassion to come fra' a woman's mooth."
+
+"Could ye no hae said, 'intil his bacon'?" said Lizzie Johnstone,
+confirming the remonstrance.
+
+_Christie._ "'Then tak your boend, an' your pund o' flesh, but in
+cutting o' 't, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian bluid, thou
+diest!'"
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "Hech!"
+
+_Christie._ "'Thy goods are by the laws Veneece con-fis-cate,
+confiscate!'"
+
+Then, like an artful narrator, she began to wind up the story more
+rapidly.
+
+"Sae Shylock got to be no sae saucy. 'Pay the boend thrice,' says he,
+'and let the puir deevil go.'--'Here it's,' says Bassanio.--Na! the
+young judge wadna let him.--'He has refused it in open coort; no
+a bawbee for Shylock but just the forfeiture; an' he daur na tak
+it.'--'I'm awa',' says he. 'The deivil tak ye a'.'--Na! he wasna to win
+clear sae; ance they'd gotten the Jew on the hep, they worried him, like
+good Christians, that's a fact. The judge fand a law that fitted him,
+for conspiring against the life of a citizen; an' he behooved to give up
+hoose an' lands, and be a Christian; yon was a soor drap--he tarned no
+weel, puir auld villain, an' scairtit; an' the lawyers sent ane o' their
+weary parchments till his hoose, and the puir auld heathen signed awa'
+his siller, an' Abraham, an' Isaac, an' Jacob, on the heed o' 't. I
+pity him, an auld, auld man; and his dochter had rin off wi' a Christian
+lad--they ca' her Jessica, and didn't she steal his very diamond
+ring that his ain lass gied him when he was young, an' maybe no sae
+hard-hairted?"
+
+_Jean Carnie._ "Oh, the jaud! suppose he was a Jew, it was na her
+business to clean him oot."
+
+_A young Fishwife._ "Aweel, it was only a Jew body, that's my comfort."
+
+_Christie._ "Ye speak as a Jew was na a man; has not a Jew eyes, if ye
+please?"
+
+_Lizzy Johnstone._ "Ay, has he!--and the awfuest lang neb atween 'em."
+
+_Christie._ "Has not a Jew affections, paassions, organs?"
+
+_Jean._ "Na! Christie; thir lads comes fr' Italy!"
+
+_Christie._ "If you prick him, does he not bleed? if you tickle him,
+does na he lauch?"
+
+_A young Fishwife (pertly)._ "I never kittlet a Jew, for my pairt--sae
+I'll no can tell ye."
+
+_Christie._ "If you poison him, does he not die? and if you wrang him"
+(with fury) "shall he not revenge?"
+
+_Lizzie Johnstone._ "Oh! but ye're a fearsome lass."
+
+_Christie._ "Wha'll give me a sang for my bonny yarn?"
+
+Lord Ipsden, who had been an unobserved auditor of the latter part of
+the tale, here inquired whether she had brought her book.
+
+"What'n buik?"
+
+"Your music-book!"
+
+"Here's my music-book," said Jean, roughly tapping her head.
+
+"And here's mines," said Christie, birdly, touching her bosom.
+
+"Richard," said she, thoughtfully, "I wish ye may no hae been getting in
+voolgar company. Div ye think we hae minds like rinning water?"
+
+_Flucker (avec malice)._ "And tongues like the mill-clack abune it?
+Because if ye think sae, captain--ye're no far wrang!"
+
+_Christie._ "Na! we hae na muckle gowd maybe; but our minds are gowden
+vessels."
+
+_Jean._ "Aha! lad."
+
+_Christie._ "They are not saxpenny sieves, to let music an' meter
+through, and leave us none the wiser or better. Dinna gang in low
+voolgar company, or you a lost laddy."
+
+_Ipsden._ "Vulgar, again! everybody has a different sense for that word,
+I think. What is vulgar?"
+
+_Christie._ "Voolgar folk sit on an chair, ane, twa, whiles three hours,
+eatin' an' abune drinkin', as still as hoegs, or gruntin' puir every-day
+clashes, goessip, rubbich; when ye are aside them, ye might as weel be
+aside a cuddy; they canna gie ye a sang, they canna gie ye a story, they
+canna think ye a thoucht, to save their useless lives; that's voolgar
+folk."
+
+She sings. "A caaller herrin'!"
+
+_Jean._ "A caaller herrin'!"
+
+_Omnes._
+
+"Come buy my bonny caaller herrin', Six a penny caaller from the sea,"
+etc.
+
+The music chimed in, and the moment the song was done, without pause,
+or anything to separate or chill the succession of the arts, the fiddles
+diverged with a gallant plunge into "The Dusty Miller." The dancers
+found their feet by an instinct as rapid, and a rattling reel shook the
+floor like thunder. Jean Carnie assumed the privilege of a bride, and
+seized his lordship; Christie, who had a mind to dance with him too,
+took Flucker captive, and these four were one reel! There were seven
+others.
+
+The principle of reel dancing is articulation; the foot strikes the
+ground for every _accented_ note (and, by the by, it is their weakness
+of accent which makes all English reel and hornpipe players such
+failures).
+
+And in the best steps of all, which it has in common with the hornpipe,
+such as the quick "heel and toe," "the sailor's fling," and the "double
+shuffle," the foot strikes the ground for every _single_ note of the
+instrument.
+
+All good dancing is beautiful.
+
+But this articulate dancing, compared with the loose, lawless diffluence
+of motion that goes by that name, gives me (I must confess it) as much
+more pleasure as articulate singing is superior to tunes played on the
+voice by a young lady:
+
+Or the clean playing of my mother to the piano-forte splashing of my
+daughter; though the latter does attack the instrument as a washerwoman
+her soapsuds, and the former works like a lady.
+
+Or skating to sliding:
+
+Or English verse to dactyls in English:
+
+Or painting to daubing:
+
+Or preserved strawberries to strawberry jam.
+
+What says Goldsmith of the two styles? "They swam, sprawled, frisked,
+and languished; but Olivia's foot was as pat to the music as its
+echo."--_Vicar of Wakefield._
+
+Newhaven dancing aims also at fun; laughter mingles with agility;
+grotesque yet graceful gestures are flung in, and little inspiring cries
+flung out.
+
+His lordship soon entered into the spirit of it. Deep in the mystery
+of the hornpipe, he danced one or two steps Jean and Christie had never
+seen, but their eyes were instantly on his feet, and they caught in a
+minute and executed these same steps.
+
+To see Christie Johnstone do the double-shuffle with her arms so saucily
+akimbo, and her quick elastic foot at an angle of forty-five, was a
+treat.
+
+The dance became inspiriting, inspiring, intoxicating; and, when the
+fiddles at last left off, the feet went on another seven bars by the
+enthusiastic impulse.
+
+And so, alternately spinning yarns, singing songs, dancing, and making
+fun, and mingling something of heart and brain in all, these benighted
+creatures made themselves happy instead of peevish, and with a day of
+stout, vigorous, healthy pleasure, refreshed, indemnified, and warmed
+themselves for many a day of toil.
+
+Such were the two picnics of Inch Coombe, and these rival cliques,
+agreeing in nothing else, would have agreed in this: each, if allowed
+(but we won't allow either) to judge the other, would have pronounced
+the same verdict:
+
+_"Ils ne savent pas vivre ces gens-l'a."_
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Two of our personages left Inch Coombe less happy than when they came to
+it.
+
+Lord Ipsden encountered Lady Barbara with Mr.----, who had joined her
+upon the island.
+
+He found them discoursing, as usual, about the shams of the present
+day, and the sincerity of Cromwell and Mahomet, and he found himself _de
+trop._
+
+They made him, for the first time, regret the loss of those earnest
+times when, "to avoid the inconvenience of both addressing the same
+lady," you could cut a rival's throat at once, and be smiled on by the
+fair and society.
+
+That a book-maker should blaspheme high civilization, by which alone
+he exists, and one of whose diseases and flying pains he is, neither
+surprised nor moved him; but that any human being's actions should be
+affected by such tempestuous twaddle was ridiculous.
+
+And that the witty Lady Barbara should be caught by this chaff was
+intolerable; he began to feel bitter.
+
+He had the blessings of the poor, the good opinion of the world; every
+living creature was prepossessed in his favor but one, and that one
+despised him; it was a diabolical prejudice; it was the spiteful caprice
+of his fate.
+
+His heart, for a moment, was in danger of deteriorating. He was
+miserable; the Devil suggested to him, "make others miserable too;" and
+he listened to the advice.
+
+There was a fine breeze, but instead of sailing on a wind, as he might
+have done, he made a series of tacks, and all were ill.
+
+The earnest man first; and Flucker announced the skipper's insanity to
+the whole town of Newhaven, for, of course, these tacks were all marine
+solecisms.
+
+The other discontented Picnician was Christie Johnstone. Gatty never
+came; and this, coupled with five or six days' previous neglect, could
+no longer pass unnoticed.
+
+Her gayety failed her before the afternoon was ended; and the last two
+hours were spent by her alone, watching the water on all sides for him.
+
+At last, long after the departure of his lordship's yacht, the Newhaven
+boat sailed from Inch Coombe with the wedding party. There was now a
+strong breeze, and the water every now and then came on board. So the
+men set the foresail with two reefs, and drew the mainsail over the
+women; and there, as they huddled together in the dark, Jean Carnie
+discovered that our gay story-teller's eyes were wet with tears.
+
+Jean said nothing; she embraced her; and made them flow faster.
+
+But, when they came alongside the pier, Jean, who was the first to
+get her head from under the sail, whipped it back again and said to
+Christie:
+
+"Here he is, Christie; dinna speak till him."
+
+And sure enough there was, in the twilight, with a pale face and an
+uneasy look--Mr. Charles Gatty!
+
+He peered timidly into the boat, and, when he saw Christie, an "Ah!"
+that seemed to mean twenty different things at once, burst from his
+bosom. He held out his arm to assist her.
+
+She cast on him one glance of mute reproach, and, placing her foot
+on the boat's gunwale, sprang like an antelope upon the pier, without
+accepting his assistance.
+
+Before going further, we must go back for this boy, and conduct him from
+where we left him up to the present point.
+
+The moment he found himself alone with Jean Carnie, in his own house, he
+began to tell her what trouble he was in; how his mother had convinced
+him of his imprudence in falling in love with Christie Johnstone; and
+how she insisted on a connection being broken off which had given him
+his first glimpse of heaven upon earth, and was contrary to common
+sense.
+
+Jean heard him out, and then, with the air of a lunatic-asylum keeper to
+a rhodomontading patient, told him "he was one fool, and his mother was
+another." First she took him up on the score of prudence.
+
+"You," said she, "are a beggarly painter, without a rap; Christie has
+houses, boats, nets, and money; you are in debt; she lays by money every
+week. It is not prudent on her part to take up with you--the better your
+bargain, my lad."
+
+Under the head of common sense, which she maintained was all on the same
+side of the question, she calmly inquired:
+
+"How could an old woman of sixty be competent to judge how far human
+happiness depends on love, when she has no experience of that passion,
+and the reminiscences of her youth have become dim and dark? You might
+as well set a judge in court, that has forgotten the law--common sense,"
+said she, "the old wife is sixty, and you are twenty--what can she do
+for you the forty years you may reckon to outlive her? Who is to keep
+you through those weary years but the wife of your own choice, not your
+mother's? You English does na read the Bible, or ye'd ken that a lad is
+to 'leave his father and mother, and cleave until his wife,'" added she;
+then with great contempt she repeated, "common sense, indeed! ye're fou
+wi' your common sense; ye hae the name o' 't pat eneuch--but there's na
+muckle o' that mairchandise in your harns."
+
+Gatty was astonished. What! was there really common sense on the side of
+bliss? and when Jean told him to join her party at Inch Coombe, or never
+look her in the face again, scales seemed to fall from his eyes; and,
+with a heart that turned in a moment from lead to a feather, he vowed he
+would be at Inch Coombe.
+
+He then begged Jean on no account to tell Christie the struggle he had
+been subjected to, since his scruples were now entirely conquered.
+
+Jean acquiesced at once, and said: "Indeed, she would be very sorry to
+give the lass that muckle pain."
+
+She hinted, moreover, that her neebor's spirit was so high, she was
+quite capable of breaking with him at once upon such an intimation; and
+she, Jean, was "nae mischief-maker."
+
+In the energy of his gratitude, he kissed this dark-browed beauty,
+professing to see in her a sister.
+
+And she made no resistance to this way of showing gratitude, but
+muttered between her teeth, "He's just a bairn!"
+
+And so she went about her business.
+
+On her retreat, his mother returned to him, and, with a sad air, hoped
+nothing that that rude girl had said had weakened his filial duty.
+
+"No, mother," said he.
+
+She then, without explaining how she came acquainted with Jean's
+arguments, proceeded to demolish them one by one.
+
+"If your mother is old and experienced," said she, "benefit by her age
+and experience. She has not forgotten love, nor the ills it leads to,
+when not fortified by prudence. Scripture says a man shall cleave to
+his wife when he has left his parents; but in making that, the most
+important step of life, where do you read that he is to break the fifth
+commandment? But I do you wrong, Charles, you never could have listened
+to that vulgar girl when she told you your mother was not your best
+friend."
+
+"N--no, mother, of course not."
+
+"Then you will not go to that place to break my heart, and undo all you
+have done this week."
+
+"I should like to go, mother."
+
+"You will break my heart if you do."
+
+"Christie will feel herself slighted, and she has not deserved this
+treatment from me."
+
+"The other will explain to her, and if she is as good a girl as you
+say--"
+
+"She is an angel!"
+
+"How can a fishwife be an angel? Well, then, she will not set a son to
+disobey his mother."
+
+"I don't think she would! but is all the goodness to be on her side?"
+
+"No, Charles, you do your part; deny yourself, be an obedient child, and
+your mother's blessing and the blessing of Heaven will rest upon you."
+
+In short, he was not to go to Inch Coombe.
+
+He stayed at home, his mother set him to work; he made a poor hand of
+it, he was so wretched. She at last took compassion on him, and in the
+evening, when it was now too late for a sail to Inch Coombe, she herself
+recommended a walk to him.
+
+The poor boy's feet took him toward Newhaven, not that he meant to go to
+his love, but he could not forbear from looking at the place which held
+her.
+
+He was about to return, when a spacious blue jacket hailed him.
+Somewhere inside this jacket was Master Flucker, who had returned in the
+yacht, leaving his sister on the island.
+
+Gatty instantly poured out a flood of questions.
+
+The baddish boy reciprocated fluency. He informed him "that his sister
+had been the star of a goodly company, and that, her own lad having
+stayed away, she had condescended to make a conquest of the skipper
+himself.
+
+"He had come in quite at the tag-end of one of her stories, but it had
+been sufficient to do his business--he had danced with her, had even
+whistled while she sung. (Hech, it was bonny!)
+
+"And when the cutter sailed, he, Flucker, had seen her perched on a
+rock, like a mermaid, watching their progress, which had been slow,
+because the skipper, infatuated with so sudden a passion, had made a
+series of ungrammatical tacks."
+
+"For his part he was glad," said the gracious Flucker; "the lass was
+a prideful hussy, that had given some twenty lads a sore heart and
+him many a sore back; and he hoped his skipper, with whom he naturally
+identified himself rather than with his sister, would avenge the male
+sex upon her."
+
+In short, he went upon this tack till he drove poor Gatty nearly mad.
+
+Here was a new feeling superadded; at first he felt injured, but on
+reflection what cause of complaint had he?
+
+He had neglected her; he might have been her partner--he had left her to
+find one where she could.
+
+Fool, to suppose that so beautiful a creature would ever be
+neglected--except by him!
+
+It was more than he could bear.
+
+He determined to see her, to ask her forgiveness, to tell her
+everything, to beg her to decide, and, for his part, he would abide by
+her decision.
+
+Christie Johnstone, as we have already related, declined his arm, sprang
+like a deer upon the pier, and walked toward her home, a quarter of a
+mile distant.
+
+Gatty followed her, disconsolately, hardly knowing what to do.
+
+At last, observing that she drew near enough to the wall to allow room
+for another on the causeway, he had just nous enough to creep alongside
+and pull her sleeve somewhat timidly.
+
+"Christie, I want to speak to you:"
+
+"What can ye hae to say till me?"
+
+"Christie, I am very unhappy; and I want to tell you why, but I have
+hardly the strength or the courage."
+
+"Ye shall come ben my hoose if ye are unhappy, and we'll hear your
+story; come away."
+
+He had never been admitted into her house before.
+
+They found it clean as a snowdrift.
+
+They found a bright fire, and Flucker frying innumerable steaks.
+
+The baddish boy had obtained them in his sister's name and at her
+expense, at the flesher's, and claimed credit for his affection.
+
+Potatoes he had boiled in their jackets, and so skillfully, that those
+jackets hung by a thread.
+
+Christie laid an unbleached table-cloth, that somehow looked sweeter
+than a white one, as brown bread is sweeter than white.
+
+But lo! Gatty could not eat; so then Christie would not, because he
+refused her cheer.
+
+The baddish boy chuckled, and addressed himself to the nice brown steaks
+with their rich gravy.
+
+On such occasions a solo on the knife and fork seemed better than a trio
+to the gracious Flucker.
+
+Christie moved about the room, doing little household matters; Gatty's
+eye followed her.
+
+Her beauty lost nothing in this small apartment; she was here, like
+a brilliant in some quaint, rough setting, which all earth's jewelers
+should despise, and all its poets admire, and it should show off the
+stone and not itself.
+
+Her beauty filled the room, and almost made the spectators ill.
+
+Gatty asked himself whether he could really have been such a fool as to
+think of giving up so peerless a creature.
+
+Suddenly an idea occurred to him, a bright one, and not inconsistent
+with a true artist's character--he would decline to act in so doubtful a
+case. He would float passively down the tide of events--he would neither
+desert her, nor disobey his mother; he would take everything as it came,
+and to begin, as he was there, he would for the present say nothing but
+what he felt, and what he felt was that he loved her.
+
+He told her so accordingly.
+
+She replied, concealing her satisfaction, "that, if he liked her, he
+would not have refused to eat when she asked him."
+
+But our hero's appetite had returned with his change of purpose, and he
+instantly volunteered to give the required proof of affection.
+
+Accordingly two pound of steaks fell before him. Poor boy, he had hardly
+eaten a genuine meal for a week past.
+
+Christie sat opposite him, and every time he looked off his plate he saw
+her rich blue eyes dwelling on him.
+
+Everything contributed to warm his heart, he yielded to the spell, he
+became contented, happy, gay.
