my own stout and sinewy arms and rather athletic frame, and came to the conclusion that, after all, digging, or felling trees, or hunting, was the sort of thing for which Nature had clearly intended me.

In a word, I was used up, and wanted a new and freshening life. I envied my Italian friend his schemes and his aspirations, and thought I should dearly like to have an oppressed nationality to plot for, and if needs were, die for; and I really wished I could, even through his influence, get up within myself a sort of bastard philo-Italianism, and fling myself into the cause of Italy as so many Englishmen were beginning to do even then, and as Byron and Stanhope, and Hastings and Finlay, and so many others, had done for Greece. But I was never much of a politician; and I was so sick of the stage that I recoiled from the notion of converting my individual life into a new piece of acting. I had long come to think, and I do still think it seriously and profoundly, that nothing in life-no, nothing whatever-is so enviable as the capacity to merge one's individuality and very existence wholly in some great cause, and to heed no personal sacrifice which is offered in its name. I don't much care whether the cause be political, or artistic, or scientific, or what not; let there but be a cause to which the individual is subjected, in which he freely loses himself, and I hold that man happy, if man can ever be happy at all. Never had it been my fortunate fate to have found such an object. My own profession never gave it to me. Therefore I accounted existence so far a failure. I had tried many modes of activity and amusement, and distraction and enjoyment, and they had done nothing for me, because I had never gone deeply enough into any path of life, or thought, or work; I had never had a cause to live for, and I might as well not have lived at all. If I have any faith left in me, it is that faith in a cause, as the soul, the grace, the beauty, the purpose of life.

I will seek then, I said to myself, a new activity. I will steep life in freshness, and recolour it in the dyes of new sensations. Ich will mein Glück probiren-marschiren!

CHAPTER XXI.

EXILE AND OUTCAST.

YES; I began to think seriously of going to the United States, making my way out westward, buying land, and turning farmer. Vague and delightful visions of the forest scenery of the New World filled me; visions of woods where tints, which in our European region we know of only in manufactured colours, mingle and contrast in the living glory of the autumnal foliage. Dreams of the rolling prairie, and the deep wine-coloured brooklet, and the rushing river, were in my mind and before my senses. It seemed to me that nothing but the fresh bosom of the young mother-Nature of the West could revive my exhausted and flagging temperament. I was fast growing more and more

weary of life as I found it and as I made it. Heat and crowd, and midnight suppers, or lonely midnight grumblings and reflections, perpetual excitement, fatigue, overwork, too much wine, and the almost incessant cigar,-these began to take effect just as I might reasonably have expected. I found that my voice already was beginning to show signs of suffering. Nobody else noticed it yet; but I could not be deceived. I consulted a medical man, who recommended rest and country air; and I thought of acting on his advice soon-some time, perhaps, when the season was over, or next year, or whenever convenient.

Meanwhile I went on as before; I mixed a great deal with joyous company of all kinds. A positive necessity for distraction of some sort seemed to have seized hold of me, and it even appeared as if distraction relieved my mind and improved my physical condition. The resolve to give up the stage and go to America, supplied a delightful excuse and temptation. It would be clearly a waste of power, an unnecessary vexation, to put myself under heavy restraint just now, when so short a time was to bring about a total change of life and habits. The fresh manly life of the New World would soon restore me to that physical strength and brightness of temperament which I used to enjoy. No use, then, in beginning any reform before I undertake the enterprise which shall change scene and habits and life altogether.

I sometimes even thought of the expediency of marrying and ranging myself; taking a companion with me to America to be a backwoodsman's wife. But I always ended by dismissing the idea as one that brought up a sensation of repulsiveness with it. To begin with, I knew nobody whom I would or could marry. Most of the women I knew were singers or actresses; and I saw most of them too closely to be likely to fall in love with any, even if a deeper and earlier feeling did not absorb my heart. There was one to whom at times I did feel myself slightly attracted; she was the little Frenchwoman with whom I had had a sort of flirtation on the evening when I otherwise made a fool of myself at Christina's apartments. She did not discourage my attentions whenever they were offered, and I did sometimes pay court to her. She was young, and very pretty. She was not witty or intellectual, or gifted with any conversational power beyond what mere animal vivacity and flow of talk may give. I do not know why on earth I cared for her company, except that she was easy of access and full of life, and her society served to distract me, just as smoking or drinking might.

