Everything Is Possible To Will

Ellen Ellis

Published: 1882

Categorie(s): Fiction, Biographical, Regional Fiction, Historical

Source: The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-EllEver.html

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About the electronic version

Everything is Possible to Will.

Author: Ellen E. Ellis

Creation of machine-readable version: Keyboarded by TechBooks, Inc.

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New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, 2007 
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About the print version

Everything is Possible to Will.

Author: Ellen E. Ellis

1882 
London

Source copy consulted: Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand Pacific Collection, P 823NZ ELL 1882

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Prepared for the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

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The Feedbooks version was uploaded and edited from the online NZETC text by Stanley Sokolow.  See his other uploads at http://www.feedbooks.com under his username StanleySokolow.

Chapter 1 A Target

We must not hope to be mowers, 
And to gather the ripe gold ears, 
Until we have first been sowers. 
And water'd the furrows with tears. 
It is not just as we take it— 
This mystical world of ours; 
Life's field will yield, as we make it, 
A harvest of thorns or flowers!

 

ON a grassy knoll, beneath wide-spreading elms, sits Zela—or Zee, as she is commonly called—a girl of some nine or ten summers. She is in a brown study of no pleasing character, judging by the rueful expression of her countenance, as, gazing on vacancy with a rapt, see-nothing look, thoughts well up in her active, chaotic brain, so nimbly as to tread on each other's heels. A pile of books lies in her lap, and on them she muses, fitfully, in a truant hope of learning her lessons.

Hark! a rustling is heard among the dry leaves, and listening, with eyes and ears alert, the easily-diverted student espies a squirrel. Down go the books, and off bounds Zee, almost as swiftly as her friend, nor halts till she has reached the tall pine up which the squirrel has gone, and to him she calls, with many endearing names; but the rogue can set her at defiance from the tree-top, whence he looks perkily down into her upturned face.

Retracing her steps, she collects her scattered books, and indulging her habit of thinking aloud, she blurts out impetuously, as she flops down on the knoll: “What's the good of this big world, with nothing but lessons all the time? Why don't girls go to school out in the woods, such a lot of live lesson-books as there are here? If I were a bird or a butterfly, I'd spoil all the lesson-books I could find. Out here in the woods everything is plain, but nowhere else; I'm all in a muddle, and can't get out of it. Bother the lessons! there is no beginning, no end to them; no one will teach me how to learn them, because I'm a ‘dunce.”’ Her head drops, and she weeps piteously, overweighted with grief for the time being. But the April sky soon clears, and furtively raising her eyes from her books, she is at her old work again, warring with her surroundings, fighting ghosts of her own creating, an unchildlike moodiness prompting her to hide away in a little world all to herself.

She has a genius for discovering fairy-bowers in the out-of-the-way nooks in which her native place abounds. The spot in which her acquaintance is made is one of her “parlors,” with “beautiful trees for walls;” the earth is carpeted with long grass; to her right is a sandy bank, dotted with primroses and violets and at her feet ripples a shallow brook, in which she ever and anon dabbles. The air is fragrant and full of melody, the birds are singing their “Goodnight” hymn. Well the songsters understand the laws of harmony, and wait on each other with exquisite taste; there is no discord, though a dozen small throats are swelling with joyful notes. A keen perception of the beautiful arrays Zee's fancy realm in rainbow hues; Nature is her inspiration, and, jumping into the good dame's triumphal car, Zee is whirled whither she will.

Beside her, laid reverently down, is a bunch of violets neatly fringed with their own green leaves, a peace-offering for Miss Pout on the morrow—the one of her two governesses, the Misses Smirke and Pout, of whom Zee is in mortal dread, though she knows no fear of bogie or of darkness. The pick of everything presentable which falls to her lot is laid with a lowly curtsey on the altar of her frowning deity; but Zee has to learn that such virtue is its own reward; Miss Pout is not to be bought—at least, by Zee; try how she would to win a smile, her offerings failed to propitiate; “black Monday” lasted all the week.

With one twentieth the labor her sisters acquitted themselves with honor, receiving from Miss Pout the coveted smile of approval; while on Zee fell cutting reproof, perhaps a ringing box on the ear or slap on the bare shoulders, making her every nerve vibrate under a sense of shame. School-days, with their hopes deferred and pains realised, are, it is said, our “happiest days;” a sorry look-out for a “dunce” like Zee, who breasted the full tide of her stupidity alone, for she could keep pace with no class, and was therefore relegated to assistant teachers. Miss Pout rarely condescended to notice “such a dunce,” but if she did tell Zee to “bring her books,” her name from those dread lips made an Irish stew of her lessons, and the girl stood before her governess like a scared silly goat. Out in the woods she could, now and then, repeat a lesson exultingly. But to look in that stern face and think of a word was out of the question, Miss Pout insisted, of course, that Zee had not looked at her lessons when, in truth, they had absorbed all her play-hours.

Late at night and at early morn she pored over her books, sleeping on them, in a vague hope that some beneficent fairy would whisper her lessons to her in her dream; but, alas, with sunrise came the horrid drudgery of learning them as best she could. Time faileth us to tell how many of her “gay and girlish hours” were spent in the stocks, holding the backboard, or swinging the dumb-bells as punishment for “returned lessons;” whereas, to learn “disgrace lessons” she was “kept in” on bread and water. Imagine an awkwardly shy girl standing in the stocks, in the middle of a large schoolroom, with a plate of dry bread and a mug of cold water in her hands, of which bread and water she was to eat and drink, and to pick up every crumb she might chance to drop. Ah, how she longed to cram the bread down Miss Pout's throat, wishing, the while, it might choke her. Zee knew, too, that some seventy-odd pairs of mischievous eyes were enjoying a giggle at her expense; as nudging and twitting her unmercifully, the owners of the all-seeing eyes asked on the sly: “How d'you like dunces' fare?” The flash of Zee's eye and the color of her cheek may be guessed; but, tiny-tit in the talons of the hawk, she took it all quietly, if not meekly.

Her troubles, moreover, followed her home, whither she carried a note from Miss Pout, requesting that her “downright obstinacy” might receive further chastisement from her father. A broad hint was given as to the purport of the note, but goosie never dreamed of losing it; nor, indeed, would it have served her turn, since her sisters received strict injunctions to tell their parents what Zee's “conduct” had been. So, note in hand, the girl slunk alone under the shaow of the houses, feeling certain that “you're in disgrace” was printed in capital letters all over her. After a severe reprimand from her father, such days ended in her being sent to bed, drowned in tears, on a bread and water supper. Her sisters made satisfactory progress, hence the faith of her parents in her lady teachers, whose school was unequalled for well twining youthful twigs, was boundless. Indeed, so busy was the home in which Zee's lot was cast, that there was no time to note that the shoe pinched any one particular child.

Zee could scramble through hedges and up trees of a come-at-able size in quest of a nest; why not up the tree of knowledge? No thought of young ladyism deterred her, she only wished that girls dressed like boys; frocks would tell tales of climbing. But, oh, dear! if a nest of young birds were secured, the wee pets invariably died in the night of the “pinch.” Plying mamma with questions as to what the “pinch” might mean, boy and girls contemplated the fate of their unfledged darlings with blank dismay; little did they think, simple souls, that the father was the medicineman. Then, too, Zee could make-believe in the storyline more than a little; her perceptions being the clearer through not being over much clogged with learning, her ways of looking at things and her ideas generally were wholly a matter of intuition, although, despite her duncehood, she revelled in the choice juvenile literature of her day—“Jack-the-Giant-Killer,” and such like stories, she devoured wholesale. One or other of these books might have been found thrust down the bosom of her dress, above which the too-obtrusive volume peeping, not unfrequently betrayed the heedless girl to Miss Pout, who levied black-mail instanter.