+
+Flucker ginger-cordialed him, his sister bewitched him.
+
+She related the day's events in a merry mood.
+
+Mr. Gatty burst forth into singing.
+
+He sung two light and somber trifles, such as in the present day are
+deemed generally encouraging to spirits, and particularly in accordance
+with the sentiment of supper--they were about Death and Ivy Green.
+
+The dog's voice was not very powerful, but sweet and round as honey
+dropping from the comb.
+
+His two hearers were entranced, for the creature sang with an
+inspiration good singers dare not indulge.
+
+He concluded by informing Christie that the ivy was symbolical of her,
+and the oak prefigured Charles Gatty, Esq.
+
+He might have inverted the simile with more truth.
+
+In short, he never said a word to Christie about parting with her,
+but several about being buried in the same grave with her, sixty years
+hence, for which the spot he selected was Westminster Abbey.
+
+And away he went, leaving golden opinions behind him.
+
+The next day Christie was so affected with his conduct, coming as it
+did after an apparent coolness, that she conquered her bashfulness
+and called on the "vile count," and with some blushes and hesitation
+inquired, "Whether a painter lad was a fit subject of charity."
+
+"Why not?" said his lordship.
+
+She told him Gatty's case, and he instantly promised to see that
+artist's pictures, particularly an "awfu' bonny ane;" the hero of which
+she described as an English minister blessing the bairns with one hand,
+and giving orders to kill the puir Scoetch with the other.
+
+"C'est e'gal," said Christie in Scotch, "it's awfu' bonny."
+
+Gatty reached home late; his mother had retired to rest.
+
+But the next morning she drew from him what had happened, and then
+ensued another of those dialogues which I am ashamed again to give the
+reader.
+
+Suffice it to say, that she once more prevailed, though with far greater
+difficulty; time was to be given him to unsew a connection which he
+could not cut asunder, and he, with tearful eyes and a heavy heart,
+agreed to take some step the very first opportunity.
+
+This concession was hardly out of his mouth, ere his mother made him
+kneel down and bestowed her blessing upon him.
+
+He received it coldly and dully, and expressed a languid hope it might
+prove a charm to save him from despair; and sad, bitter, and dejected,
+forced himself to sit down and work on the picture that was to meet his
+unrelenting creditor's demand.
+
+He was working on his picture, and his mother, with her needle, at the
+table, when a knock was heard, and gay as a lark, and fresh as the dew
+on the shamrock, Christie Johnstone stood in person in the apartment.
+
+She was evidently the bearer of good tidings; but, before she could
+express them, Mrs. Gatty beckoned her son aside, and announcing, "she
+should be within hearing," bade him take the occasion that so happily
+presented itself, and make the first step.
+
+At another time, Christie, who had learned from Jean the arrival of Mrs.
+Gatty, would have been struck with the old lady's silence; but she came
+to tell the depressed painter that the charitable viscount was about
+to visit him and his picture; and she was so full of the good fortune
+likely to ensue, that she was neglectful of minor considerations.
+
+It so happened, however, that certain interruptions prevented her from
+ever delivering herself of the news in question.
+
+First, Gatty himself came to her, and, casting uneasy glances at the
+door by which his mother had just gone out, said:
+
+"Christie!"
+
+"My lad!"
+
+"I want to paint your likeness."
+
+This was for a _souvenir,_ poor fellow!
+
+"Hech! I wad like fine to be painted."
+
+"It must be exactly the same size as yourself, and so like you, that,
+should we be parted, I may seem not to be quite alone in the world."
+
+Here he was obliged to turn his head away.
+
+"But we'll no pairt," replied Christie, cheerfully. "Suppose ye're puir,
+I'm rich, and it's a' one; dinna be so cast down for auchty pund."
+
+At this, a slipshod servant entered, and said: "There's a fisher lad,
+inquiring for Christie Johnstone."
+
+"It will be Flucker," said Christie; "show him ben. What's wrang the noo
+I wonder!"
+
+The baddish boy entered, took up a position and remained apparently
+passive, hands in pockets.
+
+_Christie._ "Aweel, what est?"
+
+_Flucker._ "Custy."
+
+_Christie._ "What's your will, my manny?"
+
+_Flucker._ "Custy, I was at Inch Keith the day."
+
+_Christie._ "And hae ye really come to Edinbro' to tell me thaat?"
+
+_Flucker (dryly)._ "Oh! ye ken the lasses are a hantle wiser than we
+are--will ye hear me? South Inch Keith, I played a bowl i' the water,
+just for divairsion--and I catched twarree fish!"
+
+_Christie._ "Floonders, I bet."
+
+_Flucker._ "Does floonders swim high? I'll let you see his gills, and if
+ye are a reicht fishwife ye'll smell bluid."
+
+Here he opened his jacket, and showed a bright little fish.
+
+In a moment all Christie's nonchalance gave way to a fiery animation.
+She darted to Flucker's side.
+
+"Ye hae na been sae daft as tell?" asked she.
+
+Flucker shook his head contemptuously.
+
+"Ony birds at the island, Flucker?"
+
+"Sea-maws, plenty, and a bird I dinna ken; he moonted sae high, then
+doon like thunder intil the sea, and gart the water flee as high as
+Haman, and porpoises as big as my boat."
+
+"Porr-poises, fulish laddy--ye hae seen the herrin whale at his wark,
+and the solant guse ye hae seen her at wark; and beneath the sea,
+Flucker, every coedflsh and doegfish, and fish that has teeth, is after
+them; and half Scotland wad be at Inch Keith Island if they kenned what
+ye hae tell't me--dinna speak to me."
+
+During this, Gatty, who did not comprehend this sudden excitement, or
+thought it childish, had tried in vain to win her attention.
+
+At last he said, a little peevishly, "Will you not attend to me, and
+tell me at least when you will sit to me?"
+
+"Set!" cried she. "When there's nae wark to be done stanning."
+
+And with this she was gone.
+
+At the foot of the stairs, she said to her brother:
+
+"Puir lad! I'll sune draw auchty punds fra' the sea for him, with my
+feyther's nets."
+
+As she disappeared, Mrs. Gatty appeared. "And this is the woman whose
+mind was not in her dirty business," cried she. "Does not that open your
+eyes, Charles?"
+
+"Ah! Charles," added she, tenderly, "there's no friend like a mother."
+
+And off she carried the prize--his vanity had been mortified.
+
+And so that happened to Christie Johnstone which has befallen many a
+woman--the greatness of her love made that love appear small to her
+lover.
+
+"Ah! mother," cried he, "I must live for you and my art; I am not so
+dear to her as I thought."
+
+And so, with a sad heart, he turned away from her; while she, with a
+light heart, darted away to think and act for him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+IT was some two hours after this that a gentleman, plainly dressed, but
+whose clothes seemed a part of himself (whereas mine I have observed
+hang upon me; and the Rev. Josiah Splitall's stick to him)--glided into
+the painter's room, with an inquiry whether he had not a picture or two
+disposable.
+
+"I have one finished picture, sir," said the poor boy; "but the price is
+high!"
+
+He brought it, in a faint-hearted way; for he had shown it to five
+picture-dealers, and all five agreed it was hard.
+
+He had painted a lime-tree, distant fifty yards, and so painted it that
+it looked something like a lime-tree fifty yards off.
+
+"That was _mesquin,"_ said his judges; "the poetry of painting required
+abstract trees, at metaphysical distance, not the various trees of
+nature, as they appear under positive accidents."
+
+On this Mr. Gatty had deluged them with words.
+
+"When it is art, truth, or sense to fuse a cow, a horse, and a critic
+into one undistinguishable quadruped, with six legs, then it will be
+art to melt an ash, an elm, and a lime, things that differ more than
+quadrupeds, into what you call abstract trees, that any man who has seen
+a tree, as well as looked at one, would call drunken stinging-nettles.
+You, who never look at nature, how can you judge the arts, which are all
+but copies of nature? At two hundred yards' distance, full-grown trees
+are more distinguishable than the animal tribe. Paint me an abstract
+human being, neither man nor a woman," said he, "and then I will agree
+to paint a tree that shall be no tree; and, if no man will buy it,
+perhaps the father of lies will take it off my hands, and hang it in the
+only place it would not disgrace."
+
+In short, he never left off till he had crushed the non-buyers with
+eloquence and satire; but he could not crush them into buyers--they beat
+him at the passive retort.
+
+Poor Gatty, when the momentary excitement of argument had subsided,
+drank the bitter cup all must drink awhile, whose bark is alive and
+strong enough to stem the current down which the dead, weak things of
+the world are drifting, many of them into safe harbors.
+
+And now he brought out his picture with a heavy heart.
+
+"Now," said he to himself, "this gentleman will talk me dead, and leave
+me no richer in coin, and poorer in time and patience."
+
+The picture was placed in a light, the visitor sat down before it.
+
+A long pause ensued.
+
+"Has he fainted?" thought Gatty, ironically; "he doesn't gabble."
+
+"If you do not mind painting before me," said the visitor, "I should be
+glad if you would continue while I look into this picture."
+
+Gatty painted.
+
+The visitor held his tongue.
+
+At first the silence made the artist uneasy, but by degrees it began to
+give him pleasure; whoever this was, it was not one of the flies that
+had hitherto stung him, nor the jackdaws that had chattered him dead.
+
+Glorious silence! he began to paint under its influence like one
+inspired.
+
+Half an hour passed thus.
+
+"What is the price of this work of art?"
+
+"Eighty pounds."
+
+"I take it," said his visitor, quietly.
+
+What, no more difficulty than that? He felt almost disappointed at
+gaining his object so easily.
+
+"I am obliged to you, sir; much obliged to you," he added, for he
+reflected what eighty pounds were to him just then.
+
+"It is my descendants who are obliged to you," replied the gentleman;
+"the picture is immortal!"
+
+These words were an epoch in the painter's life.
+
+The grave, silent inspection that had preceded them, the cool,
+deliberate, masterly tone in which they were said, made them oracular to
+him.
+
+Words of such import took him by surprise.
+
+He had thirsted for average praise in vain.
+
+A hand had taken him, and placed him at the top of the tree.
+
+He retired abruptly, or he would have burst into tears.
+
+He ran to his mother.
+
+"Mother," said he, "I am a painter; I always thought so at bottom, but
+I suppose it is the height of my ideas makes me discontented with my
+work."
+
+"What has happened?'
+
+"There is a critic in my room. I had no idea there was a critic in the
+creation, and there is one in my room.
+
+"Has he bought your picture, my poor boy?" said Mrs. Gatty,
+distrustfully.
+
+To her surprise he replied:
+
+"Yes! he has got it; only eighty pounds for an immortal picture."
+
+Mrs. Gatty was overjoyed, Gatty was a little sad; but, reviving, he
+professed himself glad; the picture was going to a judge.
+
+"It is not much money," said he, "but the man has spoken words that are
+ten thousand pounds to me."
+
+He returned to the room; his visitor, hat in hand, was about to go;
+a few words were spoken about the art of painting, this led to a
+conversation, and then to a short discussion.
+
+The newcomer soon showed Mr. Charles Gatty his ignorance of facts.
+
+This man had sat quietly before a multitude of great pictures, new and
+old, in England.
+
+He cooled down Charles Gatty, Esq., monopolist of nature and truth.
+
+He quoted to him thirty painters in Germany, who paint every stroke of a
+landscape in the open air, and forty in various nations who had done it
+in times past.
+
+"You, sir," he went on, "appear to hang on the skirts of a certain
+clique, who handle the brush well, but draw ill, and look at nature
+through the spectacles of certain ignorant painters who spoiled canvas
+four hundred years ago.
+
+"Go no further in that direction.
+
+"Those boys, like all quacks, have one great truth which they disfigure
+with more than one falsehood.
+
+"Hold fast their truth, which is a truth the world has always possessed,
+though its practice has been confined to the honest and laborious few.
+
+"Eschew their want of mind and taste.
+
+"Shrink with horror from that profane _culte de laideur,_ that 'love of
+the lopsided,' they have recovered from the foul receptacles of decayed
+art."
+
+He reminded him further, that "Art is not imitation, but illusion; that
+a plumber and glazier of our day and a medieval painter are more alike
+than any two representatives of general styles that can be found; and
+for the same reason, namely, that with each of these art is in its
+infancy; these two sets of bunglers have not learned how to produce the
+illusions of art."
+
+To all this he added a few words of compliment on the mind, as well as
+mechanical dexterity, of the purchased picture, bade him good morning,
+and glided away like a passing sunbeam.
+
+"A mother's blessing is a great thing to have, and to deserve," said
+Mrs. Gatty, who had rejoined her son.
+
+"It is, indeed," said Charles. He could not help being struck by the
+coincidence.
+
+He had made a sacrifice to his mother, and in a few hours one of his
+troubles had melted away.
+
+In the midst of these reflections arrived Mr. Saunders with a note.
+
+The note contained a check for one hundred and fifty pounds, with these
+lines, in which the writer excused himself for the amendment: "I am a
+painter myself," said he, "and it is impossible that eighty pounds can
+remunerate the time expended on this picture, to say nothing of the
+skill."
+
+We have treated this poor boy's picture hitherto with just contempt, but
+now that it is gone into a famous collection, mind, we always admired
+it; we always said so, we take our oath we did; if we have hitherto
+deferred framing it, that was merely because it was not sold.
+
+MR. GATTY'S PICTURE, AT PRESENT IN THE COLLECTION OF LORD IPSDEN!
+
+There was, hundreds of years ago, a certain Bishop of Durham, who used
+to fight in person against the Scotch, and defeat them. When he was not
+with his flock, the northern wolves sometimes scattered it; but when the
+holy father was there with his prayers and his battle-ax, England won
+the day!
+
+This nettled the Scottish king, so he penetrated one day, with a large
+band, as far as Durham itself, and for a short time blocked the prelate
+up in his stronghold. This was the period of Mr. Gatty's picture.
+
+Whose title was:
+
+_"Half Church of God, half Tower against the Scot."_
+
+In the background was the cathedral, on the towers of which paced to
+and fro men in armor, with the western sun glittering thereon. In the
+center, a horse and cart, led by a boy, were carrying a sheaf of arrows,
+tied with a straw band. In part of the foreground was the prelate, in a
+half suit of armor, but bareheaded; he was turning away from the boy to
+whom his sinking hand had indicated his way into the holy castle, and
+his benignant glance rested on a child, whom its mother was holding up
+for his benediction. In the foreground the afternoon beams sprinkled
+gold on a long grassy slope, corresponding to the elevation on which the
+cathedral stood, separated by the river Wear from the group; and these
+calm beauties of Nature, with the mother and child, were the peaceful
+side of this twofold story.
+
+Such are the dry details. But the soul of its charm no pen can fling
+on paper. For the stately cathedral stood and lived; the little leaves
+slumbered yet lived; and the story floated and lived, in the potable
+gold of summer afternoon.
+
+To look at this painted poem was to feel a thrill of pleasure in bare
+existence; it went through the eyes, where paintings stop, and warmed
+the depths and recesses of the heart with its sunshine and its glorious
+air.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+"WHAT is in the wind this dark night? Six Newhaven boats and twenty boys
+and hobbledehoys, hired by the Johnstones at half a crown each for a
+night's job."
+
+"Secret service!"
+
+"What is it for?"
+
+"I think it is a smuggling lay," suggested Flucker, "but we shall know
+all in good time."
+
+"Smuggling!" Their countenances fell; they had hoped for something more
+nearly approaching the illegal.
+
+"Maybe she has fand the herrin'," said a ten-year-old.
+
+"Haw! haw! haw!" went the others. "She find the herrin', when there's
+five hundred fishermen after them baith sides the Firrth."
+
+The youngster was discomfited.
+
+In fact the expedition bore no signs of fishing.
+
+The six boats sailed at sundown, led by Flucker. He brought to on the
+south side of Inch Keith, and nothing happened for about an hour.
+
+Then such boys as were awake saw two great eyes of light coming up from
+Granton; rattle went the chain cable, and Lord Ipsden's cutter swung at
+anchor in four fathom water.
+
+A thousand questions to Flucker.
+
+A single puff of tobacco-smoke was his answer.
+
+And now crept up a single eye of light from Leith; she came among the
+boats; the boys recognized a crazy old cutter from Leith harbor, with
+Christie Johnstone on board.
+
+"What is that brown heap on her deck?"
+
+"A mountain of nets--fifty stout herring-nets."
+
+_Tunc manifesta fides._
+
+A yell burst from all the boys.
+
+"He's gaun to tak us to Dunbar."
+
+"Half a crown! ye're no blate."
+
+Christie ordered the boats alongside her cutter, and five nets were
+dropped into each boat, six into Flucker's.
+
+The depth of the water was given them, and they were instructed to shoot
+their nets so as to keep a fathom and a half above the rocky bottom.
+
+A herring net is simply a wall of meshes twelve feet deep, fifty feet
+long; it sinks to a vertical position by the weight of net twine, and is
+kept from sinking to the bottom of the sea by bladders or corks. These
+nets are tied to one another, and paid out at the stern of the boat.
+Boat and nets drift with the tide; if, therefore, the nets touched the
+rocks they would be torn to pieces, and the fisherman ruined.
+
+And this saves the herring--that fish lies hours and hours at the very
+bottom of the sea like a stone, and the poor fisherman shall drive
+with his nets a yard or two over a square mile of fish, and not catch a
+herring tail; on the other hand, if they rise to play for five minutes,
+in that five minutes they shall fill seven hundred boats.
+
+At nine o'clock all the boats had shot their nets, and Christie went
+alongside his lordship's cutter; he asked her many questions about
+herring fishery, to which she gave clear answers, derived from her
+father, who had always been what the fishermen call a lucky fisherman;
+that is, he had opened his eyes and judged for himself.
+
+Lord Ipsden then gave her blue lights to distribute among the boats,
+that the first which caught herring might signal all hands.
+
+This was done, and all was expectation. Eleven o'clock came--no signal
+from any boat.
+
+Christie became anxious. At last she went round to the boats; found the
+boys all asleep except the baddish boy; waked them up, and made them all
+haul in their first net. The nets came in as black as ink, no sign of a
+herring.
+
+There was but one opinion; there was no herring at Inch Keith; they had
+not been there this seven years.
+
+At last, Flucker, to whom she came in turn, told her he was going into
+two fathom water, where he would let out the bladders and drop the nets
+on their cursed backs.
+
+A strong remonstrance was made by Christie, but the baddish boy insisted
+that he had an equal right in all her nets, and, setting his sail, he
+ran into shoal water.
