David Chantrey.

BY W. G. WILLS,

66
AUTHOR OF THE WIFE'S EVIDENCE," ETC.

CHAPTER XIV.

BEDFORD SQUARE AGAIN.

"HOME late, Davy," said old Chantrey, carelessly, as David came home with his sister fast asleep in his arms.

"Yes; I've been at a friend's, governor. I brought the young one with me, to show her a bit of the world."

"With friends?" repeated his father. "Odd, that, my lad; your friends should be my friends."

David laughed, and seemed to think that if the rule were carried out, it would be rather hard on the governor. He turned to go, and his father let him reach the door; there he transfixed him by a little careless and commonplace observation. "Good-night, lad," he said, returning to his former occupation with indifference; "pray remember me to my friend Wertley when you see him next."

"Your friend?" asked David, considerably startled.

The fact was, that for some time he had been visited by misgivings lest his worthy friend Mr. Wertley might, out of compliment to him, make a morning visit upon his father. Such a visit would be fraught with every thing that was awkward and distressing. He had winced as he had realised the possibilities of that interview. Wertley and his father were as acid to alkali. It was a moral certainty that his friend would wander, with a most confiding simplicity, into some gentle controversy, and no less certain that he would receive rough handling from his father. Thus already might have commenced a quarrel of the Montagues and Capulets.

"Tell him," continued the old man, " that I am not convinced upon the question of the sewage; and that I can prove him clearly wrong upon the incubation of domestic fowl."

"You know him, then?" asked David.

"Why not? he incubated me for two hours, till I clawed him a bit with my tongue."

"You didn't offend him, sir, I hope?"

"I've observed you are growing close with me, my lad; I tell you I don't like it. Offend him! no; I'm an old business-man; I never offend any one I can make use of. I proposed to do business with him."

Here Mr. Chantrey, with much complacency, stated a small stroke of business he had essayed, which consisted of a cool proposal that Mr. Wertley should join his son David in a 507. bill. Then David compre

hended for the first time the position which he had occupied in Emmie's mind on the day of that charmed visit to Kew. He had little comment to make upon the explanation, and was again about to leave the room, when his father contrived, by a second careless comment, to catch his ear again. "I offered him good security," said he; "you will allow that;" and he gently stirred the lower bar of the fire with his slipshod shoe.

In some curiosity David inquired its nature.

"Undeniable security; yet I'm bound to say he didn't think much of it. Order in a pint of stout, Davy, as you pass the Crown and Anchor." "This security, governor?" asked David:

"Your mother's novel," said the old man with dramatic brevity.

"We'll talk of it again," said David, setting the subject for the present aside. "I'll find a little money for you, governor, I hope. Goodnight to you."

"Good-night! Don't forget it in your pleasure-parties," said old Chantrey, turning gruffly to the fire. "There's a letter for you on the chimney-piece since this morning."

David laid his little sister in her cot, dressed as she was, and wrapped her up warm without breaking her sleep; he then returned to read the letter.

He opened it, and his father watched him rather curiously.

"Poor silly woman!" ejaculated David.

"It was a bad business-hand direction," muttered old Chantrey. "Who is it from?"

"This? from Mrs. Blenheim's lawyer." "Why, what scrape are you in now?"

"The woman's cracked!" sung out David, re-reading the letter.

66

Margaret Blenheim, eh? don't believe it!"

"Read that," said David, putting the open letter into his father's hands, who read it aloud with his accustomed deliberation.

"SIR,-My client, Miss Blenheim, was much surprised at receiving the sum of five pounds towards the liquidation of her claim of six thousand. She instructs me to remind you that misappropriation of trustmoney has become penal under the new act, and to assure you she means to take the most summary measures to compel you to refund the whole amount.

"The following are the only terms she can entertain: an immediate payment of two thousands pounds down, and the remaining four thou sand she may consent to receive in quarterly instalments of one hundred pounds. Pray consider this letter as preparatory to instant proceedings.

"I am, sir,

"Your obedient servant,
JAMES WATERS."

"There's a letter to come from a respectable business house!” cried

David.

Old Chantrey burst out into a loud harsh laugh when he had finished reading this production.

"You simpleton, look at it again! lawyer never put pen to that." "Do you mean to say Mrs. Blenheim would forge a signature?" "Pish, man! don't you know a lady's style?"

"You mean that Mrs. Blenheim wrote it?"

"But do you suppose a woman of fashion knows the meaning of forgery? I tell you that, beyond the circle of their education, there is no more daring or ignorant creature than a woman of fashion."

"I cannot believe it. If Mrs. Blenheim is a fashionable woman, she is also a lady," said David.

"Do you fancy, my good fellow, that the hundred-and-one ladies who have been caught shoplifting know they are thieving? not theyI hold them quite irresponsible, as I would a wild South-Australian, who thinks it a harmless freak to let fly his boomerang in the street. They don't know any thing so vulgar as the laws respecting petit larceny."

We must really protest against such extravagant and libellous assertions. Old Chantrey is in a bitter mood; and I hold myself quite irresponsible for his sentiments. Society and dissipation may have their peculiar diseases, but they are slight, and cure themselves; they are beneath the notice of the cynic.

Ah, my friend, it is poverty which gives the true virus to crime. Lash poverty with scorpions, ye philosophic magistrates; never mind the trifling diagnostics, theft, assault, drunkenness; go straight, like a surgeon of genius, to the cause, and the effects will vanish: indict poverty wherever you may find it,-envious, covetous, carping, treasonous poverty,poverty that murders in thought twenty times a day,-poverty the sycophant, poverty the unsavoury, poverty the sneak. Poverty is high treason against nature. This bountiful world is man's freehold, and all that it contains.