Some folk cannot see an inch before them; Zee, on the contrary, sees too much, and seeing at a glance how much is required of her, the little she might have accomplished became impossible. She was never told that, little by little, day by day, the whole would gradually be acquired; she could have given the sense of her lessons, as do the youth of to-day, though she could not sufficiently focalise her powers to commit words, possessing no meaning to her dormant faculties, to memory; there was, in fact, too little of the parrot about her to learn readily by rote; and yet, she evidenced a surprising aptitude in garnering information from all which transpired around her.

Frisky and tricky, withal, much of the wrong in the school may have been laid at her door; yet never was there a more innocent scapegoat. She liked Miss Pout too well at a distance to play pranks with her or her belongings; there was no chance of stealing a march upon her; indeed, suspicious of evil, she sniffed mischief in the air, and nipped it in the bud. One article of her creed, suggestive of cunning and duplicity, in reference to culprits, was: “No one is ever found out the first time.” Thus, by scenting Lucifer a long way off, her young ladies were in danger of being “possessed;” yet were they models of propriety compared to the modern miss in-her-teens

Deep down out of sight, Zee nursed the conviction that Miss Pout delighted to heap insult and indignity upon her, but she really may have caused her more anxious thought than did any other scholar; it was impossible to look in the bright, young face, and write her down an “idiot.” Being ignorant of all modes of developing natural gifts, Miss Pout believed in the cramming system; and, in refusing to be crammed, Zee left her at her wit's end. Nevertheless, bend or break was this lady's inflexible decree, and to have to deal with a sapling tough enough to rebound under the high pressure brought to bear upon it was a new and bitter experience doubtless; and resenting the failure of her belauded “system” of moulding the young idea, Miss Pout may have emptied the vials of her wrath on the head of the hapless Zela.

For Miss Smirke, Zee had a grain of respect; though she, too, believed in the cramming system, she was less cruel with it; there was, however, one threat she held over the girl's head with torturing effect. Pointing to a mysterious parcel on the top of a corner cupboard in the schoolroom, she would say, with alarming emphasis: “I'll have the steel collar taken down and fastened round your neck, miss; you incorrigible dunce!” This was misery's climax, for a notion obtained among the girls that the neck came out of the steel collar all awry, the head hind-side foremost. This star-chamber implement had never been seen; the girls believed in it nevertheless, nor could Lucifer himself have tempted one of them to have touched that mysterious parcel. Furthermore, Miss Smirke repeatedly upbraided Zee before the whole school with “picking her father's pocket by being such an incorrigible dunce”—a taunt that cut Zee to the quick; yet even while she winced, she was inwardly ready with the retort: “You, not I, are the pick-pocket. I could learn if you would but teach me in the right way.”

After having been kept perseveringly at school for many long years, Zee's parents were told by Miss Smirke that “it was simply picking their pockets to keep such a dunce at school,” which really meant that the square girl would not fit the round hole. So the Misses Smirke and Pout washed their hands of her with loud-sounding regrets, being denied the gratification of pointing to Zee as “finished in our seminary.” The light that was in her concerning book-lore was darkness which could be felt; she failed to learn because her mind was already full to repletion.

Zee's is a dual nature strongly marked; will it prove gold or dross? Would you like to see her, poor timid fawn, with all a tiger's fierceness? She is no doll-cherub, but living, quivering flesh and blood, with long gaunt limbs that will come too far through her frocks. She is a tall “dunce;” so much the worse for her. Her head is small, and over a good open brow, too lofty for a woman, waves glossy black hair, falling in natural curls round her well-formed shoulders; hazel eyes, full of fire and frolic, express the ever-varying emotions of the soul, and her nut-brown complexion is healthfully rosy. But, alas! that we must confess it, she has no nose, or, to say the least, it is like herself, “peculiar.” Hence, those who admire Vauxhall misses of wafer-like superficiality and skin-deep prettiness will dismiss Zee with a shrug, since, to this shallow age, a nose is as necessary as a grandmother of ancient pedigree. Zee can boast of the latter, though not of the former. Nose or no nose, however, our cottage girl is to be presented with rustic simplicity. We have seen gardens laid out with patrician state, but to us they are not half so sweet as the cotter's well-kept plot of ground, where the cabbage and the lily grow side by side.

We envy not the clods of earth who can see no form nor comeliness in Zee's mind. Mind, indeed! those who know her best doubt whether she has one, and to such her mind is a sealed book; yet hers is no barren soul: she is open to impressions, though not to instruction, as then imparted. As shaggy without and within as a Shetland pony, she is a forlorn hope to herself and to her friends, who can make nothing of the inexplicable girl of the untamable soul. Put on her mettle, she goes great lengths, yet an instinctive sense of right pulls her up, so that she is not more often betrayed into youthful excesses than are her more proper sisters, who make a smooth path to their feet by smilingly accepting all things as they are. Whereas Zee's path is strewn with sharp flints, which she fretfully hurls at others because they cut her own feet; yet would she not knowingly set foot upon a worm. Her one fault to the artificial is, that she has more faith in herself than in others; nevertheless, the shrine at which she offers sacrifice is as shapeless and ruthless as an Indian's. Singular in all she says and does, she is seasonable in nothing, yet asks to be appreciated as she is, without a hope of being understood, because of a prevailing disingenuous-ness, against which her fiery young soul revolts with fierce impatience. Defiance flashing in her eye and attitude, nothing shapes itself to her liking, and she bows to conventionalism with ill grace, provoking hostility, instead of winning love. “Dunce” though she was, had she been less intractable she would have doubtless received more consideration at the hands of all.

Because soulless children are easily managed, parents elect to have their children as much alike as peas in a pod; an ignoble self-love, as deep-rooted as virulent, refusing to die to self sufficiently to make variety welcome. And it is unthankful work to disturb conventionalism's despotic sway; men of little faith look with evil eye on the angel that agitates the pool; yet are myriads of the mentally impotent now waiting for the troubling of the waters of a higher, truer, life for youth and age; into which waters they will presently plunge and bring up gems from the ocean of thought, Living seed shall never die, however slow of growth. Sow it broadcast! the fertilising sun and shower shall produce its harvest of rich fruit.

Zee did not make herself; God knows what he is about; the twists and curls of character, so hateful to the superficial, are wisely intwined; so excellent, indeed, that it were unwise to rule off the irregularities; the very knots are beautiful when polished, and in the polishing of them the child who is to carve his own niche in the temple of life will need the encouragement of warmest sympathy. And there are so few, even at this hour, able to discriminate between the child who can learn but will not, and the child who would learn but cannot, that the latter is too often sadly persecuted.