+
+Christie began to be sorrowful; instead of making money, she was going
+to throw it away, and the ne'er-do-weel Flucker would tear six nets from
+the ropes.
+
+Flucker hauled down his sail, and unstepped his mast in two fathom
+water; but he was not such a fool as to risk his six nets; he devoted
+one to his experiment, and did it well; he let out his bladder line a
+fathom, so that one half his net would literally be higgledy-piggledy
+with the rocks, unless the fish were there _en masse._
+
+No long time was required.
+
+In five minutes he began to haul in the net; first, the boys hauled in
+the rope, and then the net began to approach the surface. Flucker looked
+anxiously down, the other lads incredulously; suddenly they all gave a
+yell of triumph--an appearance of silver and lightning mixed had glanced
+up from the bottom; in came the first two yards of the net--there were
+three herrings in it. These three proved Flucker's point as well as
+three million.
+
+They hauled in the net. Before they had a quarter of it in, the net came
+up to the surface, and the sea was alive with molten silver. The upper
+half of the net was empty, but the lower half was one solid mass of
+fish.
+
+The boys could not find a mesh, they had nothing to handle but fish.
+
+At this moment the easternmost boat showed a blue light.
+
+"The fish are rising," said Flucker, "we'll na risk nae mair nets."
+
+Soon after this a sort of song was heard from the boat that had showed
+a light. Flucker, who had got his net in, ran down to her, and found,
+as he suspected, that the boys had not power to draw the weight of fish
+over the gunwale.
+
+They were singing, as sailors do, that they might all pull together; he
+gave them two of his crew, and ran down to his own skipper.
+
+The said skipper gave him four men.
+
+Another blue light!
+
+Christie and her crew came a little nearer the boats, and shot twelve
+nets.
+
+The yachtsmen entered the sport with zeal, so did his lordship.
+
+The boats were all full in a few minutes, and nets still out.
+
+Then Flucker began to fear some of these nets would sink with the weight
+of fish; for the herring die after a while in a net, and a dead herring
+sinks.
+
+What was to be done?
+
+They got two boats alongside the cutter, and unloaded them into her as
+well as they could; but before they could half do this the other boats
+hailed them.
+
+They came to one of them; the boys were struggling with a thing which no
+stranger would have dreamed was a net.
+
+Imagine a white sheet, fifty feet long, varnished with red-hot silver.
+There were twenty barrels in this single net. By dint of fresh hands
+they got half of her in, and then the meshes began to break; the men
+leaned over the gunwale, and put their arms round blocks and masses of
+fish, and so flung them on board; and the codfish and dogfish snapped
+them almost out of the men's hands like tigers.
+
+At last they came to a net which was a double wall of herring; it had
+been some time in the water, and many of the fish were dead; they
+tried their best, but it was impracticable; they laid hold of the solid
+herring, and when they lifted up a hundred-weight clear of the water,
+away it all tore, and sank back again.
+
+They were obliged to cut away this net, with twenty pounds sterling in
+her. They cut away the twine from the head-ropes, and net and fish went
+to the bottom.
+
+All hands were now about the cutter; Christie's nets were all strong and
+new; they had been some time in the water; in hauling them up her side,
+quantities of fish fell out of the net into the water, but there were
+enough left.
+
+She averaged twelve barrels a net.
+
+Such of the yawls as were not quite full crept between the cutter and
+the nets, and caught all they wanted.
+
+The projector of this fortunate speculation suddenly announced that she
+was very sleepy.
+
+Flucker rolled her up in a sail, and she slept the sleep of infancy on
+board her cutter.
+
+When she awoke it was seven o'clock in the morning, and her cutter
+was creeping with a smart breeze about two miles an hour, a mile from
+Newhaven pier.
+
+The yacht had returned to Granton, and the yawls, very low in the water,
+were creeping along like snails, with both sails set.
+
+The news was in Edinburgh long before they landed. They had been
+discerned under Inch Keith at the dawn.
+
+And the manner of their creeping along, when there was such a breeze,
+told the tale at once to the keen, experienced eyes that are sure to be
+scanning the sea.
+
+Donkey-carts came rattling down from the capital.
+
+Merchants came pelting down to Newhaven pier.
+
+The whole story began to be put together by bits, and comprehended. Old
+Johnstone's cleverness was recalled to mind.
+
+The few fishermen left at Newhaven were ready to kill themselves.
+
+Their wives were ready to do the same good office for La Johnstone.
+
+Four Irish merchants agreed to work together, and to make a show of
+competition, the better to keep the price down within bounds.
+
+It was hardly fair, four men against one innocent unguarded female.
+
+But this is a wicked world.
+
+Christie landed, and proceeded to her own house; on the way she was
+met by Jean Carnie, who debarrassed her of certain wrappers, and a
+handkerchief she had tied round her head, and informed her she was the
+pride of Newhaven.
+
+She next met these four little merchants, one after another.
+
+And since we ought to dwell as little as possible upon scenes in which
+unguarded innocence is exposed to artful conspiracies, we will put
+a page or two into the brute form of dramatic dialogue, and so sail
+through it quicker.
+
+_1st Merchant._ "Where are ye going, Meggie?"
+
+_Christie Johnstone._ "If onybody asks ye, say ye dinna ken."
+
+_1st Mer._ "Will ye sell your fish?"
+
+_Christie._ "Suner than gie them."
+
+_1st Mer._ "You will be asking fifteen shillin' the cran."
+
+_Christie._ "And ten to that."
+
+_1st Mer._ "Good-morning."
+
+_2d Mer._ "Would he not go over fifteen shillings? Oh, the thief o' the
+world!--I'll give sixteen."
+
+_3d Mer._ "But I'll give eighteen."
+
+_2d Mer._ "More fool you! Take him up, my girl."
+
+_Christie._ "Twenty-five is my price the day."
+
+_3d Mer._ "You will keep them till Sunday week and sell their bones."
+
+_[Exeunt the three Merchants. Enter 4th Merchant._
+
+_4th Mer._ "Are your fish sold? I'll give sixteen shillings."
+
+_Christie._ "I'm seeking twenty-five, an' I'm offered eighteen."
+
+_4th Mer._ "Take it." _[Exit._
+
+_Christie._ "They hae putten their heads thegither."
+
+Here Flucker came up to her, and told her there was a Leith merchant
+looking for her. "And, Custy," said he, "there's plenty wind getting up,
+your fish will be sair hashed; put them off your hands, I rede ye."
+
+_Christie._ "Ay, lad! Flucker, hide, an' when I play my hand sae, ye'll
+run in an cry, 'Cirsty, the Irishman will gie ye twenty-two schellin the
+cran.'"
+
+_Flucker._ "Ye ken mair than's in the catecheesm, for as releegious as
+ye are."
+
+The Leith merchant was Mr. Miller, and this is the way he worked.
+
+_Miller (in a mellifluous voice)._ "Are ye no fatigued, my deear?"
+
+_Christie (affecting fatigue)._ "Indeed, sir, and I am."
+
+_Miller._ "Shall I have the pleasure to deal wi' ye?"
+
+_Christie._ "If it's your pleasure, sir. I'm seekin' twenty-five
+schellin."
+
+_Miller (pretending not to hear)._ "As you are a beginner, I must offer
+fair; twenty schellin you shall have, and that's three shillings above
+Dunbar."
+
+_Christie._ "Wad ye even carted herrin with my fish caller fra' the sea?
+and Dunbar--oh, fine! ye ken there's nae herrin at Dunbar the morn; this
+is the Dunbar schule that slipped westward. I'm the matirket, ye'll
+hae to buy o' me or gang to your bed" _(here she signaled to Flucker)._
+"I'll no be oot o' mine lang."
+
+_Enter Flucker hastily, crying:_ "Cirsty, the Irishman will gie ye
+twenty-two schellin."
+
+"I'll no tak it," said Christie.
+
+"They are keen to hae them," said Flucker; and hastily retired, as if to
+treat further with the small merchants.
+
+On this, Mr. Miller, pretending to make for Leith, said, carelessly,
+"Twenty-three shillings, or they are not for me."
+
+"Tak the cutter's freight at a hundre' cran, an' I'm no caring," said
+Christie.
+
+"They are mine!" said Mr. Miller, very sharply. "How much shall I give
+you the day?"
+
+"Auchty pund, sir, if you please--the lave when you like; I ken ye, Mr.
+Miller."
+
+While counting her the notes, the purchaser said slyly to her:
+
+"There's more than a hundred cran in the cutter, my woman."
+
+"A little, sir," replied the vender; "but, ere I could count them till
+ye by baskets, they would lose seven or eight cran in book,* your gain,
+my loss."
+
+     *Bulk.
+
+"You are a vara intelligent young person," said Mr. Miller, gravely.
+
+"Ye had measured them wi' your walking-stick, sir; there's just ae scale
+ye didna wipe off, though ye are a carefu' mon, Mr. Miller; sae I laid
+the bait for ye an' fine ye took it."
+
+Miller took out his snuff-box, and tapping it said:
+
+"Will ye go into partnership with me, my dear?"
+
+"Ay, sir!" was the reply. "When I'm aulder an' ye're younger."
+
+At this moment the four merchants, believing it useless to disguise
+their co-operation, returned to see what could be done.
+
+"We shall give you a guinea a barrel."
+
+"Why, ye offered her twenty-two shillings before."
+
+"That we never did, Mr. Miller."
+
+"Haw! haw!" went Flucker.
+
+Christie looked down and blushed.
+
+Eyes met eyes, and without a word spoken all was comprehended and
+silently approved. There was no nonsense uttered about morality in
+connection with dealing.
+
+Mr. Miller took an enormous pinch of snuff, and drew for the benefit of
+all present the following inference:
+
+MR. MILLER'S APOTHEGM.
+
+"Friends and neighbors! when a man's heed is gray with age and thoucht
+_(pause)_ he's just fit to go to schule to a young lass o' twenty."
+
+There was a certain middle-aged fishwife, called Beeny Liston, a tenant
+of Christie Johnstone's; she had not paid her rent for some time, and
+she had not been pressed for it; whether this, or the whisky she was in
+the habit of taking, rankled in her mind, certain it is she had always
+an ill word for her landlady.
+
+She now met her, envied her success, and called out in a coarse tone:
+
+"Oh, ye're a gallant quean; ye'll be waur than ever the noo."
+
+"What's wrang, if ye please?" said the Johnstone, sharply.
+
+Reader, did you ever see two fallow bucks commence a duel?
+
+They strut round, eight yards apart, tails up, look carefully another
+way to make the other think it all means nothing, and, being both
+equally sly, their horns come together as if by concert.
+
+Even so commenced this duel of tongues between these two heroines.
+
+Beeny Liston, looking at everybody but Christie, addressed the natives
+who were congregating thus:
+
+"Did ever ye hear o' a decent lass taking the herrin' oot o' the men's
+mooths?--is yon a woman's pairt, I'm asking ye?"
+
+On this, Christie, looking carefully at all the others except Beeny,
+inquired with an air of simple curiosity:
+
+"Can onybody tell me wha Liston Carnie's drunken wife is speakin' till?
+no to ony decent lass, though. Na! ye ken she wad na hae th' impudence!"
+
+"Oh, ye ken fine I'm speakin' till yoursel'."
+
+Here the horns clashed together.
+
+"To me, woman?" _(with admirably acted surprise.)_ "Oo, ay! it will be
+for the twa years' rent you're awin me. Giest!"
+
+_Beeny Liston._ "Ye're just the impudentest girrl i' the toon, an' ye
+hae proved it the day" (her arms akimbo).
+
+_Christie (arms akimbo)._ "Me, impudent? how daur ye speak against my
+charackter, that's kenned for decency o' baith sides the Firrth."
+
+_Beeny (contemptuously)._ "Oh, ye're sly enough to beguile the men, but
+we ken ye."
+
+_Christie._ "I'm no sly, and" _(drawing near and hissing the words)_
+"I'm no like the woman Jean an' I saw in Rose Street, dead drunk on the
+causeway, while her mon was working for her at sea. If ye're no ben your
+hoose in ae minute, I'll say that will gar Liston Carnie fling ye ower
+the pier-head, ye fool-moothed drunken leear--Scairt!"*
+
+     *A local word; a corruption from the French _Sortez._
+
+If my reader has seen and heard Mademoiselle Rachel utter her famous
+_Sortez,_ in "Virginie," he knows exactly with what a gesture and tone
+the Johnstone uttered this word.
+
+_Beeny (in a voice of whining surprise)._ "Hech! what a spite Flucker
+Johnstone's dochter has taen against us."
+
+_Christie._ "Scairt!"
+
+_Beeny (in a coaxing voice, and moving a step)._ "Aweel! what's a' your
+paession, my boenny woman?"
+
+_Christie._ "Scairt!"
+
+Beeny retired before the thunder and lightning of indignant virtue.
+
+Then all the fishboys struck up a dismal chant of victory.
+
+"Yoo-hoo--Custy's won the day--Beeny's scair_tit,"_ going up on the last
+syllable.
+
+Christie moved slowly away toward her own house, but before she could
+reach the door she began to whimper--little fool.
+
+Thereat chorus of young Athenians chanted:
+
+"Yu-hoo! come back, Beeny, ye'll maybe win yet. Custy's away gree_tin"_
+_(going up on the last syllable)._
+
+"I'm no greetin, ye rude bairns," said Christie, bursting into tears,
+and retiring as soon as she had effected that proof of her philosophy.
+
+It was about four hours later; Christie had snatched some repose. The
+wind, as Flucker prognosticated, had grown into a very heavy gale, and
+the Firth was brown and boiling.
+
+Suddenly a clamor was heard on the shore, and soon after a fishwife made
+her appearance, with rather a singular burden.
+
+Her husband, ladies; _rien que cela._
+
+She had him by the scruff of the neck; he was _dos-'a-dos,_ with his
+booted legs kicking in the air, and his fists making warlike but idle
+demonstrations and his mouth uttering ineffectual bad language.
+
+This worthy had been called a coward by Sandy Liston, and being about
+to fight with him, and get thrashed, his wife had whipped him up
+and carried him away; she now flung him down, at some risk of his
+equilibrium.
+
+"Ye are not fit to feicht wi' Sandy Liston," said she; "if ye are for
+feichtin, here's for ye."
+
+As a comment to this proposal, she tucked up the sleeves of her short
+gown. He tried to run by her; she caught him by the bosom, and gave him
+a violent push, that sent him several paces backward; he looked half
+fierce, half astounded; ere he could quite recover himself, his little
+servant forced a pipe into his hand, and he smoked contented and
+peaceable.
+
+Before tobacco the evil passions fall, they tell me.
+
+The cause of this quarrel soon explained itself; up came Sandy Liston,
+cursing and swearing.
+
+"What! ye hae gotten till your wife's; that's the place for ye; to say
+there's a brig in distress, and ye'll let her go on the rocks under your
+noses. But what are ye afraid o'? there's na danger?"
+
+"Nae danger!" said one of the reproached, "are ye fou?"
+
+"Ye are fou wi' fear yoursel'; of a' the beasts that crawl the airth, a
+cooward is the ugliest, I think."
+
+"The wifes will no let us," said one, sulkily.
+
+"It's the woman in your hairts that keeps ye," roared Sandy hoarsely;
+"curse ye, ye are sure to dee ane day, and ye are sure to be----!" (a
+past participle) "soon or late, what signifies when? Oh! curse the hour
+ever I was born amang sic a cooardly crew." _(Gun at sea.)_
+
+"There!"
+
+"She speaks till ye, hersel'; she cries for maircy; to think that, of
+a' that hear ye cry, Alexander Liston is the only mon mon enough to
+answer." _(Gun.)_
+
+"You are mistaken, Mr. Alexander Liston," said a clear, smart voice,
+whose owner had mingled unobserved with the throng; "there are always
+men to answer such occasions; now, my lads, your boats have plenty of
+beam, and, well handled, should live in any sea; who volunteers with
+Alexander Liston and me?"
+
+The speaker was Lord Ipsden.
+
+The fishwives of Newhaven, more accustomed to measure men than poor
+little Lady Barbara Sinclair, saw in this man what in point of fact he
+was--a cool, daring devil, than whom none more likely to lead men into
+mortal danger, or pull them through it, for that matter.
+
+They recognized their natural enemy, and collected together against him,
+like hens at the sight of a hawk.
+
+"And would you really entice our men till their death?"
+
+"My life's worth as much as theirs, I suppose.
+
+"Nae! your life! it's na worth a button; when you dee, your next kin
+will dance, and wha'll greet? but our men hae wife and bairns to look
+till." _(Gun at sea.)_
+
+"Ah! I didn't look at it in that light," said Lord Ipsden. He then
+demanded paper and ink; Christie Johnstone, who had come out of her
+house, supplied it from her treasures, and this cool hand actually began
+to convey a hundred and fifty thousand pounds away, upon a sheet of
+paper blowing in the wind; when he had named his residuary legatee, and
+disposed of certain large bequests, he came to the point--
+
+"Christie Johnstone, what can these people live on? two hundred a year?
+living is cheap here--confound the wind!"
+
+"Twahundred? Fifty! Vile count."
+
+"Don't call me vile count. I am Ipsden, and my name's Richard. Now,
+then, be smart with your names."
+
+Three men stepped forward, gave their names, had their widows provided
+for, and went for their sou'westers, etc.
+
+"Stay," said Lord Ipsden, writing. "To Christina Johnstone, out of
+respect for her character, one thousand pounds."
+
+"Richard! dinna gang," cried Christie, "oh, dinna gang, dinna gang,
+dinna gang; it's no your business."
+
+"Will you lend me your papa's Flushing jacket and sou'wester, my dear?
+If I was sure to be drowned, I'd go!"
+
+Christie ran in for them.
+
+In the mean time, discomposed by the wind, and by feelings whose
+existence neither he, nor I, nor any one suspected, Saunders, after a
+sore struggle between the frail man and the perfect domestic, blurted
+out:
+
+"My lord, I beg your lordship's pardon, but it blows tempestuous."
+
+"That is why the brig wants us," was the reply.
+
+"My lord, I beg your lordship's pardon," whimpered Saunders. "But, oh!
+my lord, don't go; it's all very well for fishermen to be drowned; it is
+their business, but not yours, my lord."
+
+"Saunders, help me on with this coat."
+
+Christie had brought it.
+
+"Yes, my lord," said Saunders, briskly, his second nature reviving.
+
+His lordship, while putting on the coat and hat, undertook to cool Mr.
+Saunders's aristocratic prejudices.
