"Oh! if you fall back upon prerogative--" began Sir William.

"I have never quitted it It is in the sovereignty of my woman's will that I reconcile opinions seemingly adverse, and can enjoy all the splendors of a capital and all the tameness of a village. I showed you already how I could appreciate Paris; I mean now to prove how charmed I can be with the solitudes of Marlia."

"Which says, in plain English," said the young man, "that you don't care for either."

"Will you condescend to be a little more gallant than my cousin, sir,"

said she, turning to Sir William, "and at least give me credit for having a mind and knowing it?"

There was a pettish half-seriousness in her tone that made it almost impossible to say whether she was amused or angry, and to this also the changeful expression of her beautiful features contributed; for, though she smiled, her dark gray eyes sparkled like one who invited a contradiction. In this fleeting trait was the secret of her nature. May Leslie was one of Fortune's spoiled children,--one of those upon whom so many graces and good gifts had been lavished that it seemed as though Fate had exhausted her resources, and left herself no more to bestow.

She had surpassing beauty, youth, health, high spirits, and immense wealth. By her father's will she had been contracted in marriage with her distant relative, Charles Heathcote, with the proviso that if, on attaining the age of nineteen, she felt averse to the match, she should forfeit a certain estate in Wales which had once belonged to the Heathcotes, and contained the old residence of that family.

Sir William and his son had been living in the retirement of a little German capital, when the tidings of this wardship reached them. A number of unfortunate speculations had driven the baronet into exile from England, and left him with a pittance barely sufficient to live in the strictest economy. To this narrow fortune Charles Heathcote had come back, after serving in a most extravagant Hussar regiment, and taking his part in an Indian campaign; and the dashing' soldier first heard, as he lay wounded in the hospital, that he must leave the service, and retire into obscurity. If it had not been for his strong affection for his father, Charles would have enlisted as a private soldier, and taken his chance for future distinction, but he could not desert him at such a moment, nor separate himself from that share of privation which should be henceforth borne in common; and so he came back, a bronzed, brave soldier, true-hearted and daring, and, if a little stern, no more so than might be deemed natural in one who had met such a heavy reverse on the very threshold of life.

Father and son were at supper in a little arbor of their garden near Weimar, when the post brought them the startling news that May Leslie, who was then at Malta, would be at Paris in a few days, where she expected to meet them. When Sir William had read through the long letter of the lawyer, giving an account of the late General Leslie's will, with its strange condition, he handed it to his son, without a word.

The young man read it eagerly; his color changed once or twice as he went on, and his face grew harder and sterner ere he finished. "Do you mean to accept this wardship?" asked he, hurriedly.

"There are certain reasons for which I cannot decline it, Charley," said the other, mildly. "All my life long I have been Tom Leslie's debtor, in gratitude, for as noble a sacrifice as ever man made. We were both suitors to your mother, brother officers at the time, and well received in her father's house. Leslie, however, was much better looked on than myself, for I was then but a second son, while he was the heir of a very large estate. There could not have been a doubt that his advances would have outweighed mine in a father and mother's estimate, and as he was madly in love, there seemed-nothing to prevent his success. Finding, however, in a conversation with your mother, that her affections were mine, he not only relinquished the place in my favor, but, although most eager to purchase his troop, suffered me, his junior, to pass over his head, and thus attain the rank which enabled me to marry. Leslie went to India, where he married, and we never met again. It was only some seven or eight months ago I read of his being named governor of a Mediterranean dependency, and the very next paper mentioned his death, when about to leave Calcutta."

"It is, then, most probable that, when making this will, he had never heard of our reverses in fortune?" said the young man.

"It is almost certain he had not, for it is dated the very year of that panic which ruined me."

"And, just as likely, might never have left such a will, had he known our altered fortunes?"

"I 'm not so sure of that. At all events, I can answer for it that no change in our condition would have made Tom Leslie alter the will, if he had once made it in our favor."

"I have no fancy for the compact, read it how you may," said Charles, impatiently; "nor can I say which I like least,--the notion of marrying a woman who is bound to accept me, or accepting a forfeit to release her from the obligation."

"I own it is--embarrassing," said Sir William, after a moment's hesitation in choosing a suitable word.

"A downright indignity, I'd call it," said the other, warmly, "and calculated to make the man odious in the woman's eyes, whichever lot befell him."

"The wardship must be accepted, at all events," said Sir William, curtly, as he arose and folded up the letter.

"You are the best judge of that; for if it depended upon _me_"

"Come, come, Charley," said Sir William, in his tone of habitual kindness, "this life of quiet obscurity and poverty that we lead here has no terrors for _me_. I have been so long away from England that if I went back to-morrow I should look in vain for any of my old companions.