Take heart of grace, little dunce, wherever thou art; let not discouragement's icy touch congeal the warm current of thy blood and give thee heart-sickness. Use thy brains, child; look at life with wide-open eyes; ask the reason why of everything, and above all think—think earnestly about what thou art doing and find out the best way of doing it; then, though books be a dead language to thee, other and better knowledge than is possessed by the majority of men shall furnish that upper story of thine. With thine every sense alive to heaven's beauties and earth's deformities thou canst not glide down stream, as do others, singing to thyself sweet lullaby; in the yet future thy forceful nature shall help to dethrone the despot “custom,” whose senseless denomination blocks the path of progress more hopelessly than do the snowy Alps. “Custom”e.g., unreasoning self-love, makes our hoards of thought and of things so entirely our own, that we stand by error and retard truth, to the sacrifice of all which should be most precious. But be not daunted, little Zee; thou aimest at too much, little ant, thy one grain of corn is burden too heavy for thee still; do well thy work, and thou shalt hearten some weary one plodding life's thorny highway, thorniest always to those whom the gentle Shepherd takes into his special training.

 

Chapter 2 Freightened.

ZEE was the second of a family of seventeen—four girls in as many successive years taking the lead in family honors. But Father Time has silvered the locks of some thirty odd years, since the old home rung with the shouts of the elder children. Blush of shame has never dyed the cheeks of sire of son of that forest of olive branches. Believing children to be heaven-sent blessings, the heads of the household were not careful to let their moderation therein be known of all men; so that the little chicks came trooping on the stage almost too fast to count them; and the mother's life, in consequence, was a slow martyrdom. But the father radiated an atmosphere of wondrous love and peace, as, giving glad welcome to each tiny floweret, he tossed it on his back with a lightheartedness which never owned a burden. How nobly did both parents do their part! what a dear old-fashioned couple they were! pity that such heroism should ever become antiquated.

As the dunce of the family, Zee is the black sheep amid a bevy of fair daughters. Out of the frying-pan into the fire, is her hot-water experience. Perhaps she lets the baby fall oftener than is wont; she has no girlish love of babies—they are no novelty. She is dubbed a “character” and accepts the distinctive appellation as a badge of disgrace; it may mean Turk, hobgoblin, or cannibal, for aught she knows. Friend she, as yet, has none, so mopes alone, the butt of her quick-witted sisters; or if permitted to join in their sports, a dreamy clumsiness, native to her in her early youth, spoils the fun, or obtains the credit of so doing; hence, they leave her pretty much to her own will and zigzag perplexities, for-gotten when she hides away in one of her densest copses, where all her happy hours are spent.

Too proud to court favor, she deems it a weakness to betray affection; hence, whatever of the lamb there is about her she chooses to conceal; and though lynx-eyed to the failings of others, she appears blind to her own. But oh, when there is no eye to pity, how she lashes herself with the rod she makes for her own back, in impotent resentment of that mysterious something which makes her unlike other people; the while she fails signally in attempting to be a copyist, hedged in, as she is, by strict conscientiousness coupled with felt incapacity!

Zee gladly put school-days, with their cuffing and snubbing, a long way behind her, although it was years ere she could shake herself free from the clutches of Miss Pout, who hung over her like the sword of Damocles. And to this hour, when speaking of her, Zee's eyes flash with unwonted fire, as she says: “When Miss Pout crosses my path, I long to tell her she has stood between me and the sun all my life, in failing to make the acquisition of knowledge possible to me. Oh! to think of her cold, hawk-like eye, ever ready to pounce down on this poor timid chick; of her long fingers that made my ears tingle; of her shrill voice, bearing word of doom to me; of her measured tread, which made me feel as if she were scrunching me body and soul beneath her feet, with all the enjoyment one has in scrunching a fine, large juicy apple. A sudden jump admonished me of her approach; a chill ran through me as her shadow fell upon me; and, like a startled deer, I longed to bound out of her sight, looking guilty, through fear doubtless. But, there, she has since become a wife and a mother; marriage may have humanised her.”

But Zee did at length escape Miss Pout's tyranny, and if she stand not in the world's front ranks as a clever woman, she will prove up to the average, even in this fast age. And if to play well is to work well, it augurs well for Zee since she had become ringleader in all kinds of sports; so it is to be hoped that the mother will make something of her, for in the hive she calls home there is no room for drones. Indeed, she threw herself with all her might into whatever her hands found to do, and was fast becoming at home, spite of those long limbs of hers, which she had once wished to take off and hang up out of sight.

She used the needle deftly, and soon eclipsed her sisters in concocting doll-finery; even taught Sadai how to tie a bow in her bonnet-strings, and was commended by the father for so doing—sweet commendation to Zee, because rare. She displayed more skill, also, in the compounding of cakes, puddings, and tarts than did any of her sisters; her fingers were becoming useful, so it was to be hoped she would nurse the everlasting baby without breaking it more than a little. Indeed, she took to domestic affairs with right good will, resolving to “eclipse all the Betties in creation,” and thus make something more than a stop-gap at home.

The multitudinous wants of nine girls and eight boys kept a sempstress constantly employed; hence, Zee's aptitude for the needle was no mean qualification in the estimation of the mother, who, assuming that Zee's feelings were as blunt as her brain, was conscious of no unkindness in speaking of her to strangers as “clever at her needle, though dull at her books.” But, oh! how Zee hated that sort of make-weight! how painfully humiliated she felt in the presence of those who had been informed of her deficiencies, when in all probability she was lost sight of amid a crowd of petticoated romps!

So morbidly sensitive was she, indeed, as to her defects, both of body and mind, that when it was said of her, jokingly, “The ill-weed grows apace,” the “ill-weed” joke left its sting, and scalding tears furrowed her cheeks; but as they offered no remedy, she carefully covered up her sore spot. The pert self-assertion characteristic of her, which led her into many a pitched battle in defence of the weaker party, not always on the side of right, was wholly the result of bad training; she had never been told that self-assertion and self-seeking are essentially vulgar, and must be resolutely lived down until quiet dignity loyally ascends its rightful throne. Furthermore, whatever she advanced by way of opinion was met by a covert sneer, “Oh! you're a dunce!” which raised her ire, and was met by a quick retort that made her appear as unloving as unlovely; for never, even in thought, did she own to being a dunce. Though kicking against the prick of her own making, she would submit to no paring-down process; and to throw such children ruthlessly back on their “own wicked hearts” bars rather than unlocks their strong incorrigible natures. There ought to be room for such as Zee in this big world, but conventionalism possesses no elasticity.

Youth, of true metal, has a deal of wild blood to use up. Nature economises her resources; she is too chary of her pure grain to scatter it with spendthrift prodigality, when less costly tares, as evidence of good soil, will answer her purpose equally well. Whenever a child is found to be chafing under ill-judged restraint, he is certain to possess some force of character in his superabundance of energy.

The dominant will, “the thorn in the flesh,” is rightly disciplined, the surplus energy of the restive soul given of heaven to one of its favorites. Zee was capable of the utmost heroism, as are all girls; but there was no good angel to tell her that she had a soul to form, i.e., to convert her faults into virtues, and that all mental flints and briars are discipline needful in the forming of it. Never in a book, such as is herein attempted, had she seen herself photographed with the simplicity and directness that at once gives prominence to the flaws of character and their remedy, or she would have become a very different woman. For among the more thoughtful, those who took the trouble to peep under the surface of the girl's better nature found sterling metal waiting on the miner's skill; she would rather have broken her mental shins against huge boulders by the hill side than lounge idly in flowery meads.

