From that hour a curse seemed to hang over the place. A vast city, full of seething human life, had taken the place of the swamp and the bullrushes; the hearths of the poor cotters were gone, and huge hotels, club-houses, theatres, were there instead. Progress and development-- yes; but with development came crime.

Under that overgrown city there extended a system of tunnels, sewers-- some large enough to drive a horse and cart down them, others hardly large enough to admit the band. But they extended everywhere. Under the busy street, under the quiet office where the only sound was the scratching of the pen, or the buzz of a fly "in th' pane;" under the gay theatre and the gossiping club-house there was not a spot that was not undermined.

And in these subterranean catacombs there dwelt a race nearly as numerous as the human hive above, who worked and gnawed in the dark; they were the domains of the successors of the little furred creatures which nibbled down the ancient willow tree. The grey sewer-rat worked and multiplied exceedingly beneath this mighty city. The grey rat was worse than the water-rat.

He had his human prototypes. What were Marese and Theodore but sewer-rats working in secret, in the dark underground, out of sight, whose presence could hardly be detected by a faint occasional scratching or rustle?

Beside these there were a numerous company of lesser men and masculine brutes, and female fiends, burrowing, fighting in the dark places of this mighty city, whose presence was made known at times by faint sounds of shrieking or devilish glee which rose up, as it were, from the bowels of the earth. The reign of the harmless water-rat was over. The rule of the sewer-rat was now in full force.

End of Volume One.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK TWO--PERSONS.

Forty-three miles as the crow flies, south of Stirmingham, there stands upon the lonely Downs a solitary, lichen-grown post, originally intended to direct wayfarers upon those trackless wastes.

In winter, when the herbage, always short, was shortest, and when the ground was softened by rain, there might be detected the ruts left by waggon wheels crossing each other in various directions; but road, or path properly so-called, there was none, and a stranger might as well have been placed on the desert of the Sahara. For time, and the rain blown with tremendous force across these open Downs by the wind, had all but obliterated the painted letters upon the cross-arms, and none but those acquainted with the country could have understood the fragmentary inscriptions.

Some mischievous ploughboys or shepherd lads, tired of arranging flints in fanciful rows, or cutting their names upon the turf, had improved the shining hour by climbing up this post, pulling out the arms, and inserting them in the opposite mortices, thereby making the poor post an unwitting liar. This same section of the population had also energetically pelted all the milestones for far around with flints, till the graven letters upon them were beaten out. Such wooden wit was their only resource in a place where _Punch_ never penetrated; for this lonesome spot was appropriately named World's End, or, it was locally p.r.o.nounced, Wurdel's End.

The undulating downs surrounded it upon every side, dotted here and there at long distances with farmsteads and a few cottages, and now and then a small village or hamlet of ten or a dozen houses grouped together in a "combe," or narrow valley, where there happened to be a spring of water and a "bourne" or stream. Yet World's End was not altogether to be despised. In this out-of-the-way place there was perhaps the finest natural racecourse in England, to which the uneven uphill course at Epsom, made famous by the Derby, was but an exercise ground.

A level stretch of sweet, elastic turf, half a mile wide, ran in a line something like half a horse-shoe, under the steep Downs, for a distance of two miles, unimpeded by hedge, ditch, or enclosed field, and obstructed only in a few spots by thick bushes of furze and a few scattered hawthorn trees.

A spectator standing upon the Downs had the whole of this Plain, as it was called, at once under his eye; could see a horse start and watch it gallop to the goal. From an ancient earthwork camp or "castle," this Down was known as Berbury Hill, and the level plain was often called Berbury racecourse.

