Chapter XXI

When Edward made his way, wearied and anxious, into his own room behind the courthouse, Delgado was waiting for him there, and as the judge entered, he rose quickly and uttered a few words of customary salutation in excellent Arabic. Edward Hawthorn observed at once that a strange change seemed to have come over the ragged old negro. He had lost his slouching, half-savage manner, and stood more erect, or bowed in self-respecting obeisance, with a certain obvious consciousness of personal dignity which at once reminded him of Sheik Abdullah. He noticed, too, that while the man’s English was the mere broken Creole language he had learned from the other negroes around him, his Arabic was the pure colloquial classical Arabic of the Cairo ulemas. It was astonishing what a difference this change of tongue made in the tattered old black field-labourer: when he spoke English, he was the mere ordinary plantation negro; when he spoke Arabic, he was the decently educated and perfectly courteous African Moslem.

‘You have quite surprised me, Delgado,’ Edward said, still in colloquial Arabic. ‘I had no idea there were any Africans in Trinidad who understood the language of the Koran. How did you ever come to learn it?’

The old African bowed graciously, and expanded his hands with a friendly gesture. ‘Effendi,’ he answered, ‘Allah is not wholly without his true followers in any country. Is it not written in your own book that when Elijah, the forerunner of the Prophet, cried in the cave, saying: “I alone am left of the worshippers of Allah,” the Lord answered and said unto him in his mercy: “I have left me seven thousand souls in Israel which have not bowed the knee to Baal?” Even so, Allah has his followers left even here among the infidels in Trinidad.’

‘Then you are still a Mussulman?’ Edward cried in surprise.

The old African rose again from the seat into which Edward had politely motioned him, and folding both his hands reverently in front of him, answered in a profoundly solemn voice: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’

‘But I thought—I understood—I was told that you were a teacher and preacher up yonder in the Methodist chapel.’

Delgado shrugged his shoulders with African expressiveness. ‘What can I do?’ he said, throwing open his hands sideways. ‘They have brought me here all the way from the Gold Coast. There is no mosque here, no ulema, no other Moslems. What can I do? I have to do as the other negroes do.—But see!’ and he drew something carefully from the folds of his dirty cotton shirt: ‘I have brought a Book with me. I have kept it sacredly all these years. Have you seen it? Do you know it?’

Edward opened the soiled and dog-eared but carefully treasured volume that the negro handed him. He knew it at once. It was a copy of the Koran. He turned the pages over lightly till he came to the famous chapter of the Seven Treasures; then he began to read aloud a few verses in a clear, easy, Arabic intonation.

Delgado started when he heard the young judge actually reading the sacred volume. ‘So you, too, are a Moslem!’ he cried excitedly.

Edward smiled. ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I am no Mussulman. But I have learned Arabic, and I have read the Koran.’

‘Mussulman or Christian,’ Delgado answered fervently, throwing up his head, ‘you are a servant of Allah. You have given judgment to-day like Daniel the Hebrew or like Othman Calif, the successor of the Prophet. When the great and terrible day of the Lord arrives, Allah will surely not forget the least among his servants.’

Edward did not understand the hidden meaning of that seemingly conventional pious tag, so he merely answered: ‘But you haven’t yet told me, remnant of the faithful, how you ever came to learn Arabic.’

Thus encouraged, Delgado loosed the strings of his tongue, and poured forth rapidly with African volubility the whole marvellous story of his life. The son of a petty chieftain on the Guinea coast, he had been sent in his boyhood by his father, a Mohammedan convert, to the native schools for the negroes at Cairo, where he had remained till he was over seventeen years old, and had then returned to his father’s principality. There, he had gone out to fight in some small war between two neighbouring negro chieftains, the events of which war he insisted on detailing to Edward at great length; and having been taken prisoner by the hostile party, he had at last been sold in the bad old days, when a contraband ‘ebony-trade’ still existed, to a Cuban slaver. The slaver had been captured off Sombrero Rock by an English cruiser, and all the negroes landed at Trinidad. That was the sum and substance of the strangely romantic story told by the old African to the young English barrister in the Westmoreland courthouse. Couched in his childish and ignorant negro English, it would no doubt have sounded ludicrous and puerile; but poured forth in classical Arabic almost as pure and fluent as Sheik Abdullah’s own, it was brimful of pathos, eloquence, interest, and weirdness. Yet strange and almost incredible as it seemed to Edward’s mind, the old African himself apparently regarded it as the most natural and simple concatenation of events that could easily happen to anybody anywhere.

‘And how is it,’ Edward asked at last, in profound astonishment, lapsing once more into English, ‘that you have never tried to get back to Africa?’

Delgado smiled an ugly smile, that showed all his teeth, not pleasantly, but like the teeth of a bulldog snarling. ‘Do you tink, sah,’ he said sarcastically, ‘dat dem fightin’ Dupuy is gwine to help a poor black naygur to go back to him own country? Ole-time folk has proverb; “Mongoose no help cane-rat find de way back to him burrow.”’

Edward could hardly believe the sudden transformation. In a single moment, with the change of language, the educated African had vanished utterly, and the plantation negro stood once more undisguised before him. And yet, Edward thought curiously to himself, which, after all, was the truest and most genuine of those two contrasted but united personalities—the free Mussulman, or the cowed and hopeless Trinidad field-labourer? Strange, too, that while this born African could play as he liked at fetichism or Christianity, could do obeah or sing psalms from his English hymn-book, the profoundly penetrating and absorbing creed of Islam was the only one that had sunk deep into the very inmost marrow of his negro nature. About that fact, Edward could not for a moment have the faintest hesitation. Delgado—Coromantyn or West Indian—was an undoubting Mussulman. Christianity was but a cloak with which he covered himself outwardly, to himself and others; obeah was but an art that he practised in secret for unlawful profit: Islam, the faith most profoundly and intimately adapted to the negro idiosyncrasy, was the creed that had burnt itself into his very being, in spite of all changes of outer circumstance. Not that Delgado believed his Bible the less: with the frank inconsistency of early minds, he held the two incompatible beliefs without the faintest tinge of conscious hypocrisy; just as many of ourselves, though Christian enough in all externals, hold lingering relics of pagan superstitions about horseshoes, and crooked sixpences, and unlucky days, and the mystic virtues of a cornelian amulet. Every morning he spelt over religiously a chapter in the New Testament; and every night, in the gloom of his hut, he read to himself in hushed awe a few versicles of the holy Koran.