Full of animal spirits, restrictions chafe her sorely; the spur works less harm than the curb. Open as the day, free as the air she breathes, gay as the sunshine dancing on the ever-changeful wave, she possesses too much force and vigor to be held in by the cords of precision and propriety; snap goes every leading-string the instant it is thrown around her. Exuberance of life is given to those whose course resembles the madly-rushing torrent hemmed in by coarse, stony mountains, rather than the pebbly prettiness of the well-sheltered valley.

Courage Zela, mountain-climber! each step brings the summit nearer; faint heart never yet breathed the bracing air of mountain-top. Let not difficulties frown thee down, nor envy thou the career of the tame and aimless, who will shirk life's noblest duties rather than ruffle their charming placidity, or risk the loss of their sweet-tempered insipidity. Not of such flimsy stuff are God's heroes made. Theirs is a lion-hearted love of truth, a mighty power of endurance, of entire self-abnegation; and in ruling well their own spirits, in order to stand against the stream of iniquity around them, they make grand acquisitions of moral courage. In the long-run, such beings have power with God and prevail with men. It were well to drop jewels in their path; they will have thorns and thistles enough.

Except when resenting personal injustice, or when stocks and stones unloosed her faltering tongue, Zee rarely ventured on more than monosyllables. She envied the girls from whose lips platitudes fell glibly, knowing nothing as yet of the power of thought, which would in its own good time find utterance. Gems are the better for friction; and the girl was now considerably brought out by a visit to London, by being thrown into the society of girls as superior to her early associates as the bumpkin was beneath them. An inward something spurred Zee on to a goal above mediocrity; she never placed herself on a footing with other clods; hence, in all the parties in which she figured she stood resolutely shoulder to shoulder with the belle. Yes, she sunned herself in the light of the wittiest, that her own stupidity might stand out in bold relief, and, oh! what a senseless lump she felt herself to be!

Seeing her torn by conflicting emotions that she could not wholly conceal, a lady friend judiciously helped Zee to perceive that she was unjust to herself, inasmuch as the belle in question was an only child, the favorite alike of nature and of fortune. And while admitting that Zee might have neglected her opportunities of improvement, the lady insisted that dissatisfaction with present attainments in itself evidenced a capacity for improvement, pointing to the fact that some natures ripen by slow degrees because of the excellence of the fruit maturing. Happily Zee was not too dense to understand the drift of such an inspiring insinuation.

Returning to her home, a good genius of another form is found gravitating towards her, a “blue stocking;” such, at least, was the contemptuous term then applied to sensible women. Ruby, the lady in question, was one of three sisters who had been educated in France; and whether she had once been subjected to the dunce-ordeal and a fellow-feeling prompted her to court Zee's society is unknown, but they were soon close friends. Very patiently, Ruby, whose preference for Zee was regarded as “one of her crochets,” bore with the queer girl, and tried to draw her out, to strike the key-note of an instrument apparently all unstrung, knowing that the moot question whether Zee had, or had not, her “right change” had never been fairly settled, and she so far succeeded in chasing away the diffidence that walled her in as to induce the timid child to express herself frankly, since she was in no danger of being snubbed.

What an oracle the naturally taciturn Ruby appeared to the ignorant Zee, as, in her attempt to win the latter to a loving appreciation of the useful and the good, she opened such of her stores of wisdom as came within the limits of the girl's comprehension! To her own circle, Ruby hinted broadly that there was more in Zee than in any of her sisters, in that she had a mind, whereas they possessed only retentive memories and a great capacity for instruction,i.e., cramming. Rank heresy, doubtless. But Ruby was as discriminating as thoughtful, and her carefully-formed opinions had in them an honest ring that commended them to the judgment; and she finally intimated to Zee's parents that she could discover no want in the girl, and if she was not the brightest star around their table, she was still well-freighted with common-sense. Sadai gladly gave Zee to understand that Ruby's good opinion of her was “quite a feather in her cap.” Hence, to Ruby is due not only the dawn of happier days, but she left on Zee's spirits a lasting gladness, though they have never since met.

Thenceforward, Zee resolved to find her own way up the ladder of learning—i.e., to learn from observation what she had failed to gain from books; she had always been quick to see the use of intelligible objects. The danger is that, instead of living out her true life, she will submit to the conventional paring down against which her own soul wisely revolted at that time.

Restless as impulsive, with an exaggerated truthfulness prompting her to lay bare every deviation from it in others, she was not likely to be a desirable companion to the commonalty, who were ever on thorns lest she should let light in on the dirty corners of their being. It is hard work to tear off plausibility's cloak; nevertheless, cobwebs on the brain need a spring-cleaning as much as does any haunted house.

It came to pass at length, that in reference to herself, despite her own gloomy forebodings and those of her friends, Zee, who was so fast budding into womanhood that at sixteen she was often told she “would never see twenty again,” soon spread her canvas with the breeze, cropped the top of the morning for freshness, and capped all with the rose-glow of health, in which crown of blessing she ranked second to no one. In truth, she trod the earth with a jaunty, off-hand carelessness that suited her as well as if her every nerve had been poised on wings. How or when metamorphosed no one could tell, but the thought of dunce faded out of all minds except, perhaps, those of her parents, in whose presence she was never quite at her ease, knowing that they feared she would “lose her head” in some of her daring flights. On the principle of a dunce—once a dunce always a dunce—haziness continued to float about their mental arithmetic, and prevented them reckoning her up rightly. Moreover, animal spirits were to some extent tabooed by the circle in which she moved; hence, there being no demand for the only ware she could offer on change, but a small share of self-glorification was open to her. She, nevertheless, held on in her happy-go-lucky way without any breakneck consequences.

Metaphorically speaking the two elder girls “came out” hand in hand; and Sadai became at once the full-blown cabbage rose—so brilliant in conversation, indeed (she had a wonderful memory), that one of her disputants, who gloried in his penetration declared: “Miss—is born to be an old maid if ever a girl was.” Adverse criticism, due to the fact, perchance, that in argument with her he invariably came off worsted, and the masculine mind resented the defeat. Sadai could afford to smile at his prediction, since a troop of beaux followed in her train; but with a perversity truly feminine, she cared most for the one (not the one alone) who cared least for her.

Zee had her dreams of love in a cottage, and was vain enough to believe she was worth loving even though not one of the male gender should make the discovery. Ěasy to be won she would not be, however unlikely to be sought. The few beings of either sex whom she deigned to honor with her esteem must bear the wear and tear of a life-long friendship, into which compact she never entered lightly, even with a girl. She knew a royal road to boy-favor, but declined the assumptions of hobbledehoyism, and as yet no eligible had risen on her horizon.

Having long since run past Sadai in height (Sadai's active mind had stunted her growth), Zee was spared the, to most girls of marketable age, extreme mortification of wearing her elder sister's old clothes. In the matter of personal attractions, those, but few in number, who could see soul in Zee's face pronounced her “the flower of the flock.” But when any such compliment was repeated to her, she laughed it away, saying: “They must be possessed of second sight or of some divining-rod, which transformed one at will,” etc., declaring she could “see nothing but her nose when she looked in the glass—the dear old nose, which had been provocative of more fun than all the Grecians in creation.” She good-humoredly accepted the, in her own estimation, fact that she was plain-looking, and made the best of it.