For from time immemorial rustic sports, and local races between the horses of the neighbouring farmers, had taken place twice a year under the Berbury Hill. The sports were held in the early spring; the races proper, according to custom, came off in October. They were of the most primitive character, as may be judged from the following poster, which the kindness of a printer and bookbinder at Barnham--the nearest town-- enables us to present to the reader. He had preserved a copy of it, having returned the original to the committee, who sat at the Shepherd's Bush Inn upon the Downs:--

"Take Notiss. The Public is hereby Invite to the Grand open and Hurdle Rases and Steple-Chaces at Wurdel's End which is to come off on Wensday after old Michelmuss Day. All particlars of the Stewards which is Martin Brown, William Smith, Philip Lewis, Ted Pontin. Illegul Beting is stoped."

This copy had in the corner, "Please print two Score and send by Carrier," and the unfortunate printer, ashamed to issue such a circular, sent it back with an amended form for approval; but the carrier forgot the letter, and it was not delivered till a week after the event--not that much was lost by the failure to give this species of publicity to the races. The day was well-known to all those who were likely to attend. The half-dozen gipsies, with the cocoanut sticks and gingerbread stall, duly arrived, and took up their quarters in a fir copse where the ground was dry, and the tree-trunks sheltered them somewhat from the breeze which always blows over the Downs.

Most of the spectators were hill men. There still lingers the old feud between the hill and vale--not so fierce, toned down to an occasional growl--but Nature herself seems to have provided a never-ceasing ground of quarrel. These two races, the hill and the vale men, must always put up opposing prayers to heaven. The vale prays for fine and dry weather; the hill prays for wet. How then can they possibly agree? Not more than three knots of men and half a dozen wenches came up from the vale, and these gave pretty good evidence that they had called _en route_ at the Shepherd's Bush, for they were singing in chorus the lament of the young woman who went to the trysting place to meet her faithless swain:--

But what was there to make her sad?

The gate was there, but not the lad; Which made poor Mary to sigh and to say Young William shan't be mine!

The committee were in a moveable shepherd's hut on wheels, where also was the weighing-room and the weights, some of which were stone "quarters."

Just where the judges post was erected the course was roped for a hundred yards to ensure the horses arriving at the right place, but otherwise it was open. By the side of these ropes the traps and four-wheelers and ramshackle gigs of the farmers were drawn up, with their wives and daughters, who had come to see the fun.

Among these there was one pony-carriage drawn by two handsome ponies, with a peac.o.c.k's feather behind their ears and silver bells on the harness, which, simple enough in itself, had a stylish look beside these battered and worn-out vehicles. It belonged to Jason Waldron, who was generally credited with "Esquire" after his name, and the lady who sat alone in it was his daughter Violet. Mr Waldron was not there.

Violet was attended by a young man, plainly dressed, very pale, whose slight frame gave him an effeminate appearance in contrast with the burly forms, and weather-beaten faces of those acquaintances who from time to time nodded and spoke as they pa.s.sed. The pony-carriage was drawn up under an ancient hawthorn tree, whose gnarled and twisted trunk, slow in growth, may have witnessed the formation of the entrenchment on the hill by the Britons themselves. The first frosts of autumn had blackened the leaves, and the mingling of the grey of the trunk and its lichen with the dark colour of the leaves and the red peggles or berries, under a warm, glowing, mellow sunshine, caused the tree to a.s.sume a peculiar bronze-like tint.

It may be that the sun in all his broad domains did not shine that day upon a more lovely being than Violet Waldron. Aymer Malet, the young man at her side--whose Norman name ill-a.s.sorted with his coa.r.s.e garments, too plainly speaking of poverty--would have sworn that her equal did not walk the earth, and he would have had good warrant for his belief.

Poor Aymer was out of place in that rude throng, and tormented himself with fears lest he should appear despicable in her eyes, as so inferior to those stalwart men in size and strength. He should have known better; but he was young and had lived so long with those who despised him that a habit of self-depreciation had insensibly grown upon him. It is needless to go back into his pedigree. He was well descended, but an orphan and friendless, except for the single uncle who had given a roof and a bed to lie on to his sister's child.