+
+"Should Alexander Liston and I be drowned," said he, coolly, "when our
+bones come ashore, you will not know which are the fisherman's and which
+the viscount's." So saying, he joined the enterprise.
+
+"I shall pray for ye, lad," said Christie Johnstone, and she retired for
+that purpose.
+
+Saunders, with a heavy heart, to the nearest tavern, to prepare an
+account of what he called "Heroism in High Life," large letters, and the
+usual signs of great astonishment!!!!! for the _Polytechnic Magazine._
+
+The commander of the distressed vessel had been penny-wise. He had
+declined a pilot off the Isle of May, trusting to fall in with one close
+to the port of Leith; but a heavy gale and fog had come on; he knew
+himself in the vicinity of dangerous rocks; and, to make matters worse,
+his ship, old and sore battered by a long and stormy voyage, was leaky;
+and unless a pilot came alongside, his fate would be, either to founder,
+or run upon the rocks, where he must expect to go to pieces in a quarter
+of an hour.
+
+The Newhaven boat lay in comparatively smooth water, on the lee side of
+the pier.
+
+Our adventurers got into her, stepped the mast, set a small sail,
+and ran out! Sandy Liston held the sheet, passed once round the
+belaying-pin, and whenever a larger wave than usual came at them, he
+slacked the sheet, and the boat, losing her way, rose gently, like a
+cork, upon seas that had seemed about to swallow her.
+
+But seen from the shore it was enough to make the most experienced
+wince; so completely was this wooden shell lost to sight, as she
+descended from a wave, that each time her reappearance seemed a return
+from the dead.
+
+The weather was misty--the boat was soon lost sight of; the story
+remains ashore.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+IT was an hour later; the natives of the New Town had left the pier, and
+were about their own doors, when three Buckhaven fishermen came
+slowly up from the pier; these men had arrived in one of their large
+fishing-boats, which defy all weather.
+
+The men came slowly up; their petticoat trousers were drenched, and
+their neck-handkerchiefs and hair were wet with spray.
+
+At the foot of the New Town they stood still and whispered to each
+other.
+
+There was something about these men that drew the eye of Newhaven upon
+them.
+
+In the first place a Buckhaven man rarely communicates with natives of
+Newhaven, except at the pier, where he brings in his cod and ling
+from the deep sea, flings them out like stones, and sells them to the
+fishwives; then up sail and away for Fifeshire.
+
+But these men evidently came ashore to speak to some one in the town.
+
+They whispered together; something appeared to be proposed and demurred
+to; but at last two went slowly back toward the pier, and the eldest
+remained, with a fisherman's long mackintosh coat in his hand which the
+others had given him as they left him.
+
+With this in his hand, the Buckhaven fisherman stood in an irresolute
+posture; he looked down, and seemed to ask himself what course he should
+take.
+
+"What's wrang?" said Jean Carnie, who, with her neighbors, had observed
+the men; "I wish yon man may na hae ill news."
+
+"What ill news wad he hae?" replied another.
+
+"Are ony freends of Liston Carnie here?" said the fisherman.
+
+"The wife's awa' to Granton, Beeny Liston they ca' her--there's his
+house," added Jean, pointing up the row.
+
+"Ay," said the fisherman, "I ken he lived there."
+
+"Lived there!" cried Christie Johnstone. "Oh, what's this?"
+
+"Freends," said the man, gravely, "his boat is driving keel uppermost in
+Kircauldy Bay. We passed her near enough to read the name upon her."
+
+"But the men will have won to shore, please God?"
+
+The fisherman shook his head.
+
+"She'll hae coupit a mile wast Inch Keith, an' the tide rinning aff
+the island an' a heavy sea gaun. This is a' Newhaven we'll see of them"
+_(holding up the coat)_ "till they rise to the top in three weeks'
+time."
+
+The man then took the coat, which was now seen to be drenched with
+water, and hung it up on a line not very far from its unfortunate
+owner's house. Then, in the same grave and subdued tone in which he had
+spoken all along, he said, "We are sorry to bring siccan a tale into
+your toon," and slowly moved off to rejoin his comrades, who had waited
+for him at no great distance. They then passed through the Old Town, and
+in five minutes the calamity was known to the whole place.
+
+After the first stupor, the people in the New Town collected into knots,
+and lamented their hazardous calling, and feared for the lives of those
+that had just put to sea in this fatal gale for the rescue of strangers,
+and the older ones failed not to match this present sorrow with others
+within their recollection.
+
+In the middle of this, Flucker Johnstone came hastily in from the Old
+Town and told them he had seen the wife, Beeny Liston, coming through
+from Granton.
+
+The sympathy of all was instantly turned in this direction.
+
+"She would hear the news."
+
+"It would fall on her like a thunderclap."
+
+"What would become of her?"
+
+Every eye was strained toward the Old Town, and soon the poor woman was
+seen about to emerge from it; but she was walking in her usual way, and
+they felt she could not carry her person so if she knew.
+
+At the last house she was seen to stop and speak to a fisherman and his
+wife that stood at their own door.
+
+"They are telling her," was then the cry.
+
+Beeny Liston then proceeded on her way.
+
+Every eye was strained.
+
+No! they had not told her.
+
+She came gayly on, the unconscious object of every eye and every heart.
+
+The hands of this people were hard, and their tongues rude, but they
+shrunk from telling this poor woman of her bereavement--they thought
+it kinder she should know it under her own roof, from her friends or
+neighbors, than from comparative strangers.
+
+She drew near her own door.
+
+And now a knot collected round Christie Johnstone, and urged her to
+undertake the sad task.
+
+"You that speak sa learned, Christie, ye should tell her; we daur na."
+
+"How can I tell her?" said Christie, turning pale. "How will I tell her?
+I'se try."
+
+She took one trembling step to meet the woman.
+
+Beeny's eye fell upon her.
+
+"Ay! here's the Queen o' Newhaven," cried she, in a loud and rather
+coarse voice. "The men will hae ta leave the place now y' are turned
+fisherman, I daur say."
+
+"Oh, dinna fieicht on me! dinna fieicht on me!" cried Christie,
+trembling.
+
+"Maircy on us," said the other, "auld Flucker Johnstone's dochter turned
+humble. What next?"
+
+"I'm vexed for speaking back till ye the morn," faltered Christie.
+
+"Hett," said the woman carelessly, "let yon flea stick i' the wa'. I
+fancy I began on ye. Aweel, Cirsty," said she, falling into a friendlier
+tone; "it's the place we live in spoils us--Newhaven's an impudent toon,
+as sure as deeth.
+
+"I passed through the Auld Toon the noo--a place I never speak in; an'
+if they did na glower at me as I had been a strange beast.
+
+"They cam' to their very doors to glower at me; if ye'll believe me, I
+thoucht shame.
+
+"At the hinder end my paassion got up, and I faced a wife East-by, and I
+said, 'What gars ye glower at me that way, ye ignorant woman?' ye would
+na think it, she answered like honey itsel'. 'I'm askin' your paarrdon,'
+says she; and her mon by her side said, 'Gang hame to your ain hoose,
+my woman, and Gude help ye, and help us a' at our need,' the decent mon.
+'It's just there I'm for,' said I, 'to get my mon his breakfast.'"
+
+All who heard her drew their breath with difficulty.
+
+The woman then made for her own house, but in going up the street she
+passed the wet coat hanging on the line.
+
+She stopped directly.
+
+They all trembled--they had forgotten the coat--it was all over; the
+coat would tell the tale.
+
+"Aweel," said she, "I could sweer that's Liston Carnie's coat, a droukit
+wi' the rain;" then she looked again at it, and added, slowly, "if I did
+na ken he has his away wi' him at the piloting." And in another
+moment she was in her own house, leaving them all standing there half
+stupefied.
+
+Christie had indeed endeavored to speak, but her tongue had cloven to
+her mouth.
+
+While they stood looking at one another, and at Beeny Liston's door, a
+voice that seemed incredibly rough, loud and harsh, jarred upon them; it
+was Sandy Liston, who came in from Leith, shouting:
+
+"Fifty pounds for salvage, lasses! is na thaat better than staying
+cooard-like aside the women?"
+
+"Whisht! whisht!" cried Christie.
+
+"We are in heavy sorrow; puir Liston Cairnie and his son Willy lie deed
+at the bottom o' the Firrth."
+
+"Gude help us!" said Sandy, and his voice sank.
+
+"An', oh, Sandy, the wife does na ken, and it's hairt-breaking to see
+her, and hear her; we canna get her tell't; ye're the auldest mon here;
+ye'll tell her, will ye no, Sandy?"
+
+"No, me, that' I will not!"
+
+"Oh, yes; ye are kenned for your stoot heart, an' courage; ye come fra'
+facing the sea an' wind in a bit yawl."
+
+"The sea and the wind," cried he, contemptuously; "they be ----, I'm
+used wi' them; but to look a woman i' the face, an' tell her her mon and
+her son are drowned since yestreen, I hae na coorage for that."
+
+All further debate was cut short by the entrance of one who came
+expressly to discharge the sad duty all had found so difficult. It was
+the Presbyterian clergyman of the place; he waved them back. "I know, I
+know," said he, solemnly. "Where is the wife?"
+
+She came out of her house at this moment, as it happened, to purchase
+something at Drysale's shop, which was opposite.
+
+"Beeny," said the clergyman, "I have sorrowful tidings."
+
+"Tell me them, sir," said she, unmoved. "Is it a deeth?" added she,
+quietly.
+
+"It is!--death, sudden and terrible; in your own house I must tell it
+you--(and may God show me how to break it to her)."
+
+He entered her house.
+
+"Aweel," said the woman to the others, "it maun be some far-awa cousin,
+or the like, for Liston an' me hae nae near freends. Meg, ye idle
+fuzzy," screamed she to her servant, who was one of the spectators,
+"your pat is no on yet; div ye think the men will no be hungry when they
+come in fra' the sea?"
+
+"They will never hunger nor thirst ony mair," said Jean, solemnly, as
+the bereaved woman entered her own door.
+
+There ensued a listless and fearful silence.
+
+Every moment some sign of bitter sorrow was expected to break forth from
+the house, but none came; and amid the expectation and silence the waves
+dashed louder and louder, as it seemed, against the dike, conscious of
+what they had done.
+
+At last, in a moment, a cry of agony arose, so terrible that all who
+heard it trembled, and more than one woman shrieked in return, and fled
+from the door, at which, the next moment, the clergyman stood alone,
+collected, but pale, and beckoned. Several women advanced.
+
+"One woman," said he.
+
+Jean Carnie was admitted; and after a while returned.
+
+"She is come to hersel'," whispered she; "I am no weel mysel'." And she
+passed into her own house.
+
+Then Flucker crept to the door to see.
+
+"Oh, dinna spy on her," cried Christie.
+
+"Oh, yes, Flucker," said many voices.
+
+"He is kneelin'," said Flucker. "He has her hand, to gar her kneel
+tae--she winna--she does na see him, nor hear him; he will hae her. He
+has won her to kneel--he is prayin, an' greetin aside her. I canna see
+noo, my een's blinded."
+
+"He's a gude mon," said Christie. "Oh, what wad we do without the
+ministers?"
+
+Sandy Liston had been leaning sorrowfully against the wall of the next
+house; he now broke out:
+
+"An auld shipmate at the whale-fishing!!! an' noow we'll never lift the
+dredging sang thegither again, in yon dirty detch that's droowned him; I
+maun hae whisky, an' forget it a'."
+
+He made for the spirit-shop like a madman; but ere he could reach
+the door a hand was laid on him like a vise. Christie Johnstone had
+literally sprung on him. She hated this horrible vice--had often checked
+him; and now it seemed so awful a moment for such a sin, that she forgot
+the wild and savage nature of the man, who had struck his own sister,
+and seriously hurt her, a month before--she saw nothing but the vice and
+its victim, and she seized him by the collar, with a grasp from which he
+in vain attempted to shake himself loose.
+
+"No! ye'll no gang there at siccan a time."
+
+"Hands off, ye daft jaud," roared he, "or there'll be another deeth i'
+the toon."
+
+At the noise Jean Carnie ran in.
+
+"Let the ruffian go," cried she, in dismay. "Oh, Christie, dinna put
+your hand on a lion's mane."
+
+"Yes, I'll put my hand on his mane, ere I'll let him mak a beast o'
+himsel'."
+
+"Sandy, if ye hurt her, I'll find twenty lads that will lay ye deed at
+her feet."
+
+"Haud your whisht," said Christie, very sharply, "he's no to be
+threetened."
+
+Sandy Liston, black and white with rage, ground his teeth together, and
+said, lifting his hand, "Wull ye let me go, or must I tak my hand till
+ye?"
+
+"No!" said Christie, "I'll no let ye go, _sae look me i' the face;
+Flucker's dochter, your auld comrade, that saved your life at Holy Isle,
+think o' his face--an' look in mines--an' strike me!!!"_
+
+They glared on one another--he fiercely and unsteadily; she firmly and
+proudly.
+
+Jean Carnie said afterward, "Her eyes were like coals of fire."
+
+"Ye are doing what nae mon i' the toon daur; ye are a bauld, unwise
+lassy."
+
+"It's you mak me bauld," was the instant reply. "I saw ye face the mad
+sea, to save a ship fra' the rocks, an' will I fear a mon's hand, when I
+can save" _(rising to double her height)_ "my feyther's auld freend fra'
+the puir mon's enemy, the enemy o' mankind, the cursed, cursed drink?
+Oh, Sandy Liston, hoow could ye think to put an enemy in your mooth to
+steal awa your brains!"
+
+"This 's no Newhaven chat; wha lairns ye sic words o' power?"
+
+"A deed mon!"
+
+"I would na wonder, y' are no canny; she's ta'en a' the poower oot o' my
+body, I think." Then suddenly descending to a tone of abject submission,
+"What's your pleesure, Flucker Johnstone's dochter?"
+
+She instantly withdrew the offending grasp, and, leaning affectionately
+on his shoulder, she melted into her rich Ionic tones.
+
+"It's no a time for sin; ye'll sit by my fire, an' get your dinner; a
+bonny haggis hae I for you an' Flucker, an' we'll improve this sorrowfu'
+judgment; an' ye'll tell me o' auld times--o' my feyther dear, that
+likeit ye weel, Sandy--o' the storrms ye hae weathered, side by side--o'
+the muckle whales ye killed Greenland way--an' abune a', o' the lives ye
+hae saved at sea, by your daurin an' your skell; an', oh, Sandy, will na
+that be better as sit an' poor leequid damnation doown your throat, an'
+gie awa the sense an' feeling o' a mon for a sair heed and an ill name?"
+
+"I'se gang, my lamb," said the rough man, quite subdued; "I daur say
+whisky will no pass my teeth the day."
+
+And so he went quietly away, and sat by Christie's fireside.
+
+Jean and Christie went toward the boats.
+
+Jean, after taking it philosophically for half a minute, began to
+whimper.
+
+"What's wrang?" said Christie.
+
+"Div ye think my hairt's no in my mooth wi' you gripping yon fierce
+robber?"
+
+Here a young fishwife, with a box in her hand, who had followed them,
+pulled Jean by the coats.
+
+"Hets," said Jean, pulling herself free.
+
+The child then, with a pertinacity these little animals have, pulled
+Christie's coats.
+
+"Hets," said Christie, freeing herself more gently.
+
+"Ye suld mairry Van Amburgh," continued Jean; "ye are just such a lass
+as he is a lad."
+
+Christie smiled proudly, was silent, but did not disown the comparison.
+
+The little fishwife, unable to attract attention by pulling, opened
+her box, and saying, "Lasses, I'll let ye see my presoner. Hech! he's
+boenny!" pulled out a mouse by a string fastened to his tail and set him
+in the midst for friendly admiration.
+
+"I dinna like it--I dinna like it!" screamed Christie. "Jean, put it
+away--it fears me, Jean!" This she uttered (her eyes almost starting
+from her head with unaffected terror) at the distance of about eight
+yards, whither she had arrived in two bounds that would have done no
+discredit to an antelope.
+
+"Het," said Jean, uneasily, "hae ye coowed you savage, to be scared at
+the wee beastie?"
+
+Christie, looking askant at the animal, explained: "A moose is an
+awesome beast--it's no like a mon!" and still her eye was fixed by
+fascination upon the four-footed danger.
+
+Jean, who had not been herself in genuine tranquillity, now turned
+savagely on the little Wombwelless. "An' div ye really think ye are to
+come here wi' a' the beasts i' the Airk? Come, awa ye go, the pair o'
+ye."
+
+These severe words, and a smart push, sent the poor little biped off
+roaring, with the string over her shoulder, recklessly dragging the
+terrific quadruped, which made fruitless grabs at the shingle.--_Moral._
+Don't terrify bigger folk than yourself.
+
+Christie had intended to go up to Edinburgh with her eighty pounds, but
+there was more trouble in store this eventful day.
+
+Flucker went out after dinner, and left her with Sandy Liston, who was
+in the middle of a yarn, when some one came running in and told her
+Flucker was at the pier crying for her. She inquired what was the
+matter. "Come, an' ye'll see," was all the answer. She ran down to the
+pier. There was poor Flucker lying on his back; he had slipped from the
+pier into a boat that lay alongside; the fall was considerable; for a
+minute he had been insensible, then he had been dreadfully sick, and now
+he was beginning to feel his hurt; he was in great anguish; nobody knew
+the extent of his injuries; he would let nobody touch him; all his cry
+was for his sister. At last she came; they all made way for her; he was
+crying for her as she came up.
+
+"My bairn! my bairn!" cried she, and the poor little fellow smiled, and
+tried to raise himself toward her.
+
+She lifted him gently in her arms--she was powerful, and affection made
+her stronger; she carried him in her arms all the way home, and laid him
+on her own bed. Willy Liston, her discarded suitor, ran for the surgeon.
+There were no bones broken, but his ankle was severely sprained, and he
+had a terrible bruise on the loins; his dark, ruddy face was streaked
+and pale; but he never complained after he found himself at home.
+
+Christie hovered round him, a ministering angel, applying to him with a
+light and loving hand whatever could ease his pain; and he watched her
+with an expression she had never noticed in his eye before.
+
+At last, after two hours' silence, he made her sit in full view,
+and then he spoke to her; and what think you was the subject of his
+discourse?
+
+He turned to and told her, one after another, without preface, all the
+loving things she had done to him ever since he was five years old. Poor
+boy, he had never shown much gratitude, but he had forgotten nothing,
+literally nothing.
+
+Christie was quite overcome with this unexpected trait; she drew him
+gently to her bosom, and wept over him; and it was sweet to see a
+brother and sister treat each other almost like lovers, as these two
+began to do--they watched each other's eye so tenderly.