When story and comment were fully finished, the old African rose to go. As he opened the door, Edward held out his hand for the negro to shake. Delgado, now once more the plantation labourer, hesitated for a second, fearing to take it; then at last, drawing himself up to his full height, and instinctively clutching at his loose cotton trousers, as though they had been the flowing white robes of his old half-forgotten Egyptian school-days, he compromised the matter by making a profound salaam, and crying in his clear Arabic gutturals: ‘May the blessing of Allah, the All-wise, the merciful, rest for ever on the effendi, his servant, who has delivered a just judgment!’

In another moment, he had glided through the door; and Edward, hardly yet able to realise the strangeness of the situation, was left alone with his own astonishment.

INSTINCT AND REASON.

In the following paper we propose to discard entirely the word mind as an expression of the faculty of reflection, since it is frequently misapplied or misunderstood, and its employment is vague and unsatisfactory. We prefer using a term denoting the receptivity of ideas through an organic medium by an immaterial force having the power of acting on the ingestion of ideas, and diffusing its action through the corresponding media of the nervous system: this we shall call the intellectual force, and its action is the sequence of conscious or unconscious cerebration. It is not our purpose to enter upon a consideration of the higher relations of intellectual action with so-called spiritual forces, as this would necessarily tend to the contemplation of an extra element than that more particularly implied in the attributes of instinct and reason; for by these words, in their ordinary acceptation, we recognise two separate faculties, independent, yet coexistent, and capable of harmonious co-operation, but not necessarily co-ordinate nor coexistent, since the one we contend to be the natural property of all animated beings; while the other is in part the result of transmitted intelligence, education, and enlightenment, conveyed from a higher to a lower power.

Instinct, as the more universally diffused and common endowment, is to be found throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom; and to deny its existence in one class of creation and grant it in another is illogical and contrary to the recognised and established plan of creation; it is rather a general inheritance; in some forms of life the chief or sole guide to voluntary action; while in other or higher forms, partially overlaid, and in a measure superseded, by the faculty of reason. Yet we should be, we think, altogether wrong in supposing it non-existent, because, through the cultivation and development of reasoning power, it is less easily discerned, and less fully exercised in man, than in the lower animals; for, by inquiry in the lives of uncivilised humanity, we shall find undoubted proofs of instinct in the ordinary passages of savage life, as in the choice of food; the selection of certain herbs for medicinal purposes; the capacity of tracking a path from one point to another in great distances; the avoidance of poisonous articles of diet; casual injuries; and, above all, the clinging to life which is common to all mankind. And even in civilised beings, we may discern evident traces of the same property underlying the more ostensible gift of reason, and instinctive, though otherwise unaccountable, motives leading to definite conclusions. These may take the forms of likes or dislikes towards outer objects; impulses, frequently and truly termed unreasonable, because they arise apart from reason, and are purely instinctive; hence actions that are simply the outcomes of instinct, not reconcilable to the written laws of reason or the mandates of civilisation.

In some rare instances of humanity run wild, only a few of which have been recorded, where, by some accident, a human offspring has grown up as a denizen of the forest and the companion of wild beasts, the gift of instinct serves the same purpose it fulfils in the rest of the creation; and when first brought into contact with civilisation, these outcasts have apparently evinced few, or none, of the actual attributes of reason, though these have become perceptible later on through human companionship and attention. But even centuries of cultivation and the highest hereditary advantages fail utterly to eliminate or destroy the inherent property of instinct in man; for not only, as above stated, is it displayed in the common shrinking from death and the avoidance of injury and suffering, but it manifests itself in countless other instances in daily life. Let us regard the union of sexes as one: how frequently is the choice of a partner in life made through nothing less than a blind instinct, often apart from any reasoning process, so much so, that the fact has passed into a proverb that ‘Love is blind.’ And in the common affairs of life, it is often possible to trace an independent course of action pursued without reference to a reasoning faculty, rather by a blind adherence to an unseen hidden principle, which is undoubtedly instinct guiding rather than reason. And this obedience to an unknown faculty has doubtless, in the history of the world, played important parts; especially when, in prehistoric times, man was essentially a predatory animal. On his instinctive love of fighting for personal aggrandisement, and his instinctive love of the chase for providing food and clothing, his very existence in a great measure depended. Indeed, the motives which influence and direct men’s lives are only, after all, the attributes of instinct, as we commonly observe portrayed in civilised society; thus, in one, the instinct of commercial enterprise pushes towards speculation; in another, the instinct of self-preservation induces precautions of benefit to the community; again, the instinct of need prompts measures for procuring supplies of food and clothing. On all hands, human instinct is an active agent and irrepressible.

And further, we may find the instinct of an unseen yet overruling power dominant in one form or another among the whole human race; even where, degraded by numberless superstitions, it exists among the dusky tribes of Africa, the Red American Indians, or in the countless mythological legends of nations long passed away, the instinctive belief in a God holds universal sway. In the common affairs of life, too, the teaching of instinct is displayed, as in presentiments, which, like impulses, have frequently no rational basis, but by the observance of which, our lives are not uncommonly modified in their effects and made subservient to the unseen. It is indeed possible, were the chapters of human lives actually recorded, it would be found in how many important instances and numberless occasions the exercise of instinct prevails above that of reason. It is, however, to be noted, that in proportion as the exercise of intellectual force is stimulated by education and strengthened by practice, instinctive action becomes more and more influenced by reason; and just as particular muscles, by long use, increase in bulk, so the repeated receptivity of ideas by the higher organism of the brain leads to the reflective powers being increased; and, as a natural consequence, the actions thus performed betoken the connection of ideas from which they spring, and are consequently attributed to reason.

Reason may thus be regarded, in the abstract, as the result of ideas received by the sensory ganglia, and transmitted by them to the higher organs of perception, reflected thence on the motory system by which the actions of animal life are governed, the repeated discharge of these functions constituting processes of thought or reflection.