Martin Brown was a well-meaning man, honest and st.u.r.dy, but totally incapable of comprehending that all men are not absorbed in sheep and turnips. He was moderately well off, but, like all true farmers, frugal to the extreme. Never a penny did Aymer get from him. Martin would have said: "Thee doesn't work; thee doesn't even mind a few ewes. If thee'll go bird-keeping I'll pay thee."

Aymer wished for work, but not work of that cla.s.s. He remembered one golden year spent in London with a friend of his dead father (who had lost his all by horse-racing), where he was permitted to read at will in a magnificent library, and was supplied with money to visit those art-galleries and collections in which his heart delighted. The friend died; the widow had no interest in him, and Aymer returned to the turnips, and sheep. But even in that brief period the impulse had been given; the seed had been sown and had fallen in fertile ground, which gave increase a hundredfold.

The boy--he was but twenty then--was a born genius. He could not help it; it would force him on. What he wanted was books. He could get no money to purchase them; circulating libraries had not yet established agencies upon the open Downs. By a strange contradiction he became a poacher, and the cleverest hand at setting a wire for miles. Tenants were not allowed to shoot in that district, but they might course hares as much as they pleased.

Aymer wired the ground game, sold them to the carriers who went by, and through the carriers got books slowly and one by one from the county town. In this way he bought many of Bohn's fine series--the finest and most useful, perhaps, ever issued--he read Plato and Aristotle, Livy, Xenophon--the poets, the philosophers, the dramatists of ancient Rome and Greece; and although it was not in their original tongue, the vivid imagination of the man carried him back to their day, and enabled him to realise those stirring scenes, to feel their pa.s.sions, and comprehend their arguments. He bought also most of the English poets, a few historians, and a large number of scientific works, for he was devoured with an eager curiosity to understand the stars that shone so brilliantly upon those hills--the phenomena of Nature with which he was brought in daily contact. When he had mastered a book, his friends the carriers, who called at the Shepherd's Bush, took it back to the county town and resold it for half-price, and these small sums went towards fresh purchases.

It may have been that these very untoward circ.u.mstances which would, to all appearance, have checked the growth of his mind, actually tended to a.s.sist it. He saw--he felt Nature. The wind, that whistled through the gra.s.s and sighed in the tops of the dark fir trees, spoke to him in a mystic language. The great sun, in unclouded splendour slowly pa.s.sing over the wide, endless hills, told him a part of the secret. His books were not read, in the common sense of the term: they were _thought_ through. Not a sentence but was thought over, examined, and its full meaning grasped and firmly imprinted on the memory.

Poor Aymer! How desperately he longed to escape! How the soft summer breeze seemed to woo him onwards he knew not whither! How the sun seemed to beckon, till he fancied he could hear the echo of the surge as it roared on the far-distant beach!

He did escape once--only for a little while, to be forced ignominiously back again, amid the jeers of his acquaintances. This happened before he knew Violet. By dint of catching hares and rabbits, and by selling off an acc.u.mulation of books, and by disposing of his gold watch--his only property--he managed to get some twenty pounds, and with that sum went straight to Florence.

It was in spring, just before the warm summer comes, and he revelled in the beauty of Italian skies and landscapes as he travelled. But his destination was the Palazzo, which contains the statue of ideal woman, known as the Venus de Medici. He stood before the living marble, rapt in thought, and then suddenly burst into tears.

This was perhaps childish. He had his faults; he was extremely proud and oversensitive. The sudden transition from the harsh and rude life at World's End, among the weather-beaten and rough-speaking rustics, to this new world of inexpressible beauty, overcame him. Hastily he brushed those tears away, and recovered himself; but not so quickly as to escape the observation of two sad grey eyes. Inadvertently, as he stood before the statue, he had interfered with the line of sight of a lady who was engaged in sketching. She had paused, and noticing his rapt attention, made no sign that he had interrupted her work. Thus she witnessed his weakness; and being a person of a thoughtful, perhaps too thoughtful, turn, she wondered at and pondered over it.