+
+This new care kept the sister in her own house all the next day; but
+toward the evening Jean, who knew her other anxiety, slipped in and
+offered to take her place for an hour by Flucker's side; at the same
+time she looked one of those signals which are too subtle for any but
+woman to understand.
+
+Christie drew her aside, and learned that Gatty and his mother were just
+coming through from Leith; Christie ran for her eighty pounds, placed
+them in her bosom, cast a hasty glance at a looking-glass, little larger
+than an oyster-shell, and ran out.
+
+"Hech! What pleased the auld wife will be to see he has a lass that can
+mak auchty pund in a morning."
+
+This was Christie's notion.
+
+At sight of them she took out the banknotes, and with eyes glistening
+and cheeks flushing she cried:
+
+"Oh, Chairles, ye'll no gang to jail--I hae the siller!" and she offered
+him the money with both hands, and a look of tenderness and modesty that
+embellished human nature.
+
+Ere he could speak, his mother put out her hand, and not rudely, but
+very coldly, repelling Christie's arm, said in a freezing manner:
+
+"We are much obliged to you, but my son's own talents have rescued him
+from his little embarrassment."
+
+"A nobleman has bought my picture," said Gatty, proudly.
+
+"For one hundred and fifty pounds," said the old lady, meaning to mark
+the contrast between that sum and what Christie had in her hand.
+
+Christie remained like a statue, with her arms extended, and the
+bank-notes in her hand; her features worked--she had much ado not to
+cry; and any one that had known the whole story, and seen this unmerited
+repulse, would have felt for her; but her love came to her aid, she put
+the notes in her bosom, sighed and said:
+
+"I would hae likeit to hae been the first, ye ken, but I'm real
+pleased."
+
+"But, mother," said Gatty, "it was very kind of Christie all the same.
+Oh, Christie!" said he, in a tone of despair.
+
+At this kind word Christie's fortitude was sore tried; she turned away
+her head; she was far too delicate to let them know who had sent Lord
+Ipsden to buy the picture.
+
+While she turned away, Mrs. Gatty said in her son's ear:
+
+"Now, I have your solemn promise to do it here, and at once; you will
+find me on the beach behind these boats--do it."
+
+The reader will understand that during the last few days Mrs. Gatty had
+improved her advantage, and that Charles had positively consented to
+obey her; the poor boy was worn out with the struggle--he felt he must
+have peace or die; he was thin and pale, and sudden twitches came over
+him; his temperament was not fit for such a battle; and, it is to be
+observed, nearly all the talk was on one side. He had made one expiring
+struggle--he described to his mother an artist's nature; his strength,
+his weakness--he besought her not to be a slave to general rules, but to
+inquire what sort of a companion the individual Gatty needed; he lashed
+with true but brilliant satire the sort of wife his mother was ready
+to see him saddled with--a stupid, unsympathizing creature, whose ten
+children would, by nature's law, be also stupid, and so be a weight on
+him till his dying day. He painted Christie Johnstone, mind and body, in
+words as true and bright as his colors; he showed his own weak points,
+her strong ones, and how the latter would fortify the former.
+
+He displayed, in short, in one minute, more intellect than his mother
+had exhibited in sixty years; and that done, with all his understanding,
+wit and eloquence, he succumbed like a child to her stronger will--he
+promised to break with Christie Johnstone.
+
+When Christie had recovered her composure and turned round to her
+companions, she found herself alone with Charles.
+
+"Chairles," said she, gravely.
+
+"Christie," said he, uneasily.
+
+"Your mother does na like me. Oh, ye need na deny it; and we are na
+together as we used to be, my lad."
+
+"She is prejudiced; but she has been the best of mothers to me,
+Christie."
+
+"Aweel."
+
+"Circumstances compel me to return to England."
+
+(Ah, coward! anything but the real truth!)
+
+"Aweel, Chairles, it will no be for lang."
+
+"I don't know; you will not be so unhappy as I shall--at least I hope
+not."
+
+"Hoow do ye ken that?"
+
+"Christie, do you remember the first night we danced together?"
+
+"Ay."
+
+"And we walked in the cool by the seaside, and I told you the names of
+the stars, and you said those were not their real names, but nicknames
+we give them here on earth. I loved you that first night."
+
+"And I fancied you the first time I set eyes on you."
+
+"How can I leave you, Christie? What shall I do?"
+
+"I ken what I shall do," answered Christie coolly; then, bursting into
+tears, she added, "I shall dee! I shall dee!"
+
+"No! you must not say so; at least I will never love any one but you."
+
+"An' I'll live as I am a' my days for your sake. Oh, England! I hae
+likeit ye sae weel, ye suld na rob me o' my lad--he's a' the joy I hae!"
+
+"I love you," said Gatty. "Do you love me?"
+
+All the answer was, her head upon his shoulder.
+
+"I can't do it," thought Gatty, "and I won't! Christie," said he, "stay
+here, don't move from here." And he dashed among the boats in great
+agitation.
+
+He found his mother rather near the scene of the late conference.
+
+"Mother," said he, fiercely, like a coward as he was, "ask me no more,
+my mind is made up forever; I will not do this scoundrelly, heartless,
+beastly, ungrateful action you have been pushing me to so long."
+
+"Take care, Charles, take care," said the old woman, trembling with
+passion, for this was a new tone for her son to take with her. "You had
+my blessing the other day, and you saw what followed it; do not tempt me
+to curse an undutiful, disobedient, ungrateful son."
+
+"I must take my chance," said he, desperately, "for I am under a curse
+any way! I placed my ring on her finger, and held up my hand to God and
+swore she should be my wife; she has my ring and my oath, and I will not
+perjure myself even for my mother."
+
+"Your ring! Not the ruby ring I gave you from your dead father's
+finger--not that! not that!"
+
+"Yes! yes! I tell you yes! and if he was alive, and saw her, and knew
+her goodness, he would have pity on me, but I have no friend; you
+see how ill you have made me, but you have no pity; I could not have
+believed it; but, since you have no mercy on me, I will have the more
+mercy on myself; I marry her to-morrow, and put an end to all this
+shuffling and maneuvering against an angel! I am not worthy of her, but
+I'll marry her to-morrow. Good-by."
+
+"Stay!" said the old woman, in a terrible voice; "before you destroy
+me and all I have lived for, and suffered, and pinched for, hear me; if
+that ring is not off the hussy's finger in half an hour, and you my son
+again, I fall on this sand and--"
+
+"Then God have mercy upon me, for I'll see the whole creation lost
+eternally ere I'll wrong the only creature that is an ornament to the
+world."
+
+He was desperate; and the weak, driven to desperation, are more furious
+than the strong.
+
+It was by Heaven's mercy that neither mother nor son had time to speak
+again.
+
+As they faced each other, with flaming eyes and faces, all self-command
+gone, about to utter hasty words, and lay up regret, perhaps for all
+their lives to come, in a moment, as if she had started from the earth,
+Christie Johnstone stood between them!
+
+Gatty's words, and, still more, his hesitation, had made her quick
+intelligence suspect. She had resolved to know the truth; the boats
+offered every facility for listening--she had heard every word.
+
+She stood between the mother and son.
+
+They were confused, abashed, and the hot blood began to leave their
+faces.
+
+She stood erect like a statue, her cheek pale as ashes, her eyes
+glittering like basilisks, she looked at neither of them.
+
+She slowly raised her left hand, she withdrew a ruby ring from it, and
+dropped the ring on the sand between the two.
+
+She turned on her heel, and was gone as she had come, without a word
+spoken.
+
+They looked at one another, stupefied at first; after a considerable
+pause the stern old woman stooped, picked up the ring, and, in spite of
+a certain chill that the young woman's majestic sorrow had given her,
+said, placing it on her own finger, "This is for your wife!!!"
+
+"It will be for my coffin, then," said her son, so coldly, so bitterly
+and so solemnly that the mother's heart began to quake.
+
+"Mother," said he calmly, "forgive me, and accept your son's arm.
+
+"I will, my son!"
+
+"We are alone in the world now, mother."
+
+Mrs. Gatty had triumphed, but she felt the price of her triumph more
+than her victory. It had been done in one moment, that for which she
+had so labored, and it seemed that had she spoken long ago to Christie,
+instead of Charles, it could have been done at any moment.
+
+Strange to say, for some minutes the mother felt more uneasy than her
+son; she was a woman, after all, and could measure a woman's heart, and
+she saw how deep the wound she had given one she was now compelled to
+respect.
+
+Charles, on the other hand, had been so harassed backward and forward,
+that to him certainty was relief; it was a great matter to be no longer
+called upon to decide. His mother had said, "Part," and now Christie had
+said, "Part"; at least the affair was taken out of his hands, and his
+first feeling was a heavenly calm.
+
+In this state he continued for about a mile, and he spoke to his mother
+about his art, sole object now; but after the first mile he became
+silent, _distrait;_ Christie's pale face, her mortified air, when her
+generous offer was coldly repulsed, filled him with remorse. Finally,
+unable to bear it, yet not daring to speak, he broke suddenly from his
+mother without a word, and ran wildly back to Newhaven; he looked back
+only once, and there stood his mother, pale, with her hands piteously
+lifted toward heaven.
+
+By the time he got to Newhaven he was as sorry for her as for Christie.
+He ran to the house of the latter; Flucker and Jean told him she was
+on the beach. He ran to the beach! he did not see her at first, but,
+presently looking back, he saw her, at the edge of the boats, in company
+with a gentleman in a boating-dress. He looked--could he believe his
+eyes? he saw Christie Johnstone kiss this man's hand, who then, taking
+her head gently in his two hands, placed a kiss upon her brow, while she
+seemed to yield lovingly to the caress.
+
+Gatty turned faint, sick; for a moment everything swam before his eyes;
+he recovered himself, they were gone.
+
+He darted round to intercept them; Christie had slipped away somewhere;
+he encountered the man alone!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+CHRISTIE'S situation requires to be explained.
+
+On leaving Gatty and his mother, she went to her own house. Flucker--who
+after looking upon her for years as an inconvenient appendage, except
+at dinnertime, had fallen in love with her in a manner that was half
+pathetic, half laughable, all things considered--saw by her face she
+had received a blow, and raising himself in the bed, inquired anxiously,
+"What ailed her?"
+
+At these kind words, Christie Johnstone laid her cheek upon the pillow
+beside Flucker's and said:
+
+"Oh, my laamb, be kind to your puir sister fra' this hoor, for she has
+naething i' the warld noo but yoursel'."
+
+Flucker began to sob at this.
+
+Christie could not cry; her heart was like a lump of lead in her bosom;
+but she put her arm round his neck, and at the sight of his sympathy she
+panted heavily, but could not shed a tear--she was sore stricken.
+
+Presently Jean came in, and, as the poor girl's head ached as well
+as her heart, they forced her to go and sit in the air. She took her
+creepie and sat, and looked on the sea; but, whether she looked seaward
+or landward, all seemed unreal; not things, but hard pictures of things,
+some moving, some still. Life seemed ended--she had lost her love.
+
+An hour she sat in this miserable trance; she was diverted into a
+better, because a somewhat less dangerous form of grief, by one of those
+trifling circumstances that often penetrate to the human heart when
+inaccessible to greater things.
+
+Willy the fiddler and his brother came through the town, playing as they
+went, according to custom; their music floated past Christie's ears
+like some drowsy chime, until, all of a sudden, they struck up the old
+English air, "Speed the Plow."
+
+Now it was to this tune Charles Gatty had danced with her their first
+dance the night they made acquaintance.
+
+Christie listened, lifted up her hands, and crying:
+
+"Oh, what will I do? what will I do?" burst into a passion of grief.
+
+She put her apron over her head, and rocked herself, and sobbed
+bitterly.
+
+She was in this situation when Lord Ipsden, who was prowling about,
+examining the proportions of the boats, discovered her.
+
+"Some one in distress--that was all in his way."
+
+"Madam!" said he.
+
+She lifted up her head.
+
+"It is Christie Johnstone. I'm so glad; that is, I'm sorry you are
+crying, but I'm glad I shall have the pleasure of relieving you;" and
+his lordship began to feel for a check-book.
+
+"And div ye really think siller's a cure for every grief!" said
+Christie, bitterly.
+
+"I don't know," said his lordship; "it has cured them all as yet."
+
+"It will na cure me, then!" and she covered her head with her apron
+again.
+
+"I am very sorry," said he; "tell me" _(whispering),_ "what is it? poor
+little Christie!"
+
+"Dinna speak to me; I think shame; ask Jean. Oh, Richard, I'll no be
+lang in this warld!!!"
+
+"Ah!" said he, "I know too well what it is now; I know, by sad
+experience. But, Christie, money will cure it in your case, and it
+shall, too; only, instead of five pounds, we must put a thousand pounds
+or two to your banker's account, and then they will all see your beauty,
+and run after you."
+
+"How daur ye even to me that I'm seekin a lad?" cried she, rising from
+her stool; "I would na care suppose there was na a lad in Britain." And
+off she flounced.
+
+"Offended her by my gross want of tact," thought the viscount.
+
+She crept back, and two velvet lips touched his hand. That was because
+she had spoken harshly to a friend.
+
+"Oh, Richard," said she, despairingly, "I'll no be lang in this warld."
+
+He was touched; and it was then he took her head and kissed her brow,
+and said: "This will never do. My child, go home and have a nice cry,
+and I will speak to Jean; and, rely upon me, I will not leave the
+neighborhood till I have arranged it all to your satisfaction."
+
+And so she went--a little, a very little, comforted by his tone and
+words.
+
+Now this was all very pretty; but then seen at a distance of fifty yards
+it looked very ugly; and Gatty, who had never before known jealousy, the
+strongest and worst of human passions, was ripe for anything.
+
+He met Lord Ipsden, and said at once, in his wise, temperate way:
+
+"Sir, you are a villain!"
+
+_Ipsden. "Plait-il?"_
+
+_Gatty._ "You are a villain!"
+
+_Ipsden._ "How do you make that out?"
+
+_Gatty._ "But, of course, you are not a coward, too."
+
+_Ipsden (ironically)._ "You surprise me with your moderation, sir."
+
+_Gatty._ "Then you will waive your rank--you are a lord, I believe-and
+give me satisfaction."
+
+_Ipsden._ "My rank, sir, such as it is, engages me to give a proper
+answer to proposals of this sort; I am at your orders."
+
+_Gatty._ "A man of your character must often have been called to an
+account by your victims, so--so--" (hesitating) "perhaps you will tell
+me the proper course."
+
+_Ipsden. "I_ shall send a note to the castle, and the colonel will send
+me down somebody with a mustache; I shall pretend to remember mustache,
+mustache will pretend he remembers me; he will then communicate with
+your friend, and they will arrange it all for us."
+
+_Gatty._ "And, perhaps, through your licentiousness, one or both of us
+will be killed."
+
+_Ipsden._ "Yes! but we need not trouble our heads about that--the
+seconds undertake everything."
+
+_Gatty._ "I have no pistols."
+
+_Ipsden._ "If you will do me the honor to use one of mine, it shall be
+at your service."
+
+_Gatty._ "Thank you."
+
+_Ipsden._ "To-morrow morning?"
+
+_Gatty._ "No. I have four days' painting to do on my picture, I can't
+die till it is finished; Friday morning."
+
+_Ipsden._ "(He is mad.) I wish to ask you a question, you will excuse my
+curiosity. Have you any idea what we are agreeing to differ about?"
+
+_Gatty._ "The question does you little credit, my lord; that is to add
+insult to wrong."
+
+He went off hurriedly, leaving Lord Ipsden mystified.
+
+He thought Christie Johnstone was somehow connected with it; but,
+conscious of no wrong, he felt little disposed to put up with any
+insult, especially from this boy, to whom he had been kind, he thought.
+
+His lordship was, besides, one of those good, simple-minded creatures,
+educated abroad, who, when invited to fight, simply bow, and load two
+pistols, and get themselves called at six; instead of taking down tomes
+of casuistry and puzzling their poor brains to find out whether they are
+gamecocks or capons, and why.
+
+As for Gatty, he hurried home in a fever of passion, begged his mother's
+pardon, and reproached himself for ever having disobeyed her on account
+of such a perfidious creature as Christie Johnstone.
+
+He then told her what he had seen, as distance and imagination had
+presented it to him; to his surprise the old lady cut him short.
+
+"Charles," said she, "there is no need to take the girl's character
+away; she has but one fault--she is not in the same class of life as
+you, and such marriages always lead to misery; but in other respects she
+is a worthy young woman--don't speak against her character, or you will
+make my flesh creep; you don't know what her character is to a woman,
+high or low."
+
+By this moderation, perhaps she held him still faster.
+
+Friday morning arrived. Gatty had, by hard work, finished his picture,
+collected his sketches from nature, which were numerous, left by
+memorandum everything to his mother, and was, or rather felt, as ready
+to die as live.
+
+He had hardly spoken a word or eaten a meal these four days; his mother
+was in anxiety about him. He rose early, and went down to Leith; an hour
+later, his mother, finding him gone out, rose and went to seek him at
+Newhaven.
+
+Meantime Flucker had entirely recovered, but his sister's color had left
+her cheeks. The boy swore vengeance against the cause of her distress.
+
+On Friday morning, then, there paced on Leith Sands two figures.
+
+One was Lord Ipsden.
+
+The other seemed a military gentleman, who having swallowed the
+mess-room poker, and found it insufficient, had added the ramrods of his
+company.
+
+The more his lordship reflected on Gatty, the less inclined he had
+felt to invite a satirical young dog from barracks to criticise such
+a _rencontre;_ he had therefore ordered Saunders to get up as a
+field-marshal, or some such trifle, and what Saunders would have called
+incomparable verticality was the result.
+
+The painter was also in sight.
+
+While he was coming up, Lord Ipsden was lecturing Marshal Saunders on a
+point on which that worthy had always thought himself very superior to
+his master--"Gentlemanly deportment."
+
+"Now, Saunders, mind and behave like a gentleman, or we shall be found
+out."
+
+"I trust, my lord, my conduct--"
+
+"What I mean is, you must not be so overpoweringly gentleman-like as you
+are apt to be; no gentleman is so gentleman as all that; it could not be
+borne, _c'est suffoquant;_ and a white handkerchief is unsoldier-like,
+and nobody ties a white handkerchief so well as that; of all the vices,
+perfection is the most intolerable." His lordship then touched with his
+cane the generalissimo's tie, whose countenance straightway fell, as
+though he had lost three successive battles.