Admitting this to be a rough outline of reasoning with its outcome action, we have a familiar example of this process displayed by members of the animal kingdom that are habitually brought into the society and companionship of man. Daily usage supplies experience, which, by the receptivity of ideas, constitutes a reasoning faculty, such as is constantly manifested in the actions of various animals, and which as much overrules mere instinct in them as it does in the higher animal man. For example, in my dog the predatory instinct is very strongly marked; but it daily passes and frequently enters butchers’ shops, sniffing under the carcases and joints for any scraps of meat, however small, yet never attempting to take advantage of a piece that is offered for sale. We have also frequently noticed, when driving on our rounds in a country practice, the horse would voluntarily slacken its speed as it approached the house of a patient, and scarcely require a check to draw up at the door. Why some human beings should betray a jealous disapproval of the recognition of reason in animals, seems to us utterly unaccountable. It is surely no insult to the Creator of all things if we grant the attribute of reasoning powers to His creatures; while it savours strongly of narrow and limited views of His beneficence to deny it.

It is the object of this paper to claim recognition and respect for the reasoning faculties of animals, particularly the class of domestic animals that are brought into daily intercourse with man. In them, more especially, we note habits of thought and traits of intelligence, apart from and above the mere prompting of instinct, that entitle them to our best consideration. But in the dog, as the friend of man, we shall naturally find the examples most ready to hand, not only of emotions akin to those of his master, but sentiments of honour, love, watchfulness, trust, duty, and obedience, courage, forbearance, self-denial, overcoming the mere instinct of hunger; also sensitiveness, shame, and jealousy, with self-devotion surpassing even the fear of death. In the horse, too, we find obedience, trust, eagerness to please, and affection. Even in cattle, we may notice attachment to home and persons, courage, patience, and docility.

We do not here propose to enter on a list of the attributes of reason to be observed in all animals; it is needless to relate the numberless authenticated instances recorded of elephants, tamed deer, gazelles, monkeys, and birds. To the thoughtful observer, proofs of intelligence and reflection, with experience, judgment, and conscientiousness are readily found, and even in the wild animals, as the rat, the fox, lions, and tigers, remarkable facts are recorded, which evidence powers of reflection and the exercise of judgment and reason. A lion, for instance, has been seen to drive away a cow from the herd, not rending it at once, but urging it by menaces, so as to secure its prey in a more convenient spot. Tigers watch in the jungle for the passing post-carriers, recognising their approach by the jingling sound of their ornaments, and knowing from experience that the wearers will afford them the necessary meal. The stories of foxes are legion; their cunning in eluding pursuit, and their prompt recognition of such chance advantages as the occasion may afford, evince a reasoning power beyond the mere impulse of instinct. Again, in rats, who has not witnessed countless proofs of intelligence, denoting forethought, prudence, and care, not only in their search for food, avoidance of snares, and concealment, but also exemplified in their mutual intercourse? A regimental officer once stationed at Aden described to the writer the skill of a party of rats in purloining every day the bread placed on the dinner-table. The servant who laid the table could not account for the disappearance of the several portions of bread placed ready beside the napkin and glasses, till, after watching some time, a small party of rats was seen to enter the room, and while some of them held the lower border of the table-cloth, another rapidly ascended, and mounting the table, dislodged the pieces of bread, which, falling off, were speedily appropriated by those below. The beaver has been often cited as exhibiting an almost human aptitude in the construction of dams and the formation of its lodge, and this appears more as the result of deductive reasoning, taught, no doubt, by experience, and transmitted by hereditary descent. In birds, the Corvidæ afford striking instances of the exercise of judgment and reflection, especially in the habits of rooks and ravens; we might add also magpies. But space prevents us from enlarging on this point.

The common wild bee constructs its nest in a mossy bank, and the comb is formed of rude circular cells arranged in a small group. The hive-bee, whose thickly peopled home affords but a limited space, constructs its comb of closely packed hexagonal cells, an arrangement which gives the greatest room for each cell in a circumscribed area. It accidentally occurred to the writer, many years since, to put aside a large box of pills closely packed, and left, without being opened, through the summer. When at last examined, it was found that the pills had become closely impacted together, and each individual pill was compressed in the form of a hexagon, remarkably resembling in outline the waxen cells of the hive-bee. The conduct of ants, in their communications by signalling to each other, evinces something more than blind instinct; otherwise, how can we explain the deliberate action which results from information conveyed by signals, and the plan of operations conducted on a scale beyond all relation to the size of the insignificant insects by which they are performed?

Mankind is too apt to monopolise the claim to reason, and allows to the lower animal world the gift of instinct as a kind of compromise; whereas, it has been abundantly shown that he shares also in the gift of instinct, and they likewise have a fair claim to the exercise of reason. There is nothing inconsistent in this view with the great plan of creation, for all classes of animals partake of the elements of the human frame in their general physical construction adapted to particular requirements, as anatomists have shown that man in his development from the ovum passes through the several grades of the animal kingdom by different homologies to the perfect human frame. And though in him reason assumes its highest condition, yet in the various types of his race there are as widely differing degrees of reasoning power, from the tree-dwelling tribes of Central India and the Lilliputian inhabitants of the forests of Borneo, to the highly educated and more amply endowed members of European and transatlantic society; and as, in the human race, reason exercises a paramount and prevailing sway, under which all other forces are subject, so instinct remains behind, still an element of humanity, though less conspicuous in the higher culture of civilisation than in the primitive savage, and more evident still in the lower animal world; though even here subjected to reasoning power, according, in a manner, to the amount of education and enlightenment received by these at the hand of man. Instinct belongs no more to the brute beast than to man, and reason is the heritage of both.

THE WILL OF MRS ANNE BOWDEN.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAP. I.

‘Tipsy!’ I muttered to myself with a scornful glance, and a strong feeling of disgust, as I hurriedly passed him by. Such would be, I suppose, the almost invariable exclamation of a young man whom circumstances combined with taste to keep in the path of strictest temperance, on seeing an elderly and prosperous-looking gentleman lurching unevenly along a street in the City between four and five o’clock one damp February afternoon. ‘Tipsy!’ I said, and passed on; yet, though so sad a spectacle had neither pleasure nor interest for me, I turned, after I had gone a few steps, to look once more at the supposed inebriate. That one glance showed me that my hasty judgment of his condition had been as unjust as it was uncharitable. That look of pain and distress, those starting eyes, the heavy beads of perspiration on the brow, were due not to intoxication, but to illness. As I looked at him, he stumbled, tottered on a step or two, and would have fallen, had I not, in two hasty strides, reached his side and caught him in my arms. A large envelope, apparently containing some heavy document, fell from his nerveless hand at the moment of his collapse. I picked it up, and hastily thrust it into the pocket of my overcoat, still supporting my helpless burden. The act was instinctive, almost unconscious, and no sooner done than forgotten; and the next moment my mind was wholly occupied with an appeal to one of the many young men who were hurrying by, as I myself had been, to catch the train at Broad Street, to expend a few minutes in calling a cab for me and the unfortunate man who had so suddenly become my charge.