"I will call upon Mrs. Blenheim to-morrow," said David, rising and leaving the room, to the harsh music of his father's laughter.

But by the time he reached the Blenheims' house his mood was changed. Whilst within his own honest and diligent area, he seemed to look at this case from the Chantrey point of view; which may be thus stated, the generous spontaneous offer of an innocent man employed as an opportunity of insult. Generosity towards an enemy is equivalent to weakness. It is the lift of the arm which exposes the heart to a thrust. He had opened his conduct to the very basest construction, and he was charged with cowardice and meanness by a lady he had never wronged. That was the aspect from the Chantrey side. But as he knocked at the door in Bedford Square-as he stood in the hall whilst his name was

being announced by the maid-it was as if he had walked round the question and saw it from its other side. His father it was who had been trusted by the lady upstairs, who had broken faith with a most princely villany, and had ruined the future of her daughter. If this young lady and her mother are human, how must they feel towards the son of this man? This was the Blenheim side of the case. He felt a little confused by the vividness of such unwonted considerations, and began to study into what form of speech he should put his vindication, how end, how begin. Indignation had made short work of all that, when he enacted the coming scene to himself on the road.

He was kept standing in the hall for full ten minutes, yet he did not chafe. In a softened and depressed mood, he stood on the oilcloth, gazing patiently up at the stained-glass lobby-window and the little greenhouse beside it. His meditations were interrupted by the reappearance of the little maid, of her who smiled upon all gentlemen under forty. She had bestowed a welcoming smile on David too, but in his lubberly mood he never noticed it. It was quite a prim and puckered little mouth with which she returned from the interview with her mistress.

"Mistress says she will see you in the parlour, young man."

She opened the parlour-door, and showed him in, lifting her shoulders saucily. He entered, too preoccupied to feel the affront, and the door was closed behind him.

At the fire, with the front of her gown comfortably laid up over her knees, her cheek on her hand, and her feet on the fender, sat a lady reading, evidently a young lady, buried in her book; two blue-cloth volumes lay behind her on the long dining-table.

"Polly," she said, in a sweet good-tempered voice, without turning, however, to look round, "who was that who knocked?"

She was answered by a deep masculine "hem!" from David, which brought her to her feet with a start, presenting to him a very pretty face, which my readers could scarcely recognise, so full of amazement was it. David, with a modesty which did him great credit, bowed and begged her pardon; he came to make an explanation to her mother, to remove a very false impression she had formed of him. The servant had shown him into the parlour.

"Oh, you are Mr. Chantrey," said Milly, recovering her self-possession, and gathering up her books to go.

She gathered up her books from the table, and was about to leave the room. There was an expression of haughtiness on her face which was not wont to be there. It was apparent that she felt herself in the

presence of her natural enemy.

For a moment David was abashed. He was in the presence of the actual victim of his father's fraud. The chivalry of his own youth and sex gave a peculiar poignancy to his shame. It would be a more heroic view of his regret, if we could represent him as a gentleman suffering

from a lofty principle, as the generous deputed sufferer for his father's sin, atoning for it by the self-devoted penance of a lifetime; but somehow, whether from a natural buoyancy of temperament, or some similar deficiency of romantic organisation, what chiefly galled him, so far as the matter related to himself, was the thought that a young and beautiful girl had been robbed and ruined by the head of his family. In this young-man's point of view, he had often and often brooded over it when alone, gnawing his lip, and striking his thigh at the pity and shame of it. Then Fancy would come like a ministering angel, grant him such a meeting as the present, and slip a cheque for the lost fortune into his pocket, to be drawn on the great bank of Fiction & Co. Here, indeed, was the meeting accorded by Fate, not Fancy; but where was the cheque? He had nothing but weak words to plead the cause of the innocent members of his family so long resting under the stigma.

How innocently had they shared in the spoil! What sickening humiliation for the pride of man! The very clothes they had worn, the dinners they had eaten, were at this poor girl's expense, paid for by her money; all these stinging reflections swept over his mind in one chord. He must cleanse the stain from his mother's tombstone to-day; too long has she been without an advocate; and now, in her bright mental advent upon the world, it is a fitting time.

"She shall judge us, not Mrs. Blenheim," he said in thought, as he saw her moving towards the door. In another moment's indecision he would have lost the chance. With considerable effort he threw aside his confusion, and the consequence was, his address was a little dramatic and abrupt.

"Miss Blenheim, I have not intentionally obtruded upon you; but I am glad we have met. Mr. Waters, your mother's man of business, has sent me a very foolish letter," he drew it from his pocket,—“ at his threats I can only smile" (Milly drew herself up at the word, and looked at him with very pretty aristocratic reproof); "but it grieves me to think that you could be so unjust as to believe that any members of my family participated in my father's unhappy act.”

"I know nothing about it, Mr. Chantrey: I daresay my mother will see you."

"It is to you I wish to speak."

"Why to me?" said Milly, posing herself proudly at the door. Oh, but her voice was icy! oh, but her look was relentless! She stood there, gazing at her enemy, a perfect little Medea or Leah, or-or whom you will of those revengeful daughters of Nemesis-her delicate lip curling; her eye sparkling; and, let us add by way of climax, her hand on the door-handle, and a Mudie blue three-vol. under her arm. "I presume, Mr. Chantrey, you have come to see my mother: you can have no possible business with me.”

"It was you who were injured; and to you I feel no humiliation in clearing myself and those dear to me from a very cruel charge."

VOL. XIV.

K