+
+Gatty came up.
+
+They saluted.
+
+"Where is your second, sir?" said the mare'chal.
+
+"My second?" said Gatty. "Ah! I forgot to wake him--does it matter?"
+
+"It is merely a custom," said Lord Ipsden, with a very slightly
+satirical manner. "Savanadero," said he, "do us the honor to measure the
+ground, and be everybody's second."
+
+Savanadero measured the ground, and handed a pistol to each combatant,
+and struck an imposing attitude apart.
+
+"Are you ready, gentlemen?" said this Jack-o'-both-sides.
+
+"Yes!" said both.
+
+Just as the signal was about to be given, an interruption occurred. "I
+beg your pardon, sir," said Lord Ipsden to his antagonist; "I am going
+to take a _liberty--a great liberty_ with you, but I think you will find
+your pistol is only at half cock."
+
+"Thank you, my lord; what am I to do with the thing?"
+
+"Draw back the cock so, and be ready to fire?"
+
+"So?" _Bang!_
+
+He had touched the trigger as well as the cock, so off went the barker;
+and after a considerable pause the field-marshal sprang yelling into the
+air.
+
+"Hallo!" cried Mr. Gatty.
+
+"Ah! oh! I'm a dead man," whined the general.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Ipsden, after a moment of anxiety. "Give yourself no
+concern, sir," said he, soothingly, to his antagonist--"a mere accident.
+Mare'chal, reload Mr. Gatty's pistol."
+
+"Excuse me, my lord--"
+
+"Load his pistol directly," said his lordship, sternly; "and behave like
+a gentleman."
+
+"My lord! my lord! but where shall I stand to be safe?"
+
+"Behind me!"
+
+The commander of division advanced reluctantly for Gatty's pistol.
+
+"No, my lord!" said Gatty, "it is plain I am not a fit antagonist; I
+shall but expose myself--and my mother has separated us; I have lost
+her--if you do not win her some worse man may; but, oh! if you are a
+man, use her tenderly."
+
+"Whom?"
+
+"Christie Johnstone! Oh, sir, do not make her regret me too much! She
+was my treasure, my consolation--she was to be my wife, she would have
+cheered the road of life--it is a desert now. I loved her--I--I--"
+
+Here the poor fellow choked.
+
+Lord Ipsden turned round, and threw his pistol to Saunders, saying,
+"Catch that, Saunders."
+
+Saunders, on the contrary, by a single motion changed his person from
+a vertical straight line to a horizontal line exactly parallel with the
+earth's surface, and the weapon sang innoxious over him.
+
+His lordship then, with a noble defiance of etiquette, walked up to his
+antagonist and gave him his hand, with a motion no one could resist; for
+he felt for the poor fellow.
+
+"It is all a mistake," said he. "There is no sentiment between La
+Johnstone and me but mutual esteem. I will explain the whole thing. _I_
+admire _her_ for her virtue, her wit, her innocence, her goodness and
+all that sort of thing; and _she,_ what _she_ sees in _me,_ I am sure
+I don't know," added he, slightly shrugging his aristocratic shoulders.
+"Do me the honor to breakfast with me at Newhaven."
+
+"I have ordered twelve sorts of fish at the 'Peacock,' my lord," said
+Saunders.
+
+"Divine! (I hate fish) I told Saunders all would be hungry and none
+shot; by the by, you are winged, I think you said, Saunders?"
+
+"No, my lord! but look at my trousers."
+
+The bullet had cut his pantaloons.
+
+"I see--only barked; so go and see about our breakfast."
+
+"Yes, my lord" _(faintly)._
+
+"And draw on me for fifty pounds' worth of--new trousers."
+
+"Yes, my lord" _(sonorously)._
+
+The duelists separated, Gatty taking the short cut to Newhaven; he
+proposed to take his favorite swim there, to refresh himself before
+breakfast; and he went from his lordship a little cheered by remarks
+which fell from him, and which, though vague, sounded friendly--poor
+fellow, except when he had a brush in hand he was a dreamer.
+
+This viscount, who did not seem to trouble his head about class dignity,
+was to convert his mother from her aristocratic tendencies or something.
+
+_Que sais-je?_ what will not a dreamer hope?
+
+Lord Ipsden strolled along the sands, and judge his surprise, when,
+attended by two footmen, he met at that time in the morning Lady Barbara
+Sinclair.
+
+Lord Ipsden had been so disheartened and piqued by this lady's conduct
+that for a whole week he had not been near her. This line of behavior
+sometimes answers.
+
+She met him with a grand display of cordiality.
+
+She inquired, "Whether he had heard of a most gallant action, that,
+coupled with another circumstance" _(here she smiled),_ "had in part
+reconciled her to the age we live in?"
+
+He asked for further particulars.
+
+She then informed him "that a ship had been ashore on the rocks, that no
+fisherman dared venture out, that a young gentleman had given them his
+whole fortune, and so bribed them to accompany him; that he had saved
+the ship and the men's lives, paid away his fortune, and lighted an
+odious cigar and gone home, never minding, amid the blessings and
+acclamations of a maritime population."
+
+A beautiful story she told him; so beautiful, in fact, that until she
+had discoursed ten minutes he hardly recognized his own feat; but when
+he did he blushed inside as well as out with pleasure. Oh! music of
+music--praise from eloquent lips, and those lips the lips we love.
+
+The next moment he felt ashamed; ashamed that Lady Barbara should praise
+him beyond his merits, as he conceived.
+
+He made a faint hypocritical endeavor to moderate her eulogium; this
+gave matters an unexpected turn, Lady Barbara's eyes flashed defiance.
+
+"I say it was a noble action, that one nursed in effeminacy (as you all
+are) should teach the hardy seamen to mock at peril--noble fellow!"
+
+"He did a man's duty, Barbara."
+
+"Ipsden, take care, you will make me hate you, if you detract from a
+deed you cannot emulate. This gentleman risked his own life to save
+others--he is a hero! I should know him by his face the moment I saw
+him. Oh, that I were such a man, or knew where to find such a creature!"
+
+The water came into Lord Ipsden's eyes; he did not know what to say or
+do; he turned away his head. Lady Barbara was surprised; her conscience
+smote her.
+
+"Oh, dear," said she, "there now, I have given you pain--forgive me;
+we can't all be heroes; dear Ipsden, don't think I despise you now as I
+used. Oh, no! I have heard of your goodness to the poor, and I have more
+experience now. There is nobody I esteem more than you, Richard, so you
+need not look so."
+
+"Thank you, dearest Barbara."
+
+"Yes, and if you were to be such a goose as to write me another letter
+proposing absurdities to me--"
+
+"Would the answer be different?"
+
+"Very different."
+
+"Oh, Barbara, would you accept?"
+
+"Why, of course not; but I would refuse civilly!"
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"There, don't sigh; I hate a sighing man. I'll tell you something that
+I know will make you laugh." She then smiled saucily in his face, and
+said, "Do you remember Mr.----?"
+
+_L'effronte'e!_ this was the earnest man. But Ipsden was a match for her
+this time. "I think I do," said he; "a gentleman who wants to make John
+Bull little again into John Calf; but it won't do."
+
+Her ladyship laughed. "Why did you not tell us that on Inch Coombe?"
+
+"Because I had not read _The Catspaw_ then."
+
+_"The Catspaw?_ Ah! I thought it could not be you. Whose is it?"
+
+"Mr. Jerrold's."
+
+"Then Mr. Jerrold is cleverer than you."
+
+"It is possible."
+
+"It is certain! Well, Mr. Jerrold and Lord Ipsden, you will both be glad
+to hear that it was, in point of fact, a bull that confuted the advocate
+of the Middle Ages; we were walking; he was telling me manhood was
+extinct except in a few earnest men who lived upon the past, its
+associations, its truth; when a horrid bull gave--oh--such a bellow! and
+came trotting up. I screamed and ran--I remember nothing but arriving
+at the stile, and lo, on the other side, offering me his arm with
+_empressment_ across the wooden barrier was--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well! don't you see?"
+
+"No--oh--yes, I see!--fancy--ah! Shall I tell you how he came to get
+first over? He ran more earnestly than you."
+
+"It is not Mr. Jerrold this time, I presume," said her satirical
+ladyship.
+
+"No! you cannot always have him. I venture to predict your ladyship on
+your return home gave this mediaeval personage his _conge'."_
+
+"No!"
+
+"No?"
+
+"I gave it him at the stile! Let us be serious, if you please; I have a
+confidence to make you, Ipsden. Frankly, I owe you some apology for my
+conduct of late; I meant to be reserved--I have been rude--but you
+shall judge me. A year ago you made me some proposals; I rejected them
+because, though I like you--"
+
+"You like me?"
+
+"I detest your character. Since then, my West India estate has been
+turned into specie; that specie, the bulk of my fortune, placed on board
+a vessel; that vessel lost, at least we think so--she has not been heard
+of."
+
+"My dear cousin."
+
+"Do you comprehend that now I am cooler than ever to all young gentlemen
+who have large incomes, and" (holding out her hand like an angel) "I
+must trouble you to forgive me."
+
+He kissed her lovely hand.
+
+"I esteem you more and more," said he. "You ought, for it has been a
+hard struggle to me not to adore you, because you are so improved, _mon
+cousin."_
+
+"Is it possible? In what respect?"
+
+"You are browner and charitabler; and I should have been very kind to
+you--mawkishly kind, I fear, my sweet cousin, if this wretched money had
+not gone down in the _Tisbe."_
+
+"Hallo!" cried the viscount.
+
+"Ah!" squeaked Lady Barbara, unused to such interjections.
+
+"Gone down in what?" said Ipsden, in a loud voice.
+
+"Don't bellow in people's ears. The _Tisbe,_ stupid," cried she,
+screaming at the top of her voice.
+
+"Ri tum, ti turn, ti tum, tum, tum, tiddy, iddy," went Lord Ipsden--he
+whistled a polka.
+
+_Lady Barbara (inspecting him gravely)._ "I have heard it at a distance,
+but I never saw how it was done before. _It is very, very pretty!!!!"_
+
+_Ipsden. "Polkez-vous, madame?"_
+
+_Lady Barb. "Si, je polke, Monsieur le Vicomte."_
+
+They polked for a second or two.
+
+"Well, I dare say I am wrong," cried Lady Barbara, "but I like you
+better now you are a downright--ahem!--than when you were only an
+insipid non-intellectual--you are greatly improved."
+
+_Ips._ "In what respects?"
+
+_Lady Barb._ "Did I not tell you? browner and more impudent; but tell
+me," said she, resuming her sly, satirical tone, "how is it that you,
+who used to be the pink of courtesy, dance and sing over the wreck of my
+fortunes?"
+
+"Because they are not wrecked."
+
+"I thought I told you my specie is gone down in the _Tisbe."_
+
+_Ipsden._ "But the _Tisbe_ has not gone down."
+
+_Lady Barb._ "I tell you it is."
+
+_Ipsden._ "I assure you it is not."
+
+_Lady Barb._ "It is not?"
+
+_Ipsden._ "Barbara! I am too happy, I begin to nourish such sweet hopes
+once more. Oh, I could fall on my knees and bless you for something you
+said just now."
+
+Lady Barbara blushed to the temples.
+
+"Then why don't you?" said she. "All you want is a little enthusiasm."
+Then recovering herself, she said:
+
+"You kneel on wet sand, with black trousers on; that will never be!!!"
+
+These two were so occupied that they did not observe the approach of a
+stranger until he broke in upon their dialogue.
+
+An Ancient Mariner had been for some minutes standing off and on,
+reconnoitering Lord Ipsden; he now bore down, and with great rough,
+roaring cordiality, that made Lady Barbara start, cried out:
+
+"Give me your hand, sir--give me your hand, if you were twice a lord.
+
+"I couldn't speak to you till the brig was safe in port, and you slipped
+away, but I've brought you up at last; and--give me your hand again,
+sir. I say, isn't it a pity you are a lord instead of a sailor?"
+
+_Ipsden._ "But I am a sailor."
+
+_Ancient Mariner._ "That ye are, and as smart a one as ever tied a
+true-lover's knot in the top; but tell the truth--you were never nearer
+losing the number of your mess than that day in the old _Tisbe."_
+
+_Lady Barb._ "The old _Tisbe!_ Oh!"
+
+_Ipsden._ "Do you remember that nice little lurch she gave to leeward as
+we brought her round?"
+
+_Lady Barb._ "Oh, Richard!"
+
+_Ancient Mariner._ "And that reel the old wench gave under our feet,
+north the pier-head. I wouldn't have given a washing-tub for her at that
+moment."
+
+_Ipsden._ "Past danger becomes pleasure, sir. _Olim et hoec
+meminisse_--I beg your pardon, sir."
+
+_Ancient Mariner (taking off his hat with feeling)._ "God bless ye, sir,
+and send ye many happy days, and well spent, with the pretty lady I see
+alongside; asking your pardon, miss, for parting pleasanter company--so
+I'll sheer off."
+
+And away went the skipper of the _Tisbe,_ rolling fearfully. In the heat
+of this reminiscence, the skipper of the yacht (they are all alike, blue
+water once fairly tasted) had lost sight of Lady Barbara; he now looked
+round. Imagine his surprise!
+
+Her ladyship was in tears.
+
+"Dear Barbara," said Lord Ipsden, "do not distress yourself on my
+account."
+
+"It is not your fe-feelings I care about; at least, I h-h-hope not; but
+I have been so unjust, and I prided myself so on my j-ju-justice."
+
+"Never mind!"
+
+"Oh! if you don't, I don't. I hate myself, so it is no wonder you h-hate
+me."
+
+"I love you more than ever."
+
+"Then you are a good soul! Of course you know I always--_I_--esteemed you,
+Richard."
+
+"No! I had an idea you despised me!"
+
+"How silly you are! Can't you see? When I thought you were not
+perfection, which you are now, it vexed me to death; you never saw me
+affront any one but you?"
+
+"No, I never did! What does that prove?"
+
+"That depends upon the wit of him that reasons thereon." (Coming to
+herself.)
+
+"I love you, Barbara! Will you honor me with your hand?"
+
+"No! I am not so base, so selfish. You are worth a hundred of me, and
+here have I been treating you _de haut en bas._ Dear Richard, poor
+Richard. Oh! oh! oh!" (A perfect flood of tears.)
+
+"Barbara! I regret nothing; this moment pays for all."
+
+"Well, then, I will! since you keep pressing me. There, let me go; I
+must be alone; I must tell the sea how unjust I was, and how happy I am,
+and when you see me again you shall see the better side of your cousin
+Barbara."
+
+She was peremptory. "She had her folly and his merits to think over,"
+she said; but she promised to pass through Newhaven, and he should put
+her into her pony-phaeton, which would meet her there.
+
+Lady Barbara was only a fool by the excess of her wit over her
+experience; and Lord Ipsden's love was not misplaced, for she had a
+great heart which she hid from little people. I forgive her!
+
+The resolutions she formed in company with the sea, having dismissed
+Ipsden, and ordered her flunky into the horizon, will probably give our
+viscount just half a century of conjugal bliss.
+
+As he was going she stopped him and said: "Your friend had browner hands
+than I have hitherto conceived possible. _To tell the truth,_ I took
+them for the claws of a mahogany table when he grappled you--is that the
+term? _C'est e'gal_--I like him--"
+
+She stopped him again. "Ipsden, in the midst of all this that poor man's
+ship is broken. I feel it is! You will buy him another, if you really
+love me--for I like him."
+
+And so these lovers parted for a time; and Lord Ipsden with a bounding
+heart returned to Newhaven. He went to entertain his late _vis-'a-vis_
+at the "Peacock."
+
+Meantime a shorter and less pleasant _rencontre_ had taken place between
+Leith and that village.
+
+Gatty felt he should meet his lost sweetheart; and sure enough, at a
+turn of the road Christie and Jean came suddenly upon him.
+
+Jean nodded, but Christie took no notice of him; they passed him; he
+turned and followed them, and said, "Christie!"
+
+"What is your will wi' me?" said she, coldly.
+
+"I--I--How pale you are!"
+
+"I am no very weel."
+
+"She has been watching over muckle wi' Flucker," said Jean.
+
+Christie thanked her with a look.
+
+"I hope it is not--not--"
+
+"Nae fears, lad," said she, briskly; "I dinna think that muckle o' ye."
+
+"And I think of nothing but you," said he.
+
+A deep flush crimsoned the young woman's brow, but she restrained
+herself, and said icily: "Thaat's very gude o' ye, I'm sure."
+
+Gatty felt all the contempt her manners and words expressed. He bit his
+lips. The tear started to his eye. "You will forget me," said he. "I do
+not deserve to be remembered, but I shall never forget you. I leave
+for England. I leave Newhaven forever, where I have been so happy. I am
+going at three o'clock by the steamboat. Won't you bid me good-by?" He
+approached her timidly.
+
+"Ay! that wull do," cried she; "Gude be wi' ye, lad; I wish ye nae ill."
+She gave a commanding gesture of dismissal; he turned away, and went
+sadly from her. She watched every motion when his back was turned.
+
+"That is you, Christie," said Jean; "use the lads like dirt, an' they
+think a' the mair o' ye."
+
+"Oh, Jean, my hairt's broken. I'm just deeing for him."
+
+"Let me speak till him then," said Jean; "I'll sune bring him till his
+marrow-banes;" and she took a hasty step to follow him.
+
+Christie held her fast. "I'd dee ere I'd give in till them. Oh, Jean!
+I'm a lassie clean flung awa; he has neither hairt nor spunk ava, yon
+lad!"
+
+Jean began to make excuses for him. Christie inveighed against him. Jean
+spoke up for him with more earnestness.
+
+Now observe, Jean despised the poor boy.
+
+Christie adored him.
+
+So Jean spoke for him, because women of every degree are often one solid
+mass of tact; and Christie abused him, because she wanted to hear him
+defended.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+RICHARD, LORD VISCOUNT IPSDEN, having dotted the seashore with
+sentinels, to tell him of Lady Barbara's approach, awaited his guest
+in the "Peacock"; but, as Gatty was a little behind time, he placed
+Saunders sentinel over the "Peacock," and strolled eastward; as he came
+out of the "Peacock," Mrs. Gatty came down the little hill in front, and
+also proceeded eastward; meantime Lady Barbara and her escort were not
+far from the New Town of Newhaven, on their way from Leith.