I drove him to the nearest hospital, and left him there, stating in a few words the little I knew of his sudden attack, and the chance which had thrown him on my protection.

‘It is apoplexy,’ said the house-surgeon, in whose care I left him. ‘Doubtless, he is some speculator who has risked too much in a shaky Company, and whose head has given way under the shock of losing his money. We have cases like that here pretty often, especially in times of long-continued depression of trade. Will you wait and see if he has on him a visiting card or anything bearing his name and address?’

I declined to stay longer than was necessary, for I had promised to spend that evening with my fellow-clerk Atherton, and did not want to be late for my engagement with the lad, for whom I had a sort of elder-brotherly affection. But I promised to call at the hospital next day and inquire for my protégé; and departed, the richer by what I suppose would be regarded as a virtuous action, and the poorer by the eighteenpence I had paid for the cab-fare.

It now seems to me to have been despicably, ludicrously selfish to have thought so little of the fate of the man I had left in such dangerous plight at the hospital, and so much of that expenditure of eighteenpence. I hope that I am not naturally a miser, yet I fear some niggardly instincts were dawning in me at that time, as, indeed, is almost inevitable in a young man who, having passed his early years under the shadow of that most wearing of sorrows—debt, is desirous of not merely living within, but effecting some savings from, an income of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. I recall now that I determined to do without tobacco for a week; and with this resolution in my mind, I hurried to the Broad Street station, _en route_ for Atherton’s lodgings in Camden Town.

I could not have told at that time what attracted me so strongly to Gerald Atherton, any more than Olivia could have explained the prophetic fascination which drew her to Viola. But there was an atmosphere of youth and freshness about the boy—he was the youngest of all the clerks in our office, a bright-eyed lad, not yet eighteen—that had a refreshing influence on me. I was not old myself—just twenty-four—but eight years’ life in a City office, coming after a boyhood which had had many of the anxieties of middle age, made me feel almost patriarchal compared with my joyous and inexperienced junior. There was, too, a similarity in the circumstances of our lives which tended to friendship.

‘Only, you know, Langham,’ said the boy one day, early in our acquaintance, when we were speaking on the subject, ‘my responsibilities are greater than yours; I have May to look after. A sister is a great anxiety, and when she happens to be your twin-sister, you feel that you are in a special way bound to take care of her.’

‘Where is your sister now?’ I asked.

‘Not far away. She is companion to an old lady at Hampstead. That’s why I live in Camden Town, because it is comparatively near; and I can go occasionally to see May, and even sometimes have a visit from her at my lodgings.’

‘Companion to an old lady!’ I repeated. ‘That’s a dreary life for a young girl.’

‘May doesn’t seem to dislike it; and Mrs Bowden treats her very kindly. The plague of her life is the continual espionage of the old lady’s relations—or rather her dead husband’s relations; she seems to have none of her own—who are quite convinced that my poor little sister’s courtesy to her employer—she hasn’t it in her to be uncivil to a boa-constrictor, the little darling!—is inspired by mercenary motives. That annoys her; but as we are two young people alone in the world, without a penny except what we earn, we must put up with disagreeables—May, with the suspicions of those greedy waiters on dead men’s shoes; and I, with getting the blame of everybody else’s blunders as well as my own. Really, the undeserved or only half-deserved scoldings I get, sometimes irritate me fearfully—and then at times I feel I’d do anything for a good game at cricket. I don’t think I could bear it all, if you didn’t stand by me, Langham.’

‘Who wouldn’t stand by a manly boy like you, Gerald!’ I protested, laughing.

‘Boy, my friend!’ cried Gerald with one of those bright merry glances, accompanied with an upward toss of the head, which always came upon me with the effect of a sunbeam—‘boy, indeed! I am a City man, sir, and demand to be spoken to with respect!’

‘Moreover,’ I went on, ‘the circumstances of your early life are so similar to those of my own childhood, that I felt interested in you as soon as I knew them. My widowed mother, like yours, wore out her life in a long struggle with poverty, and died just when I was about to cease being a burden to her. The only difference is that my mother was doubly overweighted by having to pay off debts of my father’s youth, contracted before he ever met her.’

‘Did not your father’s family take the responsibility even of those?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘My grandfather, after bringing up his son to no profession, and encouraging him in extravagance, cast him off on his marriage with a penniless girl, and left him to sink or swim as best he could. I imagine that my father cannot have been possessed of much moral courage, or he would not have submitted to live on the earnings of my mother’s music-teaching. But he had never been accustomed to work, and his health was bad. He died when I was three years old. Then my mother made an appeal to my grandfather to do something for me, if not for her, or at least take the responsibility of those few hundred pounds of debt which he could have paid without feeling himself a whit poorer, but which formed a millstone round her neck. But the rich Liverpool merchant, who was ready to subscribe lavishly to ostentatious charities, refused to help his daughter-in-law by a penny, and refused in _such_ a letter! My mother never showed it to me, but I found it in her desk after her death. I keep it still, and to this day my blood boils if I read its insulting words.’

‘And did your grandfather never soften?’

‘He gave no sign of it; and on his death, he left all he possessed to my aunt, my father’s half-sister.’

‘And she?’

‘I confess,’ said I, ‘that she did make some advances towards me, but they came at an unlucky moment. My mother had just died; and from the letters I found after her death, I had learned for the first time with what cruelty she had been treated. Besides, I had lately obtained my first situation, and was disposed to be aggressively independent. So I declined my aunt’s invitation to visit her with a rudeness which no one would be guilty of but an inexperienced boy at the age when he is most desirous of being thought a man.’

‘I suppose that was the end of it all?’