I have forgotten the habits and the ways of home, and I have learned to submit myself to twenty things here which would be hardships elsewhere, but I don't like to contemplate the same sort of existence for _you_; I want to speculate on a very different future; and if--if--Nay, you need not feel so impatient at a mere conjecture."

"Well, to another point," said the young man, hastily. "We have got, as you have just said, to know that we can live very comfortably and contentedly here, looking after our celery and seakale, and watching our silver groschen; are you so very certain that you 'd like to change all this life, and launch out into an expensive style of living, to suit the notions of a rich heiress, and, what is worse again, to draw upon _her_ resources to do it?"

"I won't deny that it will cost me severely; but, until we see her and know her, Charley, until we find out whether she may be one whose qualities will make our sacrifices easy--"

"Would you accept this charge if she were perfectly portionless, and without a shilling in the world?"

"If she were Tom Leslie's daughter, do you mean?"

"Ay, any one's daughter?"

"To be sure I would, boy; and if I were only to consult my own feelings in the matter, I 'd say that I 'd prefer this alternative to the other."

"Then I have no more to say," said the son, as he walked away.

Within a month after this conversation, the little cottage was shut up, the garden wicket closed with a heavy padlock, and to any chance inquirer after its late residents, the answer returned was, that their present address was Place Vendome, Paris.

"Tell me your company," said the old adage; but, alas! the maxim had reference to other habits than our present-day ones. With what company now does not every man mix? Bishops discuss crime and punishment with ticket-of-leave men; fashionable exquisites visit the resorts of thieves; "swell people" go to hear madrigals at Covent Garden; and, as for the Ring, it is equally the table-land to peer and pickpocket. If, then, you would hazard a guess as to a man's manners nowadays, ask not his company, but his whereabouts. Run your eye oyer the addresses of that twice-remanded insolvent, ranging from Norfolk Street, Strand, to Berkeley Square, with Boulogne-sur-Mer, St John's Wood, Cadiz, the New Cut, Bermondsey, and the Edgware Road, in the interval, and say if you cannot, even out of such slight materials, sketch off his biography.

"The style is the man," says the adage; and we might with as much truth say, "the street is the man." In his locality is written his ways and means, his manners, his morals, his griefs, joys, and ambitions. We live in an age prolific in this lesson. Only cast a glance at the daily sacrifices of those who, to reside within the periphery of greatness, submit to a crushing rent and a comfortless abode.

Think of him who, to date his note "------ Street, Berkeley Square,"

denies himself honest indulgence, all because the world has come to believe that certain spots are the "Regions of the Best," and that they who live there must needs be that grand English ideal,--respectable.

Dear me, what unheard-of sacrifices does it demand of humble fortunes to be Respectable! what pinching and starving and saving! what self-denial and what striving! what cheerless little dinner-parties to other Respectables! what dyeing of black silks and storing of old ostrich feathers! And how and wherefore have we wandered off in this digression!

Simply to say that Sir William Heathoote and his ward were living in a splendid quarter of Paris, and after that rambled into Germany, and thence to Como and down to Rome, very often delighted with their choice of residence, enjoying much that was enjoyable, but still--shall we own it?--never finding the exact place they seemed to want, nor exactly the people with whom they were willing to live in intimacy. They had been at Baden in the summer, at Como in the late autumn, at Rome in the winter, at Castellamare in the spring,--everywhere in its season, and yet somehow--And so they began to try that last resource of bored people,--places out of the season and places out of common resort,--and it was thus that they found themselves at Florence in June, and in Marlia in July.

CHAPTER III. TRAVELLING ACQUAINTANCE

About the same hour of the same evening which we have just chronicled, a group of persons sat under some spreading chestnut-trees beside a brawling little rivulet at the Bagni de Lucca. They were travellers, chance acquaintances thrown together by the accidents of the road, and entertained for each other those varied sentiments of like and dislike, those mingled distrusts, suspicions, and beliefs, which, however unconsciously to ourselves, are part of the education travelling impresses, and which, when long persevered in, make up that acute but not always amiable individual we call "an old traveller."