+
+Mrs. Gatty came down, merely with a vague fear. She had no reason
+to suppose her son's alliance with Christie either would or could be
+renewed, but she was a careful player and would not give a chance away;
+she found he was gone out unusually early, so she came straight to the
+only place she dreaded; it was her son's last day in Scotland. She had
+packed his clothes, and he had inspired her with confidence by arranging
+pictures, etc., himself; she had no idea he was packing for his
+departure from this life, not Edinburgh only.
+
+She came then to Newhaven with no serious misgivings, for, even if her
+son had again vacillated, she saw that, with Christie's pride and her
+own firmness, the game must be hers in the end; but, as I said before,
+she was one who played her cards closely, and such seldom lose.
+
+But my story is with the two young fishwives, who, on their return from
+Leith, found themselves at the foot of the New Town, Newhaven, some
+minutes before any of the other persons who, it is to be observed, were
+approaching it from different points; they came slowly in, Christie
+in particular, with a listlessness she had never, known till this
+last week; for some days her strength had failed her--it was Jean that
+carried the creel now--before, Christie, in the pride of her strength,
+would always do more than her share of their joint labor. Then she could
+hardly be forced to eat, and what she did eat was quite tasteless to
+her, and sleep left her, and in its stead came uneasy slumbers, from
+which she awoke quivering from head to foot.
+
+Oh! perilous venture of those who love one object with the whole heart.
+
+This great but tender heart was breaking day by day.
+
+Well, Christie and Jean, strolling slowly into the New Town of Newhaven,
+found an assemblage of the natives all looking seaward; the fishermen,
+except Sandy Liston, were away at the herring fishery, but all the boys
+and women of the New Town were collected; the girls felt a momentary
+curiosity; it proved, however, to be only an individual swimming in
+toward shore from a greater distance than usual.
+
+A little matter excites curiosity in such places.
+
+The man's head looked like a spot of ink.
+
+Sandy Liston was minding his own business, lazily mending a skait-net,
+which he had attached to a crazy old herring-boat hauled up to rot.
+
+Christie sat down, pale and languid, by him, on a creepie that a lass
+who had been baiting a line with mussels had just vacated; suddenly she
+seized Jean's arm with a convulsive motion; Jean looked up--it was the
+London steamboat running out from Leith to Granton Pier to take up her
+passengers for London. Charles Gatty was going by that boat; the look
+of mute despair the poor girl gave went to Jean's heart; she ran hastily
+from the group, and cried out of sight for poor Christie.
+
+A fishwife, looking through a telescope at the swimmer, remarked: "He's
+coming in fast; he's a gallant swimmer, yon--
+
+"Can he dee't?" inquired Christie of Sandy Liston.
+
+"Fine thaat," was the reply; "he does it aye o' Sundays when ye are at
+the kirk."
+
+"It's no oot o' the kirk window ye'll hae seen him, Sandy, my mon," said
+a young fishwife.
+
+"Rin for my glass ony way, Flucker," said Christie, forcing herself to
+take some little interest.
+
+Flucker brought it to her, she put her hand on his shoulder, got slowly
+up, and stood on the creepie and adjusted the focus of her glass; after
+a short view, she said to Flucker:
+
+"Rin and see the nook." She then leveled her glass again at the swimmer.
+
+Flucker informed her the nook said "half eleven"--Scotch for "half past
+ten."
+
+Christie whipped out a well-thumbed almanac.
+
+"Yon nook's aye ahint," said she. She swept the sea once more with her
+glass, then brought it together with a click, and jumped off the stool.
+Her quick intelligence viewed the matter differently from all the
+others.
+
+"Noow," cried she, smartly, "wha'll lend me his yawl?"
+
+"Hets! dinna be sae interferin', lassie," said a fishwife.
+
+"Hae nane o' ye ony spunk?" said Christie, taking no notice of the
+woman. "Speak, laddies!"
+
+"M' uncle's yawl is at the pier-head; ye'll get her, my woman," said a
+boy.
+
+"A schell'n for wha's first on board," said Christie, holding up the
+coin.
+
+"Come awa', Flucker, we'll hae her schell'n;" and these two worthies
+instantly effected a false start.
+
+"It's no under your jackets," said Christie, as she dashed after them
+like the wind.
+
+"Haw! haw! haw!" laughed Sandy.
+
+"What's her business picking up a mon against his will?" said a woman.
+
+"She's an awfu' lassie," whined another. The examination of the swimmer
+was then continued, and the crowd increased; some would have it he was
+rapidly approaching, others that he made little or no way.
+
+"Wha est?" said another.
+
+"It's a lummy," said a girl.
+
+"Na! it's no a lummy," said another.
+
+Christie's boat was now seen standing out from the pier. Sandy Liston,
+casting a contemptuous look on all the rest, lifted himself lazily into
+the herring-boat and looked seaward. His manner changed in a moment.
+
+"The Deevil!" cried he; "the tide's turned! You wi' your glass, could
+you no see yon man's drifting oot to sea?"
+
+"Hech!" cried the women, "he'll be drooned--he'll be drooned!"
+
+"Yes; he'll be drooned!" cried Sandy, "if yon lassie does na come
+alongside him deevelich quick--he's sair spent, I doot."
+
+Two spectators were now added to the scene, Mrs. Gatty and Lord Ipsden.
+Mrs. Gatty inquired what was the matter.
+
+"It's a mon drooning," was the reply.
+
+The poor fellow, whom Sandy, by aid of his glass, now discovered to
+be in a wornout condition, was about half a mile east of Newhaven
+pier-head, and unfortunately the wind was nearly due east. Christie was
+standing north-northeast, her boat-hook jammed against the sail, which
+stood as flat as a knife.
+
+The natives of the Old Town were now seen pouring down to the pier and
+the beach, and strangers were collecting like bees.
+
+"After wit is everybody's wit!!!"--_Old Proverb._
+
+The affair was in the Johnstone's hands.
+
+"That boat is not going to the poor man," said Mrs. Gatty, "it is
+turning its back upon him."
+
+"She canna lie in the wind's eye, for as clever as she is," answered a
+fishwife.
+
+"I ken wha it is," suddenly squeaked a little fishwife; "it's Christie
+Johnstone's lad; it's yon daft painter fr' England. Hech!" cried she,
+suddenly, observing Mrs. Gatty, "it's your son, woman."
+
+The unfortunate woman gave a fearful scream, and, flying like a tiger on
+Liston, commanded him "to go straight out to sea and save her son."
+
+Jean Carnie seized her arm. "Div ye see yon boat?" cried she; "and
+div ye mind Christie, the lass wha's hairt ye hae broken? aweel,
+woman--_it's just a race between deeth and Cirsty Johnstone for your
+son._"
+
+The poor old woman swooned dead away; they carried her into Christie
+Johnstone's house and laid her down, then hurried back--the greater
+terror absorbed the less.
+
+Lady Barbara Sinclair was there from Leith; and, seeing Lord Ipsden
+standing in the boat with a fisherman, she asked him to tell her what it
+was; neither he nor any one answered her.
+
+"Why doesn't she come about, Liston?" cried Lord Ipsden, stamping with
+anxiety and impatience.
+
+"She'll no be lang," said Sandy; "but they'll mak a mess o' 't wi' ne'er
+a man i' the boat."
+
+"Ye're sure o' thaat?" put in a woman.
+
+"Ay, about she comes," said Liston, as the sail came down on the first
+tack. He was mistaken; they dipped the lug as cleverly as any man in the
+town could.
+
+"Hech! look at her hauling on the rope like a mon," cried a woman. The
+sail flew up on the other tack.
+
+"She's an awfu' lassie,". whined another.
+
+"He's awa," groaned Liston, "he's doon!"
+
+"No! he's up again," cried Lord Ipsden; "but I fear he can't live till
+the boat comes to him."
+
+The fisherman and the viscount held on by each other.
+
+"He does na see her, or maybe he'd tak hairt."
+
+"I'd give ten thousand pounds if only he could see her. My God, the man
+will be drowned under our eyes. If he but saw her!!!"
+
+The words had hardly left Lord Ipsden's lips, when the sound of a
+woman's voice came like an AEolian note across the water.
+
+"Hurraih!" roared Liston, and every creature joined the cheer.
+
+"She'll no let him dee. Ah! she's in the bows, hailing him an' waving
+the lad's bonnet ower her head to gie him coorage. Gude bless ye, lass;
+Gude bless ye!"
+
+Christie knew it was no use hailing him against the wind, but the moment
+she got the wind she darted into the bows, and pitched in its highest
+key her full and brilliant voice; after a moment of suspense she
+received proof that she must be heard by him, for on the pier now hung
+men and women, clustered like bees, breathless with anxiety, and the
+moment after she hailed the drowning man, she saw and heard a wild yell
+of applause burst from the pier, and the pier was more distant than the
+man. She snatched Flucker's cap, planted her foot on the gunwale, held
+on by a rope, hailed the poor fellow again, and waved the cap round and
+round her head, to give him courage; and in a moment, at the sight of
+this, thousands of voices thundered back their cheers to her across
+the water. Blow, wind--spring, boat--and you, Christie, still ring life
+toward those despairing ears and wave hope to those sinking eyes; cheer
+the boat on, you thousands that look upon this action; hurrah! from the
+pier; hurrah! from the town; hurrah! from the shore; hurrah! now, from
+the very ships in the roads, whose crews are swarming on the yards to
+look; five minutes ago they laughed at you; three thousand eyes and
+hearts hang upon you now; ay, these are the moments we live for!
+
+And now dead silence. The boat is within fifty yards, they are all three
+consulting together round the mast; an error now is death; his forehead
+only seems above water.
+
+"If they miss him on that tack?" said Lord Ipsden, significantly, to
+Liston.
+
+"He'll never see London Brigg again," was the whispered reply.
+
+They carried on till all on shore thought they would run over him, or
+past him; but no, at ten yards distant they were all at the sail, and
+had it down like lightning; and then Flucker sprang to the bows, the
+other boy to the helm.
+
+Unfortunately, there were but two Johnstones in the boat; and this boy,
+in his hurry, actually put the helm to port, instead of to starboard.
+Christie, who stood amidships, saw the error; she sprang aft, flung the
+boy from the helm and jammed it hard-a-starboard with her foot. The boat
+answered the helm, but too late for Flucker; the man was four yards from
+him as the boat drifted by.
+
+"He's a deed mon!" cried Liston, on shore.
+
+The boat's length gave one more little chance; the after-part must drift
+nearer him--thanks to Christie. Flucker flew aft; flung himself on his
+back, and seized his sister's petticoats.
+
+"Fling yourself ower the gunwale," screamed he. "Ye'll no hurt; I'se
+haud ye."
+
+She flung herself boldly over the gunwale; the man was sinking, her
+nails touched his hair, her fingers entangled themselves in it, she gave
+him a powerful wrench and brought him alongside; the boys pinned him
+like wild-cats.
+
+Christie darted away forward to the mast, passed a rope round it, threw
+it the boys, in a moment it was under his shoulders. Christie hauled
+on it from the fore thwart, the boys lifted him, and they tumbled him,
+gasping and gurgling like a dying salmon, into the bottom of the boat,
+and flung net and jackets and sail over him to keep the life in him.
+
+Ah! draw your breath all hands at sea and ashore, and don't try it
+again, young gentleman, for there was nothing to spare; when you were
+missed at the bow two stout hearts quivered for you; Lord Ipsden hid
+his face in his two hands, Sandy Liston gave a groan, and, when you were
+grabbed astern, jumped out of his boat and cried:
+
+"A gill o' whisky for ony favor, for it's turned me as seeck as a doeg."
+He added: "He may bless yon lassie's fowr banes, for she's ta'en him oot
+o' Death's maw, as sure as Gude's in heaven!"
+
+Lady Barbara, who had all her life been longing to see perilous
+adventures, prayed and trembled and cried most piteously; and Lord
+Ipsden's back was to her, and he paid no attention to her voice; but
+when the battle was won, and Lord Ipsden turned and saw her, she clung
+to his arm and dried her tears; and then the Old Town cheered the boat,
+and the New Town cheered the boat, and the towns cheered each other; and
+the Johnstones, lad and lass, set their sail, and swept back in triumph
+to the pier; so then Lady Barbara's blood mounted and tingled in her
+veins like fire. "Oh, how noble!" cried she.
+
+"Yes, dearest," said Ipsden. "You have seen something great done at
+last; and by a woman, too!"
+
+"Yes," said Barbara, "how beautiful! oh! how beautiful it all is; only
+the next one I see I should like the danger to be over first, that is
+all."
+
+The boys and Christie, the moment they had saved Gatty, up sail again
+for Newhaven; they landed in about three minutes at the pier.
+
+
+TIME. From Newhaven town to pier on foot: 1 m. 30 sec. First tack: 5 m.
+30 sec. Second tack, and getting him on board: 4 m. 0 sec. Back to the
+pier, going free: 3 m. 30 sec.
+
+Total: 14 m. 30 sec.
+
+
+They came in to the pier, Christie sitting quietly on the thwart after
+her work, the boy steering, and Flucker standing against the mast,
+hands in his pockets; the deportment this young gentleman thought fit
+to assume on this occasion was "complete apathy"; he came into port with
+the air of one bringing home the ordinary results of his day's fishing;
+this was, I suppose, to impress the spectators with the notion that
+saving lives was an every-day affair with La Famille Johnstone; as for
+Gatty, he came to himself under his heap of nets and jackets and spoke
+once between Death's jaw and the pier.
+
+"Beautiful!" murmured he, and was silent. The meaning of this
+observation never transpired, and never will in this world. Six months
+afterward, being subjected to a searching interrogatory, he stated that
+he had alluded to the majesty and freedom of a certain _pose_ Christie
+had adopted while hailing him from the boat; but, reader, if he had
+wanted you and me to believe it was this, he should not have been half
+a year finding it out--_increduli odimus!_ They landed, and Christie
+sprang on shore; while she was wending her way through the crowd,
+impeded by greetings and acclamations, with every now and then a lass
+waving her kerchief or a lad his bonnet over the heroine's head, poor
+Mrs. Gatty was receiving the attention of the New Town; they brought her
+to, they told her the good news--she thanked God.
+
+The whole story had spread like wildfire; they expostulated with her,
+they told her now was the time to show she had a heart, and bless the
+young people.
+
+She rewarded them with a valuable precept.
+
+"Mind your own business!" said she.
+
+"Hech! y' are a dour wife!" cried Newhaven.
+
+The dour wife bent her eyes on the ground.
+
+The people were still collected at the foot of the street, but they
+were now in knots, when in dashed Flucker, arriving by a short cut, and
+crying: "She does na ken, she does na ken, she was ower moedest to look,
+I daur say, and ye'll no tell her, for he's a blackguard, an' he's just
+making a fule o' the puir lass, and if she kens what she has done for
+him, she'll be fonder o' him than a coow o' her cauf."
+
+"Oh, Flucker! we maun tell her, it's her lad, her ain lad, she saved,"
+expostulated a woman.
+
+"Did ever my feyther do a good turn till ye?" cried Flucker. "Awel,
+then, ye'll no tell the lassie, she's weel as she is; he's gaun t'
+Enngland the day. I cannie gie ye a' a hidin'," said he, with an eye
+that flashed volumes of good intention on a hundred and fifty people;
+"but I am feytherless and motherless, an' I can fa' on my knees an'
+curse ye a' if ye do us sic an ill turn, an' then ye'll see whether
+ye'll thrive."
+
+"We'll no tell, Flucker, ye need na curse us ony way."
+
+His lordship, with all the sharp authority of a skipper, ordered
+Master Flucker to the pier, with a message to the yacht; Flucker
+_qua_ yachtsman was a machine, and went as a matter of course. "I am
+determined to tell her," said Lord Ipsden to Lady Barbara.
+
+"But," remonstrated Lady Barbara, "the poor boy says he will curse us if
+we do."
+
+"He won't curse me."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because the little blackguard's grog would be stopped on board the
+yacht if he did."
+
+Flucker had not been gone many minutes before loud cheering was heard,
+and Christie Johnstone appeared convoyed by a large detachment of the
+Old Town; she had tried to slip away, but they would not let her. They
+convoyed her in triumph till they saw the New Town people, and then they
+turned and left her.
+
+She came in among the groups, a changed woman--her pallor and her
+listlessness were gone--the old light was in her eye, and the bright
+color in her cheek, and she seemed hardly to touch the earth.
+
+"I'm just droukit, lasses," cried she, gayly, wringing her sleeve. Every
+eye was upon her; did she know, or did she not know, what she had done?
+
+Lord Ipsden stepped forward; the people tacitly accepted him as the
+vehicle of their curiosity.
+
+"Who was it, Christie?"
+
+"I dinna ken, for my pairt!"
+
+Mrs. Gatty came out of the house.
+
+"A handsome young fellow, I hope, Christie?" resumed Lord Ipsden.
+
+"Ye maun ask Flucker," was the reply. "I could no tak muckle notice, ye
+ken," putting her hand before her eye, and half smiling.
+
+"Well! I hear he is very good-looking; and I hear you think so, too."
+
+She glided to him and looked in his face. He gave a meaning smile. The
+poor girl looked quite perplexed. Suddenly she gave a violent start.
+
+"Christie! where is Christie?" had cried a well-known voice. He had
+learned on the pier who had saved him--he had slipped up among the boats
+to find her--he could not find his hat--he could not wait for it--his
+dripping hair showed where he had been--it was her love whom she had
+just saved out of Death's very jaws.
+
+She gave a cry of love that went through every heart, high or low, young
+or old, that heard it. And she went to him, through the air it seemed;
+but, quick as she was, another was as quick; the mother had seen him
+first, and she was there. Christie saw nothing. With another cry,
+the very keynote of her great and loving heart, she flung her arms
+round--Mrs. Gatty, who was on the same errand as herself.
+
+"Hearts are not steel, and steel is bent; Hearts are not flint, and
+flint is rent."
+
+The old woman felt Christie touch her. She turned from her son in a
+moment and wept upon her neck. Her lover took her hand and kissed it,
+and pressed it to his bosom, and tried to speak to her; but all he could
+do was to sob and choke--and kiss her hand again.
+
+"My daughter!" sobbed the old woman.
+
+At that word Christie clasped her quickly; and then Christie began to
+cry.
+
+"I am not a stone," cried Mrs. Gatty.
+
+"I gave him life; but you have saved him from death. Oh, Charles, never
+make her repent what she has done for you."
+
+She was a woman, after all; and prudence and prejudice melted like snow
+before her heart.
+
+There were not many dry eyes--least of all the heroic Lady Barbara's.