‘Not quite. Six months later, after I had come to London, I received another letter from my aunt, in which she stated that she had intended to adopt me and make me her heir, if I had not so insolently rejected her friendly overtures; but that I need no longer hope for anything from her, as she was about to be married shortly. And she added—rather vindictively, I thought—that as her future husband was considerably younger than herself, he would probably survive her and inherit all her property. I fancy she thought to excite in me an avaricious regret for my previous coldness; but in truth my only idea was that in making her become the wife of a man much her junior, spite and loneliness were combining to lead her into a great folly; for, as she was considerably older than my father, she must by that time have been quite a middle-aged woman, and I suspected the youthful husband of fortune-hunting. That was the last I ever heard of my only surviving relative. I don’t know what name she bore after her marriage, nor even if she still lives. I stand quite alone.’

‘Poor old man!’ said the boy affectionately. ‘Rich as you are—from my point of view, for your salary is twice as large as mine—I am better off than you. I don’t stand alone; I have May.’

‘I should think a sister was only an additional anxiety,’ I replied.

‘True; but still there’s a selfish comfort in the thought that somebody cares for you. At least, I like it. I’m a sentimental sort of animal, who likes being petted—not a calm, self-contained creature like you.’

I doubt if I deserved Atherton’s epithets. I felt very lonely at times, and the boy’s affection—for he was sincerely attached to me, and had a refreshing un-English readiness to display his attachment—was charming. I told him more of my history and feelings than I had ever before confided to any one; for he was as sympathetic as a woman, while possessing a discretion reputed to be rare among feminine creatures.

In truth I was greatly attached to Gerald, and I was quite distressed this afternoon at the thought of being late for my engagement with him. It was his birthday, and we were to take tea together at his lodgings, and then go to the theatre, and I feared that my delay might interfere with our plans.

But it was another and more cheerful accident than that of being late that was to prevent our occupying the pit at the Lyceum that night. I had expected to see Gerald’s face looking for me from the window of his sitting-room, as I approached the little street with the long name—Mount Edgcumbe Terrace—where he resided; but I was surprised, and for the moment bewildered, to find _two_ faces gazing with interest at my approaching figure—two faces so alike in feature and colouring, that though a moment’s reflection convinced me that they must belong to Gerald Atherton and his twin-sister, I could not have said which of them was my friend’s. Each had the same bright, laughing, dark-blue eyes, the same short, curling, dark-brown hair, the same contour and expression, and at this moment the same merry and mischievous smile. I thought I had never in my life seen a prettier sight than these two joyous, youthful figures standing side by side.

‘Confess, Langham, that you didn’t know which was who, when you saw us just now,’ cried Gerald as I entered the room.

I admitted that I had been puzzled for the moment; ‘though,’ I added, ‘I am sure that a longer glimpse would have enabled me to distinguish Miss Atherton from you.’

‘Yes,’ returned Gerald, ‘I know that my poor little sister is only a plain-looking likeness of my bewitching self, that could not deceive any one for more than a moment.’

Miss Atherton made a little _moue_ of protest at her brother as she said: ‘Mr Langham only means that the stool on which I was standing, to make me look as tall as you, was so shaky, that I shouldn’t have been able to keep on it a minute longer.’

Then I tried again to utter a complimentary remark, which Gerald again appropriated, whereupon we all laughed and were friends at once.

I had known nothing of the effect of a woman’s presence in the house since I had been old enough to appreciate it; it was therefore a revelation to me to note how May Atherton glorified that dingy parlour in Camden Town. As she moved to and fro, making the tea-table in some nameless way a thousand times more attractive than the landlady knew how to do, my eyes followed her with a persistence which would have been embarrassing to her had she been troubled with the least degree of self-consciousness; but of all the women I have ever known, May Atherton was the most completely free from vanity and all the faults that accompany it. At present her thoughts were occupied solely with the pleasure of being in her brother’s society, and the desire to make things brighter for him and his friend, whom, for Gerald’s sake, she accepted as her friend also.

‘I really feel as if I knew you quite well, Mr Langham,’ she said, ‘for Gerald has spoken to me often of you; and I am so glad to feel that my boy has a good thoughtful friend, older than himself, to advise and help him.’

The motherly air with which May uttered the last words sat prettily if strangely on her extreme youth, and indeed between the pair of children there were a hundred touches of reciprocal tenderness and protection, which were very pleasant to look at, though they made me feel very lonely and a little envious. Not that I had any cause to feel neglected; for Gerald and his sister united in making much of me—he for my own sake, she for her brother’s sake. Only for your brother’s sake, were you so kind to me then, sweet May; afterwards, it was, I hope, for a more personal reason!

I could spend much time in describing that happy evening; but perhaps, repeated to less sympathetic ears, the wit might not seem so witty nor the wisdom so wise as they did to us. At last, however, May said with a sigh that she must go home; and Gerald proposed that I as well as he should escort her to the door of the ‘ogress’s castle.’

‘But you must not call Mrs Bowden an ogress,’ protested May, laying a hand upon her brother’s shoulder; ‘she is very kind to me. Was it not thoughtful of her to let me come and spend this evening with you, because I had mentioned a week ago that it was our birthday? She is always so much interested in what I say of you—and she likes to hear about you too, Mr Langham,’ added the girl, turning to me.

‘About me!’ I repeated. ‘How does she know of my existence?’

‘Oh, I have mentioned your name often, in speaking of Gerald and his friends, and she frequently questions me about you. I suppose she likes you for Gerald’s sake, and Gerald for mine.’

‘Don’t deceive yourself, mademoiselle,’ interrupted the irrepressible Gerald. ‘Her liking for you is the mere anticipation of the passion that will fill her when she sees me. She cares for you only as Olivia did for Viola before she saw Sebastian.’

How had the boy hit upon that comparison? I had conversely been thinking for three hours past that my liking for Sebastian had been the mere anticipation of my love for Viola!

At her brother’s words, May laughed and shook her head. ‘Don’t _you_ deceive yourself, dear. There is no rival to “dear Henry” in Mrs Bowden’s heart.’

‘Who is “dear Henry?”’ I asked.

‘The late Mr Bowden, and the one vexation of my life.’

‘How can that be, if he is dead?’