My new friend, who called herself Mdlle. Finola, and was the daughter, I came to know, of a fat couple who sold slippers in one of the passages of the Palais Royal, was a girl with a very agreeable light French sort of soprano voice, and pleasing vivacious ways, and an inordinate amount of self-conceit. She was not by any means a bad little person, and would rather, all things being equal, do a kindly thing

than not. She was, I have no doubt, practically, or as Heine would say, anatomically, virtuous; but she had no particular prejudice in favour of virtue, and probably never troubled herself much by thinking on the subject. Her ideas of life consisted of flattery, singing, lyrical successes, complimentary critiques in newspapers, jewels, crinoline (crinoline was rather a new fashion then), pleasant little dinners and suppers, carriages, and a fair prospect of a brilliant match. She had no more true lyrical genius than an Italian-boy's monkey; but she sometimes captivated audiences, and set them applauding with a genuine enthusiasm which Pasta might have failed to arouse. She had a quick arch way of glinting with her eyes, which conveyed to some people an idea of immense latent humour and espièglerie, that, I can answer for it, had no existence in my little friend's mental constitution. She turned her bright beaming orbs in flashing rapidity from stalls to boxes in a manner which irresistibly kept attention alive. Who could withdraw his interest for a moment from the stage when he could not tell but that the very next moment those glittering laughing brown eyes might roguishly seek out his own? She had apparently the

faculty of eye-flirting with every man in a whole theatre in turn. Then she shrugged her very full, white, and bare shoulders with such a piquancy, and had such quick graceful gestures, and so fluttered her pretty plumage, that it was quite a pleasant sight to see. Of course,

all this told with much more decided effect in the Italiens, or some such house, than in one of our great temples of opera; but even in our vast house it had its effect upon the limited section from whom the rest of the audience, and the town generally, took their time.

Not, however, to be merely piquante and vivacious, Mdlle. Finola had a way of throwing a momentary gleam of tender softness into her eyes, and looking pensively before her, as if consciousness had withdrawn itself wholly from the audience, and buried itself in the depths of some sweet inner sadness; and she so trilled out a prolonged, plaintive, and dreamy note, that people sometimes declared her pathetic power quite equal to her humour and vivacity. When ordinary observers note any little effect produced with ease, they are apt to believe that the performer has a capacity for doing something infinitely greater, if he or she would only try, and did but care to succeed. A sad mistake generally; for on the stage and in real life we almost invariably do all we can and the best we can; and that which you see is the display of our whole stock of capability. But audiences could not readily believe that the one little bit of effective show had exhausted Mdlle. Finola's whole resources. The result was that in her own parts, Rosinas, Figlias del Reggimento, and so on, she was greatly admired, and her little tricks of instinctive coquetry and vivacity were accepted by many as the deliberate and triumphant efforts of graceful art, if not indeed the stray sparks which indicated the existence of a latent fire of true lyrical genius.

Now this little personage was beginning to be very popular about the time when Christina's husband came to London. She had not indeed come as yet into any sort of antagonism or rivalry with Madame Reichstein, and they never sang together; but Finola's nights were usually very successful, and she was even rallying a sort of party round her both in audiences and critics. Perhaps Christina's passionate enthusiastic style had begun to be too much for some of her hearers. True art is a sad strain upon the intellects of many of us; and little Finola was a great relief. She was Offenbach after Meyerbeer; and a good many occupants of opera-stalls to-day know what that means, and can appreciate the charming relaxation to wearied inanity which it implies. And though not as yet anything of a rival to Christina, Finola was beginning to be talked about a good deal. I don't think Christina at this time cared in the least, or grudged the little thing any sprays of laurel that might fall to her. But she always affected to think me an admirer of Finola, one of Finola's party, and indeed, more than that, one of Finola's lovers; and at last, out of pure spleen at being so set down, I acted intentionally as if I were one of that silly throng; and as Mdlle. Finola liked flirting with anyone, she showed herself willing enough to flirt with me.