+
+The three whom a moment had made one were becoming calmer, and taking
+one another's hands for life, when a diabolical sound arose--and what
+was it but Sandy Liston, who, after furious resistance, was blubbering
+with explosive but short-lived violence? Having done it, he was the
+first to draw everybody's attention to the phenomenon; and affecting to
+consider it a purely physical attack, like a _coup de soleil,_ or so on,
+he proceeded instantly to Drysel's for his panacea.
+
+Lady Barbara enjoined Lord Ipsden to watch these people, and not to lose
+a word they said; and, after she had insisted upon kissing Christie,
+she went off to her carriage. And she too was so happy, she cried three
+distinct times on her way to Edinburgh.
+
+Lord Ipsden, having reminded Gatty of his engagement, begged him to add
+his mother and Christie to the party, and escorted Lady Barbara to her
+phaeton.
+
+So then the people dispersed by degrees.
+
+"That old lady's face seems familiar to me," said Lord Ipsden, as he
+stood on the little natural platform by the "Peacock." "Do you know who
+she is, Saunders?"
+
+"It is Peggy, that was cook in your lordship's uncle's time, my lord.
+She married a green-grocer," added Saunders, with an injured air.
+
+"Hech! hech!" cried Flucker, "Christie has ta'en up her head wi' a
+cook's son."
+
+Mrs. Gatty was ushered into the "Peacock" with mock civility by Mr.
+Saunders. No recognition took place, each being ashamed of the other as
+an acquaintance.
+
+The next arrival was a beautiful young lady in a black silk gown, a
+plain but duck-like plaid shawl, who proved to be Christie Johnstone, in
+her Sunday attire.
+
+When they met, Mrs. Gatty gave a little scream of joy, and said: "Oh, my
+child; if I had seen you in that dress, I should never have said a word
+against you."
+
+"Pars minima est ipsa puella sui!"
+
+His lordship stepped up to her, took off his hat, and said: "Will Mrs.
+Gatty take from me a commission for two pictures, as big as herself, and
+as bonny?" added he, doing a little Scotch. He handed her a check; and,
+turning to Gatty, added, "At your convenience, sir, _bien entendu."_
+
+"Hech! it's for five hundred pund, Chairles."
+
+"Good gear gangs in little book,"* said Jean.
+
+     *Bulk.
+
+"Ay, does it," replied Flucker, assuming the compliment.
+
+"My lord!" said the artist, "you treat Art like a prince; and she shall
+treat you like a queen. When the sun comes out again, I will work for
+you and fame. You shall have two things painted, every stroke loyally in
+the sunlight. In spite of gloomy winter and gloomier London, I will try
+if I can't hang nature and summer on your walls forever. As for me,
+you know I must go to Gerard Dow and Cuyp, and Pierre de Hoogh, when
+my little sand is run; but my handwriting shall warm your children's
+children's hearts, sir, when this hand is dust." His eye turned inward,
+he walked to and fro, and his companions died out of his sight--he was
+in the kingdom of art.
+
+His lordship and Jean entered the "Peacock," followed by Flucker, who
+merely lingered at the door to moralize as follows:
+
+"Hech! hech! isna thaat lamentable? Christie's mon's as daft as a drunk
+weaver."
+
+But one stayed quietly behind, and assumed that moment the office of her
+life.
+
+"Ay!" he burst out again, "the resources of our art are still
+unfathomed! Pictures are yet to be painted that shall refresh men's
+inner souls, and help their hearts against the artificial world; and
+charm the fiend away, like David's harp!! The world, after centuries of
+lies, will give nature and truth a trial. What a paradise art will be,
+when truths, instead of lies, shall be told on paper, on marble, on
+canvas, and on the boards!!!"
+
+"Dinner's on the boarrd," murmured Christie, alluding to Lord Ipsden's
+breakfast; "and I hae the charge o' ye," pulling his sleeve hard enough
+to destroy the equilibrium of a flea.
+
+"Then don't let us waste our time here. Oh, Christie!"
+
+"What est, my laddy?"
+
+"I'm so preciously hungry!!!!"
+
+"C-way* then!"
+
+     * Come away.
+
+Off they ran, hand in hand, sparks of beauty, love and happiness flying
+all about them.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+"THERE is nothing but meeting and parting in this world!" and you may be
+sure the incongruous personages of our tale could not long be together.
+Their separate paths had met for an instant in one focus, furnished then
+and there the matter of an eccentric story, and then diverged forever.
+
+Our lives have a general current, and also an episode or two; and the
+episodes of a commonplace life are often rather startling; in like
+manner this tale is not a specimen, but an episode of Lord Ipsden and
+Lady Barbara, who soon after this married and lived like the rest of the
+_beau monde._ In so doing, they passed out of my hands; such as wish to
+know how viscounts and viscountesses feed and sleep, and do the domestic
+(so called), and the social (so called), are referred to the fashionable
+novel. To Mr. Saunders, for instance, who has in the press one of those
+cerberus-leviathans of fiction, so common now; incredible as folio
+to future ages. Saunders will take you by the hand, and lead you over
+carpets two inches thick--under rosy curtains--to dinner-tables. He
+will _fete_ you, and opera you, and dazzle your young imagination with
+_e'p'ergnes,_ and salvers, and buhl and ormolu. No fishwives or painters
+shall intrude upon his polished scenes; all shall be as genteel as
+himself. Saunders is a good authority; he is more in the society,
+and far more in the confidence of the great, than most fashionable
+novelists. Mr. Saunders's work will be in three volumes; nine hundred
+and ninety pages!!!!!!
+
+In other words, this single work of this ingenious writer will equal in
+bulk the aggregate of all the writings extant by Moses, David, Solomon,
+Isaiah, and St. Paul!!!
+
+I shall not venture into competition with this behemoth of the _salon;_
+I will evaporate in thin generalities.
+
+Lord Ipsden then lived very happily with Lady Barbara, whose hero he
+straightway became, and who nobly and poetically dotes upon him. He has
+gone into political life to please her, and will remain there--to please
+himself. They were both very grateful to Newhaven; when they married
+they vowed to visit it twice a year, and mingle a fortnight's simple
+life with its simple scenes; but four years have passed, and they have
+never been there again, and I dare say never will; but when Viscount
+Ipsden falls in with a brother aristocrat who is crushed by the fiend
+_ennui,_ he remembers Aberford, and condenses his famous recipe into a
+two-edged hexameter, which will make my learned reader laugh, for it is
+full of wisdom:
+
+"Diluculo surgas! miseris succurrere discas!!"
+
+Flucker Johnstone meditated during breakfast upon the five hundred
+pounds, and regretted he had not years ago adopted Mr. Gatty's
+profession; some days afterward he invited his sister to a conference.
+Chairs being set, Mr. Flucker laid down this observation, that near
+relations should be deuced careful not to cast discredit upon one
+another; that now his sister was to be a lady, it was repugnant to his
+sense of right to be a fisherman and make her ladyship blush for him;
+on the contrary, he felt it his duty to rise to such high consideration
+that she should be proud of him.
+
+Christie acquiesced at once in this position, but professed herself
+embarrassed to know how such a "ne'er-do-weel" was to be made a
+source of pride; then she kissed Flucker, and said, in a tone somewhat
+inconsistent with the above, "Tell me, my laamb!"
+
+Her lamb informed her that the sea has many paths; some of them
+disgraceful, such as line or net fishing, and the periodical laying
+down, on rocky shoals, and taking up again, of lobster-creels; others,
+superior to anything the dry land can offer in importance and dignity
+and general estimation, such as the command of a merchant vessel trading
+to the East or West Indies. Her lamb then suggested that if she would
+be so good as to launch him in the merchant-service, with a good rig of
+clothes and money in his pocket, there was that in his head which would
+enable him to work to windward of most of his contemporaries. He bade
+her calculate upon the following results: In a year or two he would be
+second mate, and next year first mate, and in a few years more skipper!
+Think of that, lass! Skipper of a vessel, whose rig he generously left
+his sister free to determine; premising that two masts were, in his
+theory of navigation, indispensable, and that three were a great deal
+more like Cocker than two. This led to a general consultation; Flucker's
+ambition was discussed and praised. That modest young gentleman, in
+spite of many injunctions to the contrary, communicated his sister's
+plans for him to Lord Ipsden, and affected to doubt their prudence. The
+bait took; Lord Ipsden wrote to his man of business, and an unexpected
+blow fell upon the ingenious Flucker. He was sent to school; there to
+learn a little astronomy, a little navigation, a little seamanship, a
+little manners, etc.; in the mysteries of reading and writing his sister
+had already perfected him by dint of "the taws." This school was a blow;
+but Flucker was no fool; he saw there was no way of getting from school
+to sea without working. So he literally worked out to sea. His first
+voyage was distinguished by the following peculiarities: Attempts to put
+tricks upon this particular novice generally ended in the laugh turning
+against the experimenters; and instead of drinking his grog, which he
+hates, he secreted it, and sold it for various advantages. He has been
+now four voyages. When he comes ashore, instead of going to haunts of
+folly and vice, he instantly bears up for his sister's house--Kensington
+Gravel-pits--which he makes in the following manner: He goes up the
+river--Heaven knows where all--this he calls running down the longitude;
+then he lands, and bears down upon the Gravel-pits; in particular
+knowledge of the names of streets he is deficient, but he knows the
+exact bearings of Christie's dwelling. He tacks and wears according as
+masonry compels him, and he arrives at the gate. He hails the house,
+in a voice that brings all the inhabitants of the row to their windows,
+including Christie; he is fallen upon and dragged into the house. The
+first thing is, he draws out from his boots, and his back, and other
+hiding-places, China crape and marvelous silk handkerchiefs for
+Christie; and she takes from his pocket a mass of Oriental sugar-plums,
+with which, but for this precaution, she knows by experience he would
+poison young Charley; and soon he is to be seen sitting with his hand
+in his sister's, and she lookng like a mother upon his handsome,
+weather-beaten face, and Gatty opposite, adoring him as a specimen of
+male beauty, and sometimes making furtive sketches of him. And then the
+tales he always brings with him; the house is never very dull, but it is
+livelier than ever when this inexhaustible sailor casts anchor in it.
+
+The friends (chiefly artists) who used to leave at 9:30, stay till
+eleven; for an intelligent sailor is better company than two lawyers,
+two bishops, three soldiers, and four writers of plays and tales, all
+rolled together. And still he tells Christie he shall command a vessel
+some day, and leads her to the most cheering inferences from the fact
+of his prudence and his general width-awake; in particular he bids her
+contrast with him the general fate of sailors, eaten up by land-sharks,
+particularly of the female gender, whom he demonstrates to be the worst
+enemies poor Jack has; he calls these sunken rocks, fire-ships and other
+metaphors. He concludes thus: "You are all the lass I mean to have till
+I'm a skipper, and then I'll bear up alongside some pretty, decent lass,
+like yourself, Christie, and we'll sail in company all our lives, let
+the wind blow high or low." Such is the gracious Flucker become in his
+twentieth year. Last voyage, with Christie's aid, he produced a sextant
+of his own, and "made it twelve o'clock" (with the sun's consent, I
+hope), and the eyes of authority fell upon him. So, who knows? perhaps
+he may one day, sail a ship; and, if he does, he will be prouder and
+happier than if we made him monarch of the globe.
+
+To return to our chiefs; Mrs. Gatty gave her formal consent to her son's
+marriage with Christie Johnstone.
+
+There were examples. Aristocracy had ere now condescended to wealth;
+earls had married women rich by tallow-importing papas; and no doubt,
+had these same earls been consulted in Gatty's case, they would have
+decided that Christie Johnstone, with her real and funded property, was
+not a villainous match for a green grocer's son, without a rapp;* but
+Mrs. Gatty did not reason so, did not reason at all, luckily, her heart
+ran away with her judgment, and, her judgment ceasing to act, she became
+a wise woman.
+
+     *A diminutive German coin.
+
+The case was peculiar. Gatty was a artist _pur sang_--and Christie, who
+would not have been the wife for a _petit maitre,_ was the wife of wives
+for him.
+
+He wanted a beautiful wife to embellish his canvas, disfigured hitherto
+by an injudicious selection of models; a virtuous wife to be his crown;
+a prudent wife to save him from ruin; a cheerful wife to sustain his
+spirits, drooping at times by virtue of his artist's temperament; an
+intellectual wife to preserve his children from being born dolts and
+bred dunces, and to keep his own mind from sharpening to one point,
+and so contracting and becoming monomaniacal. And he found all these
+qualities, together with the sun and moon of human existence--true love
+and true religion--in Christie Johnstone.
+
+In similar cases, foolish men have set to work to make, in six months,
+their diamond of nature, the exact cut and gloss of other men's pastes,
+and, nervously watching the process, have suffered torture; luckily
+Charles Gatty was not wise enough for this; he saw nature had
+distinguished her he loved beyond her fellows; here, as elsewhere, he
+had faith in nature--he believed that Christie would charm everybody of
+eye, and ear, and mind, and heart, that approached her; he admired her
+as she was, and left her to polish herself, if she chose. He did well;
+she came to London with a fine mind, a broad brogue, a delicate ear; she
+observed how her husband's friends spoke, and in a very few months she
+had toned down her Scotch to a rich Ionic coloring, which her womanly
+instinct will never let her exchange for the thin, vinegar accents that
+are too prevalent in English and French society; and in other respects
+she caught, by easy gradation, the tone of the new society to which her
+marriage introduced her, without, however, losing her charming self.
+
+The wise dowager lodges hard by, having resisted an invitation to be in
+the same house; she comes to that house to assist the young wife with
+her experience, and to be welcome--not to interfere every minute, and
+tease her; she loves her daughter-in-law almost as much as she does her
+son, and she is happy because he bids fair to be an immortal painter,
+and, above all, a gentleman; and she, a wifely wife, a motherly mother,
+and, above all, a lady.
+
+This, then, is a happy couple. Their life is full of purpose and
+industry, yet lightened by gayety; they go to operas, theaters and
+balls, for they are young. They have plenty of society, real society,
+not the ill-assorted collection of a predetermined number of bodies,
+that blindly assumes that name, but the rich communication of various
+and fertile minds; they very, very seldom consent to squat four mortal
+hours on one chair (like old hares stiffening in their hot forms), and
+nibbling, sipping and twaddling in four mortal hours what could have
+been eaten, drunken and said in thirty-five minutes. They are both
+artists at heart, and it shocks their natures to see folks mix so very
+largely the _inutile_ with the _insipidum,_ and waste, at one huge but
+barren incubation, the soul, and the stomach, and the irrevocable hours,
+things with which so much is to be done. But they have many desirable
+acquaintances, and not a few friends; the latter are mostly lovers of
+truth in their several departments, and in all things. Among them are
+painters, sculptors, engineers, writers, conversers, thinkers; these
+acknowledging, even in England, other gods besides the intestines, meet
+often _chez_ Gatty, chiefly for mental intercourse; a cup of tea with
+such is found, by experience, to be better than a stalled elk where
+chit-chat reigns over the prostrate hours.
+
+This, then, is a happy couple; the very pigeons and the crows need
+not blush for the nest at Kensington Gravel-pits. There the divine
+institution Marriage takes its natural colors, and it is at once
+pleasant and good to catch such glimpses of Heaven's design, and sad to
+think how often this great boon, accorded by God to man and woman,
+must have been abused and perverted, ere it could have sunk to be the
+standing butt of farce-writers, and the theme of weekly punsters.
+
+In this pair we see the wonders a male and female can do for each other
+in the sweet bond of holy wedlock. In that blessed relation alone two
+interests are really one, and two hearts lie safe at anchor side by
+side.
+
+Christie and Charles are friends--for they are man and wife.
+
+Christie and Charles are lovers still--for they are man and wife.
+
+Christie and Charles are one forever--for they are man and wife.
+
+This wife brightens the house, from kitchen to garret, for her husband;
+this husband works like a king for his wife's comfort, and for his own
+fame--and that fame is his wife's glory. When one of these expresses or
+hints a wish, the other's first impulse is to find the means, not the
+objections.
+
+They share all troubles, and, by sharing, halve them.
+
+They share all pleasures, and, by sharing, double them.
+
+They climb the hill together now, and many a canty day they shall have
+with one another; and when, by the inevitable law, they begin to descend
+toward the dark valley, they will still go hand in hand, smiling so
+tenderly, and supporting each other with a care more lovely than when
+the arm was strong and the foot firm.
+
+On these two temperate lives old age will descend lightly, gradually,
+gently, and late--and late upon these evergreen hearts, because they are
+not tuned to some selfish, isolated key; these hearts beat and ring with
+the young hearts of their dear children, and years hence papa and mamma
+will begin life hopefully, wishfully, warmly again with each loved
+novice in turn.
+
+And when old age does come, it will be no calamity to these, as it is to
+you, poor battered beau, laughed at by the fair ninnies who erst laughed
+with you; to you, poor follower of salmon, fox, and pheasant, whose
+joints are stiffening, whose nerve is gone--whose Golgotha remains; to
+you, poor faded beauty, who have staked all upon man's appetite, and
+not accumulated goodness or sense for your second course; to you, poor
+drawing-room wit, whose sarcasm has turned to venom and is turning to
+drivel.
+
+What terrors has old age for this happy pair? it cannot make them ugly,
+for, though the purple light of youth recedes, a new kind of tranquil
+beauty, the aloe-blossom of many years of innocence, comes to, and
+sits like a dove upon, the aged faces, where goodness, sympathy and
+intelligence have harbored together so long; and where evil passions
+have flitted (for we are all human), but found no resting-place.
+
+Old age is no calamity to them. It cannot terrify them; for ere they had
+been married a week the woman taught the man, lover of truth, to search
+for the highest and greatest truths in a book written for men's souls by
+the Author of the world, the sea, the stars, the sun, the soul; and this
+book, _Dei gratia,_ will, as the good bishop sings,
+
+"Teach them to live that they may dread The grave as little as their
+bed."
+
+It cannot make them sad, for, ere it comes loved souls will have gone
+from earth and from their tender bosom, but not from their memories; and
+will seem to beckon them now across the cold valley to the golden land.
+
+It cannot make them sad, for on earth the happiest must drink a
+sorrowful cup more than once in a long life, and so their brightest
+hopes will have come to dwell habitually on things beyond the grave;
+and the great painter, _jam Senex,_ will chiefly meditate upon a richer
+landscape and brighter figures than human hand has ever painted; a scene
+whose glories he can see from hence but by glimpses and through a glass
+darkly; the great meadows on the other side of Jordan, which are bright
+with the spirits of the just that walk there, and are warmed with an
+eternal sun, and ring with the triumph of the humble and the true, and
+the praises of God forever.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christie Johnstone, by Charles Reade
+
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