‘Alas! he has left innumerable relatives, who haunt his widow and sing his praises. They profess to be actuated only by exceptional devotion to his memory and by affection for his widow; and I suppose it is only the natural perversity of my soul that reminds me of the fact that Mrs Bowden is very rich and has no relatives of her own. Perhaps it is their strong and very plainly displayed jealousy of my supposed influence over my employer that makes me think so uncharitably of them.’

‘And does Mrs Bowden believe in their professions?’

‘I don’t know; but she is a very shrewd old lady; and I suspect her of finding some pleasure in giving each of “dear Henry’s” relatives in turn the impression that he or she is to be her heir, and then dashing their hopes to the ground. To-day, she has delighted her husband’s brother, and will doubtless drive all the other relatives to despair, by giving him Mr Bowden’s favourite seal, a thing she cherishes greatly. This is supposed to be almost equivalent to making a will in his favour. I suppose it’s malicious,’ said May with one of her brightest smiles, ‘but I can’t help getting some fun out of it too. You see, she has expressly stated that she has no intention of dividing her property; one individual is to inherit all, so the anxiety of each is intense, though concealed. I really think the only relief they all have from their dissimulated hatred of each other is their open hatred of me.’

‘Poor little girl! How can even the most prejudiced of fortune-hunters hate you? It is hard to bear,’ said Gerald tenderly, taking his sister’s hand in his.

But the shade which had for a moment darkened her face vanished as she saw it reflected in his. ‘That is only a little trouble, dear,’ she said gently, ‘so little, that if I had any harder ones, I should not notice it; and by way of compensation, I am sure that Mrs Bowden herself really loves and trusts me.’

We were very merry as we walked up to the old house in Well Walk, Hampstead, where Miss Atherton lived. A pretty, picturesque place it seemed in the dim spring moonlight; and May grew quite animated in telling me of the quaint relics of past centuries which survived beside the modern comfort of its furnishing. The path between the garden door and that of the house had been covered with glass and made into a conservatory, where even at this early time of the year flowers and rare ferns spread their leaves. Gerald and I watched May pass within the door, feeling—at least I did—like Moore’s unfortunate Peri to whom the doors of heaven were shut. At the inner door she turned and waved her hand, sending a smile of farewell down the flowery vista. Then she disappeared, and suddenly the night grew darker.

I had all this time—so selfish a thing is pleasure!—forgotten the unfortunate gentleman whose sudden illness I had witnessed; but as Gerald and I were walking down Haverstock Hill, after parting with May, the thought of him suddenly came to my mind, and at the same moment I recollected the packet I had picked up and put in my pocket. I narrated the incident of the afternoon to my friend, and went back with him to his rooms to examine the thickly-filled envelope which had come into my possession. There was on it neither address nor other superscription; one side was soiled by falling in the mud of the street; on the other was a large seal in red wax, on which I deciphered, in old English characters, the letters H. L. B., below a mailed hand holding a dagger, and above the motto, ‘What I hold, I hold fast.’

I determined to take the packet to the hospital next day, when I should go to inquire for the invalid, and either give it to him, or, if his condition rendered him incapable of taking care of it, intrust it to the house-surgeon. It was not permitted to me to fulfil my intention. When, after my day’s work, I went to the hospital, I found that the patient in whom I was interested had been removed.

‘We found out his name and address from some letters in his pocket,’ said the house-surgeon, ‘and sent a message to his family. His son came immediately and removed him.’

‘What is the name?’ I asked.

‘I forget. Collins or Cotton, or something like that; but I can’t speak with any certainty. He was a solicitor, I remember.’

‘Is not his name on the hospital books?’

‘No. He was here so short a time, that it was never entered.’

‘How very unfortunate!’ I exclaimed.

‘Why? Was it of importance that you should see him?’ asked the house-surgeon, an easygoing and careless youth, who had evidently felt hitherto that my interrogatories were tiresome and unnecessary, but was now roused to attention by the fervour of my tone.

‘It may be of considerable importance to him. He dropped a packet, apparently containing documents, when he fell yesterday. I picked it up, and forgot to deliver it to you when I left him in your charge. It may be essential to him to regain immediate possession of it.’

The young doctor was sufficiently interested now, but he could do nothing; he had no certain recollection of anything connected with his patient. I was forced to content myself with leaving with him my name, Richard Langham, and the address of Messrs Hamley and Green, in whose employ I was, that he might refer to me if any inquiry was made about the packet.

I doubted not that I should within a few days be relieved of the charge of it; but days and weeks passed into months, and that sealed envelope remained in my possession, and lay like an undeserved burden on my conscience.

THE OLD PRIORY GARDEN.

The whispering May wind stirs the hawthorn and lilac in the old priory garden, and brings great gushes of delicious scent past the window, and fills the room with sweetness. All the last month the weather has been fitful and changeable—rain and storm, sunshine and cloud, dust and east winds; but after two days of soaking downpour and wild west wind, the morning of the last day of May has dawned in the full glorious beauty of late spring. Thrushes and blackbirds vie with each other in song, sweet and shrill, clear and inspiring; a modest siskin whistles its little monotonous roulade; now and then, a few notes of the shy linnet are heard; a robin is feeding its brood close by; swallows and martins are darting about in all directions; in the apple blossoms are hundreds of bees, making a dense dreamy music; while their compatriot the humble-bee booms along with his big velvety body shining and gleaming in the sun.

What a splendid creature! See, it settles close at hand. Turn it over with a grass bent. With a surprised buzz, it rights itself. Again and yet again it turns over, seemingly staring to see the cause of its overthrow. Draw the bent lightly across its back—two legs are instantly raised to brush off the unwelcome touch. A second time the same; a third, and the bent is fairly clutched by all the gummy legs, and retained under its body. It crawls up a stick, and with angry bustle, goes booming off.

One does not realise summer is so close upon us, when May is such a capricious maiden, till a morning like this wakes one up to the conviction that in twenty-four more days the sun will have reached its altitude, and soon will begin the shortening days again. The garden here is quaint, and quite unlike the generality of town gardens. From the square of paved court rises one step, and then a stretch of grass, an oval flower-bed each side, a path up the centre; sloping grass banks supported with large stones, where huge bunches of primroses spring from the niches. Along the sides are rockeries with hardy trailing plants—stonecrop, periwinkle both major and minor, white and blue, with variegated foliage; sweet woodruff, violets, and a mass of ferns, whose delicate light silver green fronds are daily uncurling into beauty. The wallflowers are in full bloom. Later on, the germander speedwell will open its bright evanescent flowers, that, though only a wild plant, makes such splendid masses of colour when cultivated, with the silver-foil in bunches near it.