One Midsummer's night, Zee and a girl-friend had strolled together through a fine old park, in itself a wordless poem, A shower had newly laid the dust, and given to each tiny blade of grass its own drop of dew; indeed, Nature's many witcheries made the turf so springy, the girls could but dance over it, as to the right of them, to the left of them, in front of them, and behind them, the nightingale was betrayed, by the stillness of all things, into a gush of melody that hushed Zee's very being into forgetfulness as she listened with delighted awe.

Entering the parlor on her return home, she was introduced to a gentleman, whom we shall name Wrax; but unmindful of the stranger, the girl, whose frame quivered with the blissful intoxication of the hour, burst into a rapturous description of the old park, every inch of which was familiar to Wrax, being at the door of his childhood's home. So little had Wrax impressed Zee's mind (it was too full as of yore), that she had forgotten the eventful hour of meeting until he recalled it in after years.

Having for years merely visited her home at intervals, Zee was its only inmate to whom Wrax was a stranger; his visits thenceforth became so frequent, and his proffered excuses in reference thereto so far-fetched, that between the girls (there were two at least old enough to think of love and the like of it) there was soon plenty of surmising as to which had made “a case of smite.” Fruitless surmises, however, since Wrax was pointedly equal in his attentions to the sisters, frequently proposing a walk with both, carefully avoiding a walk with either alone; and if betrayed into a momentary toying with one, he turned with extra sweetness to the other instanter.

Wrax's advances were supported by good prospects and comely proportions; he was very tall, with a good head well-set on broad shoulders, together with the promise of all the whisker-and-moustache trimmings supposed to make a man look manly in the eyes of the fair sex. Then, too, he “had a nose,” as Zee said. So that any girl who had unfortunately nothing but marriage to look forward to might have been forgiven the wish that he would turn his thoughts her way.

A married sister of Ruby's once said that our Adonis “struck her at first sight as the handsomest young fellow she had ever seen.” But then she had seen him at his best, having met him at the door of Zee's home one fine winter's night, after a brisk walk had given bloom to his cheek and light to his eye. He was all animation, indeed, notwithstanding his deep-mourning habiliments; for well he knew there was to be a dance in the homely kitchen, and he loved the mazy whirl. Wrax, wild with excitement, was up to all sorts of hair-brained tricks. He, of course, led off in the first set of quadrilles with Sadai, choosing Zee, later in the evening, for “Sir Roger de Coverley,” remarking aside to his partner, “No other couple in the room can make so high an arch as we can.” And as they stood there, arms aloft, in all the joyousness of ruddy health, more than one whispered to another: “They're a fine couple!”

At length, his visits became so entirely a matter of course, the marvel was if he thought an excuse necessary; still, he was never off his guard, but so studiously polite and kind, that Zee fancied he purposed entrapping both sisters unawares, a mode of procedure which revolted her honest soul; she had no faith in the happy-with-either creed.

But it must be confessed Sadai early succumbed to Wrax's fascinations; hence, to Sadai, “Which is the favorite?” became a question of vital import, for with all the ardor of nineteen summers, she indulged alternately in great expectations and wretched misgivings; whereas the freedom-loving Zee was not to be caught, to whom Sadai exclaimed, in all the desperation of “over-head-and-ears” helplessness: “Oh, Zee! I'd give anything to be as free and easy with Wrax as you are; but I am tongue-tied in his presence.”

The father and mother, too, shared the ever-recurring doubt as to which was the loadstone; an attraction there must be, else why his frequent visits? Wrax was, indeed, “such a catch,” respecting family, position, etc., that the girls' entire visiting circle presently asked, with growing interest: “Which is it to be? Is Zee's star in the ascendent?” No, it must be Sadai, notwithstanding that trifles light as air now and again pointed to Zee, sufficiently to make her sister draw love-lorn sighs when no one listened. She had, nevertheless, more than air to live upon; many a neatly turned compliment from Wrax fed the flame, if it were ever so little on the wane.

Many a friend, the parents included, unhesitatingly expressed the hope that Zee might prove to be the reigning queen, since Sadai had already ample conceit in reference to beaux. On a certain occasion, an old lady spent an evening in the bosom of the family, of whom Wrax, of course, made one, after whose departure mamma inquired of her friend: “Which do you think is the favorite?” To which, the old lady replied, sagaciously: “Well, I don't know; he talks to Sadai, but he looks at Zee.” A nice distinction, proving the good dame to be well versed in love-passages.

A sprat supper was another eventful episode. Betty, having cleaned the fish, and spread them soldier-like, stiff and straight, on a dish, dredging each layer with flour, the girls were to cook them, for to make her daughters good cooks the mother spared neither time nor expense. Admonished of the danger of “too many cooks,” Wrax yet opined there would be more fun with the girls in the kitchen than with the old folk in the parlor; and so, with a spring and a bound, made for the familiar stove-territory, guaranteeing that by his aid the fish should be browned to perfection. To the full enjoyment of these nice little fish it is imperative that they be served hot and hot. And in cooking the first dish, Sadai was confused not a little by the quizzical Zee and his lordship himself, who watched the operations with inspiriting enthusiasm, making suggestions wide of the mark, to which Zee added piquancy, the pair cracking nuts and jokes, as the sprats frizzled in the pan.

The first dish was cooked, and served with the greatest nicety, of which dish Wrax, as a visitor, was in duty bound to partake. But no; left to his own sweet will, he elected to remain to watch Zee's wand of enchantment, since she threatened to excel Sadai. Heigh Ho, for Sadai! ill-starred Sadai! She could not dare to stay behind too; into the parlor she must go, followed by the dear little fish. Love-sauce is said to be mawkish rather than appetising, and it probably sufficed her cravings of hunger for the nonce.

Cooking that second dish of sprats must have been delirious work to the mischief-loving Zee. With so much spice in her composition, it must have demanded the resolution of a Hercules to resist the temptation to fizz up like champagne, and explode in a jocund fit of laughter. Did she conceal an inward chuckle? No doubt she did; not by so much as a smile would she help the solution of the vexed question. Wrax should find his own way, at his own pleasure, out of his selfmade tangle. Suppressed merriment must, nevertheless, have tingled to her finger-ends, as she, with her elfish wiles, played on our hero's heart-strings, demurely turning the fish meanwhile. The very sprats put on their best behavior, as if they too enjoyed the sport.

Entering the parlor, followed by Wrax and Betty with the fish, Zee, by a quick appreciative glance, imposed silence on both parents, the merry twinkle in whose eyes told her plainly that the joke was not lost upon them. No sooner, however, was Wrax well off the premises than the laugh was all against the, for the time being, much-to-be-pitied Sadai, who was already sufficiently in the dumps without her sister's banter. Given a cause of triumph, the young are often cruel. As far as Wrax was concerned, Zee was indifferent enough to be saucy, and the witch could tease a little; it was a family weakness, and at Sadai she must have her fling, with some spirit if not wit; and concluded her twitting by proposing another sprat-supper, at which Sadai, by waiving the priority of right in the cooking of the fish, should effectually nail the artful Wrax.