We are not about to present them all to our reader, and will only beg to introduce to his notice a few of the notabilities then present. _Place aux dames!_ then; and, first of all, we beg attention to the dark-eyed, dark-haired, and very delicately featured woman, who, in half-mourning, and with a pretty but fantastically costumed girl beside her, is working at an embroidery-frame close to the river. She is a Mrs. Penthony Morris, the wife or the widow--both opinions prevail--of a Captain Penthony Morris, killed in a duel, or in India, or alive in the Marshalsea, or at Baden-Baden, as may be. She is striking-looking, admirably dressed, has a most beautiful foot, as you may see where it rests upon the rail of the chair placed in front of her, and is, altogether, what that very smartly dressed, much-beringed, and essenced young gentleman near her has already pronounced her, "a stunning fine woman." He is a Mr. Mosely, one of those unhappy young Londoners whose family fame is ever destined to eclipse their own gentility, for he is immediately recognized, and drawlingly do men inquire some twenty times a day, "Ain't he a son of Trip and Mosely's, those fellows in Bond Street?" Unhappy Trip and Mosely! why have you rendered yourselves so great and illustrious? why have your tasteful devices in gauze, your "sacrifices" in challis, your "last new things in grenadine," made such celebrity around you, that Tom Mosely, "out for his travels," can no more escape the shop than if he were languishing at a customer over a "sweet article in white tarlatan"? In the two comfortable armchairs side by side sit two indubitable specimens, male and female, of the Anglo-Saxon family,--Mr. Morgan, that florid man, wiping his polished bald head, and that fat lady fanning with all her might. Are they not English? They are "out," and, judging from their recorded experiences, only dying to be "in" again. "Such a set of cheating, lying, lazy set of rascals are these Italians! Independence, air; don't talk to me of that humbug! What they want is English travellers to fleece and English women to marry." Near to these, at full length, on two chairs, one of which reclines against a tree at an angle of about forty degrees, sits our Yankee acquaintance, whom we may as well present by his name, Leonidas Shaver Quackinboss; he is smoking a "Virginian" about the size of a marshal's baton, and occasionally sipping at a "cobbler," which with much pains he has compounded for his own drinking. Various others of different ranks and countries are scattered about, and in the centre of all, at a small table with a lamp, sits a short, burly figure, with a strange mixture of superciliousness and drollery in his face, as though there were a perpetual contest in his nature whether he would be impertinent or amusing. This was Mr. Gorman O'Shea, Member of Parliament for Inchabogue, and for three weeks a Lord of the Treasury when O'Connell was king.

[Illustration: 044]

Mr. O'Shea is fond of public speaking. He has a taste for proposing, or seconding, or returning thanks that verges on a passion, so that even in a private dinner with a friend he has been known to arise and address his own companion in a set speech, adorned with all the graces and flowers of post-prandial eloquence. Upon the present occasion he has been, to his great delight, deputed to read aloud to the company from that magic volume by which the Continent is expounded to Englishmen, and in whose pages they are instructed in everything, from passports to pictures, and drilled in all the mysteries of money, posting, police regulations, domes, dinners, and Divine service by a Clergyman of the Established Church. In a word, he is reciting John Murray.

To understand the drift of the present meeting, we ought to mention that, in the course of a conversation started that day at the _table d'hote_ it was suggested that such of the company as felt disposed might make an excursion to Marlia to visit a celebrated villa there, whose gardens alone were amongst the great sights of Northern Italy. All had heard of this charming residence; views of it had been seen in every print-shop. It had its historical associations from a very early period.

There were chambers where murders had been committed, conspiracies held, confederates poisoned. King and Kaiser had passed the night there; all of which were duly and faithfully chronicled in "John," and impressively recited by Mr. Gorman O'Shea in the richest accents of his native Doric.

"There you have it now," said he, as he closed the volume; "and I will say, it has n't its equal anywhere for galleries, terraces, carved architraves, stuccoed ceilings, and frescos, and all the other balderdash peculiar to these places."

"Oh, Mr. O'Shea, what profanation!" interposed Mrs. Morris; "walls immortalized by Giotto and Cimabue!"

"Have n't they got stunning names of their own?" broke in Quackinboss.

"That's one of the smallest dodges to secure fame. You must be something out of the common. There was a fellow up at Syracuse townland, Measles, North Carolina, and his name was Flay Harris; they called him Flea--"

"That ceiling of the great hall was a work of Guido's, you said?"

inquired Mrs. Morris.

"A pupil of Guido's, a certain Simone Affretti, who afterwards made the designs for the Twelve Apostles in the window of the chapter-room at Sienna," read out Mr. O'Shea.

"Who can vouch for one word of all that, sir?" burst in Mr. Morgan, with a choleric warmth. "Who is to tell me, sir, that you did n't write that, or Peter Noakes, or John Murray himself, if there be such a man."

"I can vouch for the last," said a pale, gentle-looking young fellow, who was arranging the flies in a fishing-book under a tree at a little distance. "If it will relieve you from any embarrassments on the score of belief, I can assist you so far."

If there was a faint irony in this speech, the mild look of the speaker and his softened accents made it seem of the very faintest, and so even the bluff Mr. Morgan himself appeared to acknowledge.