Up a short flight of stone steps, with ferns on each side, under an ivy-covered archway, and on another plat of grass, with a long flower-bed, with trellis-work at the back, covered with the red and yellow honeysuckle, and a huge mass of climbing roses, the rare delicate ‘maiden blush,’ which in a fortnight will be heavy with bloom. More rockeries and ferns, lilies of the valley and forget-me-nots under the syringa bushes, and sweet-brier. In another corner are tall irises and great white lilies, with here and there a bunch of orange tiger lily. Southernwood, lavender, and rosemary, variegated balm in profusion. Soon the fragrant pinks, and their aristocratic relations the carnations, will be in bloom; and the rich velvety pansies, that are now so large and perfect, will dwindle as the sun gains more power, and the strawberries begin to crimson on the sunny south beds; and the geraniums and verbenas and purple heliotropes take the place of auriculas and the narcissus.

Round the square of vegetable garden is a wide path, with beds sloping to the walls, one of which is of good brick, with plum, cherry, and other fruit-trees trained along it. The other is the real old stone wall belonging to the ‘antient’ priory, that formerly stood close by. At one time, this wall was covered with a dense mass of ivy, in which colonies of sparrows built their nests, reared their young, and flourished mightily. Snails, slugs, and wood-lice swarmed, and beetles in endless variety. One wild day in a wet February, part of the old wall came down, breaking up the trees, and cutting up the borders and turf. It was patched up again; and just as the spinach was fit to cut and lettuce planted out, there was a soaking rain one night, and in the morning the old wall was again prostrate over all our spring plantings. Such a wreck it was, and disturbed our equilibrium for days. It was soon set straight as regards the stonework; but it was weeks before the place looked itself again; and that crumbling old wall was watched with suspicion all summer. Then outdoor life coming to an end, we ceased to think on the subject.

October following was mild and balmy for the first few days; then the wind shifted suddenly to the east, and four or five nights of sharp frost came, that turned all the foliage into a golden glory, a steady downpour of a week culminating with a tremendous wind-storm. It blew and whistled and stormed till every leaf was swept away into space, going no one knew whither, howling and whistling round the chimney-stacks till night was made terrible. During the worst of the storm, in the early morning, down came the old wall again from end to end, cutting up turf, breaking down the fruit-trees, and overwhelming the shrubs and rockeries in a general wreck. For many weeks did the state of chaos continue; wretched drenched fowl made themselves at home in the flower-beds, and forlorn-looking ducks wandered across, and feasted on the host of slugs and fat snails and beetles that the pouring rain had tempted out of the nooks and crevices of the stones and mass of ivy. It was built up at last; but little or nothing could be done to repair the ravages done to the garden till the end of March, except making a general clearance of the rubbish, and one of the quaintest of shady corners seemed lost for ever.

But after a few fine balmy days and a spell of sunshine, curious things happened under the rebuilt wall: stray snowdrops appeared in places where none had been heretofore; a bunch of pure white crocuses unfolded their blossoms to the sun in one place; two or three stray ‘stars of Bethlehem’ in another. Later on, a single stem shot up of yellow Lent lilies; bunches of tormentilla with double yellow blooms, and clover with deep red-brown leaves and big snowy balls of flowers; the mouse-ear, hawkweed, and trailing moneywort. Down amongst the remains of the common turf came a thick growth of parsley-piert with its close fine-edged leaves, and cuckoo-pint with delicate pinky-white flowers. On the wall between the new mortar and old stones came little fibres of crimson-tipped moss, stonecrop (_Sedum_), sandwort, pellitory of the wall, and in one place a single plant of flax, with its pale-blue flowers and long spear-like leaves; without mentioning the more common chickweed, groundsel, wild feverfew and plantain, yellow wallflowers, and many different sorts of grass and mosses. There is no doubt most of these plants had come from seeds brought to the nests in the ivy by the birds, and had lain there in the dry rubble for years, some, perhaps, for generations, simply because there was not moisture enough to cause the seeds to sprout and germinate. ‘If a grain of wheat fall to the ground and _live_, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit,’ which seems enigmatical till pondered over and thought out. How often have the gray-cowled monks strolled round this old garden, marking how this tree promised a bounteous crop of cherries, luscious morrellas, that, when ‘cunninglie steeped in spirits with due proportion of mace, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar,’ makes a liqueur fit for the drink of princes; or noting how the gnarled old apple-trees—then young and in full bearing—were covered with garlands of pink-and-white blossoms, that promised later in the autumn a rich harvest of golden fruit: ladies’-fingers, Ribstone pippins, codlings, golden russets, Blenham orange, with sourings for winter keeping; also the frail blooms of the pear-trees, jargonelle, Marie Louise, baking pears of enormous size, with the rich, juicy ‘bishop’s thumbs’ and brown burées.

Now, a young lay-brother will come to pick dainty bits of herbs for flavouring the soups and stews, with their accompaniment of esculent vegetables, for, in those old palmy days, seldom did their genial faces have ‘anchorite’ written on them. Go to the extreme end of the garden, and turn round; what a delightful view meets the gaze! Down in the hollow lies the sleepy little town, with its quaint gabled houses, and nearly imbedded in a wealth of lime-trees. Far away, when the wind is high and the atmosphere clear, are seen ranges of fertile hills for miles, or the distance is wrapped in a soft purple haze that is still more lovely; and over all this, the deep blue sky with fleecy white clouds, and the blessed sunshine pouring down over all the wealth of buds and blossoms, singing birds, and busy humming bees.

I came across, the other day, an account of what a naturalist found in a square of backyard nearly uncultivated. Why, such a place as this old priory garden would give him pleasure and profit for months, nay, years, for not a tenth part of all the natural lovelinesses has been exhausted yet. Some other time, perhaps, I shall tell something more of what I find here as the years glide onward.

A POSSIBLE LEGAL REFORM.