As younger sisters were fast trenching on womanhood, their elders gave place to them perforce, and electing to become a model “school-marm” by profession, Sadai voluntarily returned to the blissful quiet and unfading bowers of the Misses Smirke and Pout's seminary to qualify herself for her high vocation. Being thus summarily disposed of, the mother said, dryly: “If Sadai be his choice, Wrax's visits will now cease.” And Zee gloried in his being put to the test, triumphing inwardly by anticipation. Novice though she was in affairs of the heart, she was as keen-scented as those who had been through the wood; but never a word did she say.

Sadai had vanished, but her spiritualised presence remained, or Zee said it did, and that it explained the impossibility of the devoted lover absenting himself; and by talking much of Sadai, all of which Zee faithfully chronicled to her, Wrax appeared resolved that “his particular weakness” should remain an open question.

The conventionalism that makes truth play lackey to expediency requires a girl to conceal her love if it exists; in Zee's case there was no love to discover, therefore none to conceal. She, skittish young thing, soliloquised thusly: “Eh! Mr. Wrax, you sly old fox! you'll bag your game without the waste of powder and shot, will you? But the very artlessness of somebody, who is neither to be bribed into love nor goaded into love by jealousy, may foil your deep-laid schemes. You are but drifting on to sand-banks, with the wind dead in your teeth; veer round, old boy! make ‘true as the needle to the pole’ your motto, and come calm, come storm, you'll have a fair chance of bringing somebody to port. But now, good day, sir!”

Sadai having fled the home-nest, Zee must follow her example; and that she might see something of the world, it was arranged that she should go to Scotland, to a widowed aunt in easy circumstances. Wrax protested vehemently against Zee's being “exiled,” as he called it, urging that he had seen a tear drop on her work during the discussion of the subject. Wrax may have flattered himself that the precious tear was his own by right divine; but no, it was wholly due to a cat-like love of home, coupled with an English girl's ignorant prejudices against the Scotch.

At length the time of trial came, the time of triumph too; for on the night of parting Wrax was woefully depressed. At the last moment, it fell to Zee's lot, as usual, to “let him out,” when he became greatly agitated, seized her hand, kissed it reverently, put something into it, gasped out “Goodbye,” and tore himself away, to hide perchance a tearfulness he tried in vain to choke down.

Love will out; it has many voices. Wrax had never made Sadai a present; and to crow over her clever sister, in being the first to have an acknowledged lover, was the uppermost feeling in the mind of the meddlesome, irrepressible Zee. She may have blessed her stars, and felt for Wrax a puzzled sort of gratitude at his having singled her out as the object of special favor; but she was conscious of no tender sentiment, no aching void within which he alone could fill. Fancy had not painted him her beau-ideal.

With an embarrassment quite novel, and feeling as sheepish, though from a different cause, as even Wrax could desire, Zee returned to the parlor, with that tale-telling present of his, which she wished at the bottom of the sea rather than that she should have to exhibit it. Yet she never dreamed of concealing it from her parents, who evidently expected Wrax to make some sign. On looking at his gift, behold a lady's pen-knife! Unlucky choice! “Sure to cut their love in two,” said the mother, presently adding, as she warmed under the discussion of the subject: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” A sorry prospect for one of the twain, according to the knifecutting logic.

The father and mother rejoiced to find that Sadai had “not had it all her own way;” and assuming that Zee must love Wrax if he loved her, they complimented her on his being all that could be desired, with much more to the same purpose.

To have changed places with Zee, Sadai, who fancied her charms were irresistible to all save Wrax, would gladly have thrown her intellectual superiority overboard. But, bemoaning the crook in her lot, she must wear the willow for a season, writing herself down of all girls most miserable, and Zee blessed above women. Love's vapors blotted out her bit of blue sky, as briny tears deluged her pillow, or she sighed out her griefs on the bosom of some sweet girl confidant, as sorely tried may be as herself. Overwhelming as is such sorrow while it lasts, how petty it looks when life's well-fought battles fill the mind's foreground! It is well if the soul is stretched on the rack but once on its way to the valley of the shadow.

The following lines chimed only too well with Zee's spirit of perversity lang syne, and to her mind suggested the treatment Wrax's variable conduct merited. Where a life-long happiness or misery is at stake, a girl, instead of taking her lover's professions of attachment on trust, should test his sincerity by all reasonable methods, and counterfeit men richly deserve the treatment the lines prescribe; but to subject a really generous, unselfish man to such waywardness is an almost unpardonable crime.

Now out upon this smiling, no smile shall meet his sight; 
But a word of gay reviling is all he'll hear to-night, 
For he'll hold my smiles too lightly if he always see me smile, 
He'll think they shine more brightly when I have frowned awhile. 
‘Tis not kindness keeps a lover, he must feel the chain he wears, 
All the sweet enchantment's over when he has no anxious cares;

For the heart would seem too common it he knew that heart his won, 
Ah! the empire of a woman is still in the unknown, 
Let change without a reason make him never feel secure, 
For ’tis an April season that a lover must endure; 
They're all of them so faithless, their torment is your gain; 
Would you keep your own heart scatheless, be the one to give the pain.

To give pain to kill self-love and selfishness, is sometimes imperatively necessary, but take care that you wound to heal, to develop true manliness; such wounding, to be effective, must first have cut deep within one's own spirit. Love execrates the mere animalism, which teaches that the gratification of the passions is happiness; love cannot exalt itself by the abasement of another. Impossible! A nobler, more interested love—the love which can reverence only the God-like in the beloved—must be cultivated before passion's supremacy shall be displaced.

Appreciating the highest in themselves, girls should aim at naturalness at all costs. Nature, even in its “fall,” is better than art, because more God-like, and the grace which is born of inward beauty of character is divine. And yet it is to be feared that “society,” so-called, is daily becoming more artificial. Art-imitators are usually of the feminine gender, distinguished by an imposing self-consciousness—an I-am-holier-than-thou imperiousness, which aims at putting others down, much as a cat sets paw upon a mouse. Art-manufactured women stand much on the parade of hollow dignity; every movement of the body, together with the expression of the face, is trained with consummate art; every emotion, every impulse even, are reduced to measure, until they can almost be produced on the point of a lancet: and, in consequence, the outer tabernacle becomes as statuesque as though eut in marble. There is wisdom, of a sort, in such training, since if the muscles of the face have too much play, the face ages before its time; on the other hand, the lungs need exercise, and a voice, soft and low, is cultivated at the expense of the lungs. Extremes are dangerous; and art may be studied till it degenerates into the cream of the cream of artfulness, contrasting unfavorably with that perfect truthfulness conventionalism finds it impossible to deal with.

If art-imitators be sincere, if their souls are as transparent as their seeming, goodness will supply a silver thread of consistency, whereon the pearls of character may hang together in unmistakable harmony. But if a scratch-cat nature lurks beneath the fair exterior, how treacherous the whole appears! Girls, don't ape anything; to ape is seemly only for monkeys. Have done with cant of thought, of word, of look, and of deed. Go wade, if need be, through waters dark and deep, subject to every trial to which woman is heir, and if after some twenty, thirty years of close companionship, insincerity be the last sin those who know you best are likely lay to your charge, you are a something immeasurably better than actors. Art may be bought at too high a price. Character alone is wealth, beauty, goodness. Make the soul beautiful, it will enrich and beautify the life.

 

Chapter 3 Pursued.