Day by day Aymer, while his funds lasted and he could stay in Florence, came and stood before the statue, lingering for hours in its close vicinity; so that the artist, as she sketched, had the fullest opportunity of noting the strong contrast between his delicate, intellectual features and slight, tall frame, and the coa.r.s.e dress he wore. Growing interested, she instructed her attendants to make inquiries, and they easily elicited the name of the stranger, and the place from which he had come.

By a curious coincidence, it so happened that the lady-artist herself was the owner of a family mansion, and moderately large estate but a few miles from Aymer's home. He was, in fact, perfectly familiar with her name, which was a household word at World's End, where distinguished names were few; but moving in his low sphere he had never seen her face.

Lady Lechester--Agnes Lechester to her friends--was "lord of herself, that heritage of woe," and being of an artistic turn of mind, had spent much of her time upon the Continent; another reason being certain unhappy matters connected with the history of the family mansion. She was much struck with the singularity of a mere lad of low and poor estate thus coming to Florence, obviously from pure love of the beautiful. Nothing approaching to affection sprang up in her mind; it must be distinctly understood that her interest was of a different character entirely. But from that moment Aymer unconsciously became the subject of a certain amount of surveillance. He deemed himself despised and unnoticed by all; but there was one who had not forgotten him.

Those happy days in lovely Florence pa.s.sed like a dream. Even by living on a few fruits and a little bread alone, the scanty stock of money he had carried with him could not be made to last for ever. Barely a month of pure, unalloyed pleasure--pure in every sense of the term--and poor Aymer, who knew not how to get employment in a foreign city, was obliged to return, and Agnes Lechester saw him no more standing in rapt admiration before the famous statue.

Aymer reached Dover with five shillings in his pocket, and walked the whole of the distance, one hundred and fifty miles, to World's End, often sleeping out at night under a rick. Slight as he was in frame, he possessed considerable power of enduring fatigue, and had a way of lounging idly along the road, abstracted in thought, and so walking mile after mile, till he woke up at his destination.

They laughed him to scorn at World's End. The poor fellow wandered about in the daytime on the Downs, hiding in the fir copses, lying on the ancient earthwork entrenchment, and dreaming of his fair Florence, so many hundreds of miles away. He grew dejected and hopeless till he saw Violet. Then in time, the very destiny he deemed so harsh in confining him to that rude spot seemed even superior to the glorious possibilities he had hoped for. For Violet took the place of the marble G.o.ddess; yet there never was a beauty less like the Venus de Medici.

Lovely as are the ideals men have created for themselves, it sometimes happens that Nature presents us with a rare gem, surpa.s.sing those cold conceptions of the mind as far as the sun is above the earth.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWO.

Violet returned from a long visit to friends near London just about the time that Aymer reached home, weary and footsore, from Dover. Although The Place, as Jason Waldron's house was called, was but two miles from World's End, Aymer had never seen her. She was but rarely at home, for Waldron had given her the best education money could buy, and this necessitated much absence from her native hills. But, education and visits over, Violet, with a happy heart, returned to the dear old home at last.

It was on one lovely afternoon in May that Aymer saw her for the first time. He was lying upon the ground hidden in the brake which grew round the hedge of a fir copse on the Downs. Through this copse there ran a narrow green lane or track. He was reading his favourite little book of poetry--one that he always carried in his pocket--the tiny edition of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets, published by William James Brown, thirty years since, and now out of print.

Somehow the spirit of those sonnets and that peculiar poetry had penetrated into his mind. The little book was annotated on its narrow margin with notes in his own handwriting, and he knew the greater part of it by heart. He had just read the sonnet beginning--

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As she belied with false compare,

when the sound of horse's hoofs made him look up.

A lady, riding on a black horse, had entered the green lane, and was pa.s.sing slowly at a walk. It was Violet. Waldron. All that English beauty which seemed to pervade the poetry of wonderful Will, to Aymer's fancy appeared to be hers. She pa.s.sed him, and was gone, but her presence was left behind.