Counsel and solicitors have never been so friendly as brother professionals should be, and never will be until ‘amalgamation’ is an accomplished fact. They have many causes of difference—some real, many fancied. In all of them, jealousy is a great factor; for, whatever may be thought to the contrary, each branch of the legal profession _is_ jealous of the privileges of the other. The barrister wants personal relations with his client, which would mean very great loss to the solicitor; and the solicitor wants to be allowed a right of audience before the Supreme Court, which would certainly rob the barrister of half his fees. Hence, there is a straining between the two limbs of the law, which causes many hard things to be said of both.

One of the most real grievances of solicitors is in the matter of fees. Two solicitors brief counsel to appear in two cases. Both cases come on for hearing at the same time in different courts. Obviously, the chosen advocate cannot attend to both, and so one is left to the tender mercies of a half-fledged junior, whose well-meant efforts often result in the loss of his client’s case. That such should be the fact is inevitable, so long as the public will persist in preferring the possible services and slight attention of an ‘eminent’ counsel, obtained at a fancy price, to the certain attention and careful study bestowed upon his case by a less eminent, but often equally able, counsel at a fair price. But the real ground of complaint is that when a case is thus murdered through its conductor’s inability to attend to it, that conductor still retains his fee. He has never, in fact, the smallest idea of disgorging a fee, even when paid on a brief upon which he has never appeared. Why should he? It was not his fault that he could not do the work he was retained for; he _has_ given valuable time to getting up the case (though he certainly need not have done so, as it turned out); and—strongest argument of all—he does not lose custom by thus publicly fattening on the unearned increment. So he has continued to ‘unearn’ it; and the solicitor—whose interests are of course his client’s—has continued to writhe under the open injustice thus sanctioned by the etiquette of that most honourable of professions, the Bar of England.

But at last a ray of hope has found its way into the long-suffering solicitor’s breast. The chink through which the welcome ray has come has been pierced by a certain Mr Norton, a solicitor. It happened in this wise: Mr Norton briefed and feed ‘an eminent leading counsel’ in a certain case; but the retained one failed to appear upon the trial. Mr Norton felt hurt; but, being a practical man, an idea struck him. He wrote to the eminent one, pointing out that it would not be altogether an iniquitous proceeding if his fees were returned. The eminent one made courteous reply that ‘he would be happy to return the fees if he could find any precedent for doing so.’ This would have ‘stumped’ most solicitors; but Mr Norton rose to the occasion. He at once laid the whole matter before the Attorney-general; and that luminary expressed his ‘views and usage’ to be ‘to return so much of the brief fee as exceeds the amount which would have been proper if the brief had been simply a case for opinion.’ This means the return in such cases of by far the greater portion of the fees; and such return will, if it become a ‘precedent,’ be most acceptable not only to solicitors, but to the public at large. In this particular case, the counsel referred to, having found a precedent, and being unable to eat his own words, at once sent Mr Norton a ‘cheque for the difference;’ and Mr Norton has certainly done well to make the matter public. All barristers now have a sound precedent for doing an act of justice; and it is to be hoped that they, as a body, will not neglect to follow it. So the profession will escape a certain amount of ill repute which has long tarnished, in the eyes at least of envious persons, its very honourable ’scutcheon.

DEAD FLOWERS.

BY ALEXANDER ANDERSON.

Those simple daisies which you view,
Last year, when summer winds did wave,
And clouds were white with sunshine, grew
Upon the Ettrick Shepherd’s grave.

But not of him they speak, nor draw
My thoughts back to that early time
When, rapt in that one dream, he saw
The shadows lift from fairy clime.

Nor yet of Ettrick, as it goes
To join the Yarrow’s haunting tone,
That each may murmur as it flows
A music something like his own.

Nor even of Saint Mary’s Lake,
Amid those hills from which he drew
The legendary Past, to wake
Its far-off melodies anew.

No; not of these I think, though each
Is rich in spells of magic song;
These daisies touch a chord to which
All sadder thoughts of death belong.

And so I turn, and for a space
Within the sacred Past I stand,
To feel the sunshine of a face,
The kindly pressure of a hand.

All just the same as when she[2] gave
These dead flowers as a welcome thing.
Alas! and now upon her grave
The grass is thinking of the spring.

It seems but yesterday since then—
How slow, yet swift, the days have sped—
And here, beside the streets of men,
She slumbers with the holy dead.

She should have lain among the hills,
In some old churchyard, where each sound
Is of the wind, the tinkling rills,
And cry of lonely things around;

Or where old ballads grew to life,
Far back within the shadowy years,
That sang of rugged Border strife,
Or passions born of love and tears.

For loyal to their old-world chords,
She felt her heart in unison
With all their rich but simple words,
That took new music from her own.

True woman of the faithful heart,
And kindly as the summer air;
A nature such as could impart
Its genial presence everywhere.

In her the friend was friend indeed;
A larger sense of sympathy,
That overstepped the pales of creed,
Drew her to all in charity.

And now this death that waits for each,
An unseen shade by all, has come;
The Scottish music of her speech
So sweet, is now for ever dumb.

So pass the leal ones of this earth,
To leave with us a holier claim;
To touch us with their spirit-birth,
And whisper they are still the same.

These simple flowers of withered hue,
Last year, when summer winds did wave,
Were plucked by her because they grew
Upon the Ettrick Shepherd’s grave.

This year, when summer pours her light,
And daisies are to beauty blown,
Some hands will pluck their blossoms white,
Because they grow upon her own.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Jean Logan Watson, author of _Bygone Days in our Village, Round the Grange Farm_, and other books full of quaint simplicity and freshness, and breathing on every page the delightful personality of the writer. Her sudden death was deeply felt by a large circle of friends, and has left a blank that can never be filled up. She died 7th October 1885, and sleeps in the Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh.—A. A.

EASTER SUNDAY.

It is not perhaps generally known that Easter Sunday falls this year on the latest possible date on which it can fall—April 25. It is only once in every century that Easter falls on so late a date as this; the last year on which it did so was in 1734, and the next occasion will be in 1943. The earliest date for Easter is March 22, and this has occurred once only in this century—in 1818; and it may safely be said that none now living will see the next similar occurrence, for it will not take place until the year 2000. In fixing Easter, the general rule is, that Easter Sunday is always the first Sunday after the full moon on or next after 21st March.

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Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.

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