A QUICK, pleasant sail landed Zee in Edinburgh's fair city, and she was welcomed by friends who received her with the deference due to a woman, and thus removed, in a measure, the diffidence natural to her in her intercourse with strangers. The new world, too, necessarily opened the eyes of her mind, receptive as it was of impressions. With Scotch lassies she was directly at one, and quite too ready to join in their trifling and small talk; but at the bachelor order of Scotia's sons she looked askance: they were older, and of a different stamp from her beaux of yore, limited, as they were, to a select few.

To a womanly-looking girl, slightly elevated in the social scale, Wrax's youth was one of the disadvantages under which he labored. To him out of sight was not out of mind as concerned Zee, for she quickly received a letter from him, with a glumness which boded no good to the writer, whose preference flattered her vanity, but never so much as ruffled the surface of deeper feeling. Wrax's habitual wariness had deserted him at the wrong moment, or he never would have written that “Mamma had no doubt that Zee would be glad to hear from him.” Writing that sentence sealed his doom. Zee was such a touch-me-not in the matter of the affections, that she would have recoiled from one for whom she had a liking, could he have presumed upon it; and Wrax, having long since won the mother over to his side by showering upon her attentions which he deemed it unwise to pay to either daughter, Zee feared, not without reason, that in her desire to secure the prize the mother had assured Wrax that he was safe on the score of her daughter's affections. Zee must be something more than grateful for the honor put upon her, reasoned the old folks. Not so Zee, odd fish that she was; the possibility of Wrax having made sure of her love would have quenched the spark had there been one kindled. Yet was she no flirt; liberty she loved, license pleased her not.

Receiving letters from Wrax, and answering the same, soon became exceedingly distasteful to Zee. Still she shrank from wounding his vanity sufficiently to enlighten him as to the unwelcome fact. Here Sadai came to the rescue, telling him the state of affairs in tones no doubt tender as true. Letters legitimately dolorous, for and against a further correspondence, at length, to Zee's relief, closed all communication between herself and Wrax. What a blow to the scheming lover, who believed he had the bird in his hand! But however piqued his vanity might be, Zee believed he would soon solace himself with another.

Having experienced the pangs of unrequited love, Sadai could offer the rejected heartfelt sympathy. What could be more natural than that she should fill the niche left vacant by Zee, who would have esteemed the fates most propitious had they made the pair affinities for aye. But, alas, they were playing at cross-purposes—fire-eaters, both of them, with nought but themselves to consume. Wrax battled with his despair alone. Love's cross-current ran none the smoother for Sadai, in whose lacerated bosom hope's last ray died.

To her parents, who esteemed Wrax a king among men, Zee's rejection of him had given great offence; and in writing to her they never once, during her twelve months' absence, failed to “pity her blindness,” or grieve that she “stood in her own light.” Wrax himself (there was good stuff in Wrax) kept the wound open. He had never forsaken the old home, never forsaken the old love; nor did he attempt to conceal the joy Zee's anticipated return home afforded him. She, on the contrary, being averse to a renewal of the severed friendship, and knowing that her return home was urged in the belief that she “could not fail to love Wrax on better acquaintance,” preferred remaining at a distance, and forth with advertised for a situation as useful companion to a lady, mentioning her English birth and desire to travel.

But no situation being offered to Zee's liking, home she must go, nothing loth except for Wrax; and knowing he desired to meet her in London, she purposely made her return from the North uncertain. Hence, when she did at last land in that ocean of bewilderment, the modern Babylon, with its sea of absorbed stone-wall faces, a sickening sense of insignificance crept over her, such as youth in its travels must ever feel (did, at least, in those days); and owing to an inculcated distrust of strangers, lavish attentions from them would but have aggravated her sense of loneliness. Grateful for such companionship as her luggage afforded, she, without much ado, gathered her silent friends around her, hailed a cab, and bidding adieu to the motley throng, stepped gladly off the public stage into a cosy English home once more.

Apprising the home-birds of her safe arrival, Zee was careful to leave her return to rusticity an open question, to escape that dreadful Wrax. The crest pertaining to her family name is a lion rampant. The fickle month of March presided at her nativity; hence, “mad as a March hare” may explain Zee's manifold peculiarities. She had proved as invulnerable to the wiles of the canny Scot as to those of the Englishman, Zee might, perchance, have loved, but her “object” was so singularly obtuse, that Cupid's scratch in her case healed in a day or two; she kept the reins of heart and mind too well in hand to canter down love's steep incline, there to perish in a sea of neglect. Zee and the willow parted company ere she was once under its baneful shade, and leaving Auld Reekie scot free was so much in favor of the absent lover.

Hungering for news of the March hare, Wrax lingered wistfully about the charmed home-circle, and hearing from the fountain-head that he might hope to see his idol in a few days at most, the railway-station thenceforward became his post of observation. From many a train he turned away heart-sick, but his attendance failed not, until the “object of all in creation most dear” alighted from one of the carriages, when he stepped aside perforce to hide a sudden tremulousness; and as for Zee, she dared look neither to the right nor left, lest a stray glance should rest on him.

At home once more, loving greeting fell on her ear; but she had barely time to give a kiss all round and lay aside her wraps before she was “wanted downstairs.” Downstairs she went, to meet whom do you guess? Why, Wrax, of course. Yes, all alone in the little parlor the pair met face to face, and Zee was not simpleton enough to run away. Wrax was not given to rhapsodising, and may not have put his welcome home in so many words; there was, nevertheless, a world of content in his manner. Tacitly ignoring the past, they talked long and learnedly, no doubt; for Zee, having gained by the varied experience travel affords, was every inch a woman, possessing a quiet confidence equal to any emergency; nor would Wrax, although less travel-stained, have owned to lacking the eighth of an inch of manhood. He had, indeed, acquired a suavity of voice and manner, seeming to defy dispute; yet Zee did presume to differ from him in much that he advanced. And he told her at a later date that at that first interview he had thought her “greatly changed”—not for the better, she opined.

The fact was, the girl had leaped into the woman, and he had not been there to allow the always critical transformation to take place imperceptibly. And more than this, Zee had changed grievously; she had become conventional—traitor to the higher, truer life in seeking the good-will of her fellows, rather than their good, as will presently appear.

Much of the trepidation she felt in again meeting with Wrax arose from the fear that he had worshipped an ideal Zee, and that the veritable flesh and blood would dispel the illusion. What if her cherished experiences, in rubbing off the blush-rose of simple innocence, had substituted the gaudy poppy? What if his idol proved to be of brass, his rare gem a worthless bauble; and he, in flinging her from him, with a Spartan-like heroism for which she had not given him credit, should cast his own fetters around herself, and leave her to fade away, a love-lorn maiden, while he stood a little beyond, upright, gazing with gratified scorn on the fatal trammels in which he consigned her to the blest shades of forgetfulness, whence he had himself but now emerged? Zee was exceedingly sensitive on this point, and it was excusable, remembering the mother's knife-cutting superstition, which was to leave one of the twain out in the cold.

Notwithstanding certain nervous twitchings as to whether she is fire-proof, she will doubtless hold her own against Wrax's graces of person and position, unless he love her still, and seek her in right earnest, in which case it is devoutly to be hoped that she will inhale that spiritual ether, which neither comes nor goes at our bidding.