I have spoken of all this for the purpose of showing how matters stood as regarded Christina and myself just about the time when her husband made his appearance so unexpectedly in London. WeChristina and I were on strange, cold, almost unfriendly terms, so far as all outer appearances went. My soul was still filled with love for her, wildly dashed sometimes with a bitterness not much unlike hate. She, on her side, seemed to me to be leading the life almost of a frivolous, careless, heartless coquette; I was drifting away from all my old moorings of steadfastness and perseverance and patience, and becoming an idler with the idle; I drank midnight, and thought midnight, as the phrase has it. With the sudden appearance of the Italian exile came a change in all our relationships; chance, utter chance, conspired with his own character and purpose, and the place he held in Christina's life, to make his presence the source of change and event to all of us.

In a very short time after his coming, Signor Salaris became the recognised lion of the London season. He had, in the impresario's sense of the word, quite a wonderful success. He delivered lectures on his imprisonment and his escape, which crowded Willis's Rooms, and filled King-street with coronetted carriages. He pleaded the cause of his country; he called upon England to regard the independence of Italy as Europe's most pressing and vital question; and countesses clapped their kid-gloved hands and waved their perfumed handkerchiefs. He dined now with a Cabinet minister, and now with the leader of the Opposition. He spent great part of his time at Mr. Lyndon's. He was intrigued for and battled for, as the attraction of evening-parties. He

bore it all patiently, as one who does a work of drudgery with a good object; but he smiled sadly and shook his head when one congratulated him privately on his success. I once told him he ought to be a proud man. He said he felt profoundly discouraged. A great illusion, he calmly said, was gone. England, he now knew, would do nothing for his country. He had come to plead for protection and help. He found himself the hero of a carnival scene, pelted with flowers and sugarplums.

I am not a politician, and this is not a political story. I introduce the subject of Salaris and his success, because at this time in one way, as later in another, it affected my own life.

I went one evening to hear my new friend tell his story and make his appeal in Willis's Rooms. I went alone; the room was crowded; Mr. Lyndon M.P. presided. There were present what Ned Lambert would have called "no end of swells." Salaris was speaking when I got in. He was really not, in the rhetorical sense, an eloquent man. He had nothing of Kossuth about him, nor had his style anything of the poetic grandiloquence of Mazzini. He talked in a simple, severe, unpretending sort of way, with hardly any gesticulation. The sincerity of his purpose, the clear straightforwardness of his language, the sweetness of his expression, made the great charm which, added of course to the romantic nature of his recent escape, delighted the West-end. He was a novelty in the way of exiles. He positively seemed, I heard a lady near me remark, quite like an English gentleman. In fact, the Thaddeus of Warsaw personage was played out; and the West-end now thrilled with a new sensation, to see an escaped and exiled patriot who looked like an ordinary gentleman, and spoke as composedly as a financial member of Parliament.

I looked round the room, expecting to see Christina there. I was not disappointed. She was seated two or three rows of seats away from me, and she looked very handsome, but melancholy, and a little fatigued. She was apparently not listening much more attentively than I was. She saw me, and nodded a salutation, and whispered something to a lady at her side. The lady, who seemed to have been listening very closely to the speaker, looked up, and glanced towards me. She was very young-about nineteen, perhaps—with a delicate, clearly-shaped, youthful Madonna face, and eyes that had a tender violet light in them. They were eyes that did not flash or glitter or sparkle. They rested on you with a quiet luminous depth, like the light a planet seems to give. Her face had a thoughtful, sweet, almost sad expression until the violet light arising in the eyes suffused the whole countenance with its genial radiancy. It was a face not to be forgotten, once you had seen it; and I had not forgotten it, for I had seen it before, and had many a time wished to see it again. It was the face of Mr. Lyndon's youngest daughter; the girl to whom I had spoken in Palace-yard when wild Stephen Lyndon made his absurd mistake.