Congratulating himself on the coast being clear, Wrax resolved to go in and win, or at least to keep other suitors at bay until his case proved hopeless. And having the run of the house, he unceremoniously popped in upon Zee at early morn and dewy eve, hoping to find her as neat in her household duties, as with book or needle in the parlor. By the way, does the god consult the happiness of himself or of his goddess, when he goes prying into her scrubbing, cooking and sewing qualifications? What if she were to return the compliment, and starting on a voyage of discovery on her own account, overhauled his private affairs to satisfy herself that he was the Simon Pure he represented himself to be? Is the prying less necessary in the one case than in the other? Once let the goddess become a thoughtful woman, and she will take certain of the prying gender down from their high horse.

The change in Zee, real or fancied, which Wrax saw, failed to deter him from remaining her devoted knight in season and out of season; at her best and at her worst, she was his one particular star, and she honored his unwavering constancy, not a little gratified to find herself at a premium still. Being no longer desirous of concealing his devotion to his morning and evening star, he ceased to require a discreet third person to join them in their rambles. At home and abroad, at all times and places, without any ostensible reason, Wrax cropped up, observing which curious coincidence, the little daughter of a lady, visiting at Zee's home, inquired of her mamma, in all the innocence of her short life: “Mamma, why does that young man follow us about everywhere?” She, happy child, never lived to understand magnetism.

All too soon, as the months wore on, Zee allowed herself to drift into an engagement with Wrax. How could she help it, indeed? how was she to throw away so tried and steady a regard? If love is assumed when an engagement is entered upon, Zee, to please the friends who had grieved over her previous “error of judgment,” no less than to please Wrax himself, had said “Yes” when she ought to have said “No,” but lacked the moral courage so to do. Gladly would she have schooled her heart to fondness, and have given him of her best; but she did not know how to set about it, as, indeed, how should she? It is not given us to love when and whom we will; the combustion must be spontaneous; love, like womankind, refuses to be drilled. The best, the most receptive of both sexes, often suffer most from the fitful Cupid, who laughs at his empty quiver and random shots.

Wrax's faith in Zee's pledged word was such that he was content with ever so slight a hope of winning her love, nor feared the frustration of his wildest anticipations. But since flirting no longer whetted the edge of their intercourse, there was in his attentions too much of the dumb-show of the faithful doggie to be agreeable. His earlier hair-breath escape had so deadened his courage, that the Dick-Turpin sort of lover, which would have suited our spirited Black Bess, was not forthcoming. Zee is now the one to want a third party in their perumbulations; not that she is more nice than wise, but that she may have the diversion of watching another skipping about collecting the treasures the hedgerows supplied, and she often coaxed Merlee to accompany them. On the road out, gathering mosses and wild flowers affoled delightful amusement; but in the deepening twilight such resources failing her, Merlee pronounced “lover's pace, three miles in four hours,” wearisome to a degree, and left the pair to edify each other in silence.

Walking, demurely, by Wrax's side, with her hand locked on his arm, and receiving merely “Yes” or “No,” with any number of “looks of love,” as Sadai would have said, in response to her sallies of wit and wisdom, this was little less than purgatory to the quick-silver girl, who was like tow, that any spark but Wrax's could set on fire. No wonder she used the nettle occasionally, and longed to hop off and leave him in the lurch, for he must have been inexcusably slow to have remained dumb with such a merry sprite by his side. The scenery amid which they roamed ought to have made star-gazing delightful work even to the most sluggish clodpole. But though a rustic like Zee, Wrax's tastes were not pastoral; he hadn't a soul above bricks and mortar; he craved “life,” the “life” found in the bustling, fever-breeding city. For an object in nature to claim even a passing notice from him was a nine days' wonder; Zee kept a queerly-twisted bit of thorn for years, because he had given it to her and called it “curious.”

The time has arrived for Sadai and Iva to start a young ladies' boarding-school in their native town, Zee being appointed commissioner-in-chief of the sewing-basket, etc. So youthful a firm was it (its head being but one-and-twenty) that a matronly servant became at once an institution; and grave deliberation was held as to whether a “follower,” in the person of Wrax, could be permitted to desecrate the virtuous domicile. The father said, laughingly, to Wrax: “I can't think how you find the courage to go courting among such girls. I never could have done it.” Nor was the father the only man who thought the elder girls (Merlee was head man to the old folk) a formidable trio to attack, the furies where the graces should be, perhaps. But Sadai and Iva protested that Wrax, having the worst on his side, there was nothing for anyone to fear; whereas Wrax may have questioned whether “the worst” in her pranks was as much on his side as were her accommodating sisters. But no; Zee's heart was tender, if her treatment was mettlesome; he thought himself more to be envied than pitied; her teasing was so pleasing, there could not be too much of it.

During school vacation a full-fledged Cockney fell from the clouds into this charming dovecote, or rather, on discovering what its inmates were, he made something more than a half-way house of the old home, constituting himself knight-errant to the girls. Being a bachelor and related to Ruby by marriage, he at once found grace with Zee, who named him “My man Friday.” Well as he might know his great Babylon he was as green as to what life in the woods might mean as any country cousin could desire, and his verdancy served Zee to perfection. He loved a lark, so did she; but “She must keep the ball rolling,” he said (and she was willing to take him at his word), “if he were to find a charm in the dreary wilds of fell and flood.” Oh, fie! he all but annihilated himself at starting, by hinting that the country could be “dreary.” Zee told him that “to become a spick and span Hodge he must be dying with love for hedges and ditches, thrushes and witches, while sighing for a lodge in some vast wilderness,” which he devoutly “hoped he might never possess, unless someone,” who shall be nameless, “consented to be the patron saint of his hermitage.” He thenceforth caught her cue (some men are pure clay in some hands), only stipulating that she should give him her company without stint, and he would yield himself unreservedly to her tuition of rustic mysteries.

Oh, delightful! Zee had at last found someone after her own heart, ravelling out and rippling over with a jollity which spurned all bounds and set priggishness at defiance; and with mischief throbbing in her every nerve, she clapped her hands in exuberant gladness; and, oh, on how many a wild-goose chase she sent her faithful swain, deigning only to laugh at him for his pains. Friday, nevertheless, professed to meet her admiration for nature, animate and inanimate, with like enthusiasm. Zee lived in clover for the nonce; and in all boating, nutting, and lily-gathering parties he was the doughty knight, and she the dainty maiden surrounded by a fairy circlet of far-reaching spells, all the powers of the air assisting at her conjuring.

Just now a nutting expedition is in the wind, and merry voices chant their names; they heed not; good-natured, half-baked simpletons may gather nuts and throw them to Zee to crack, or leave her free to while away the time of her smoke-dried city guest with resplendent visions which wrap them in delirious daydreams as they revel in the sweet woodland scenes and scents. But when once she lays aside her mystic wand, she is her own slap-dash self again, scrambling after nuts with an energy which kept Friday, who was step-and-fetch-it according to order, on thorns, so completely, indeed, did sundry significant nods from Zee unhinge his nerves, that he was never so supremely happy as when she was in dreamland. And seated on a throne of his improvising, himself in all humility at her feet, she indulged his humor by building marble halls in the air, and all her spidery webs are herring-boned with golden thread. Now she glides along avenues stretching further than eye can scan, to the mansion of many turrets deeply embowered in shrubberies. There are the broad gravel walks, mossy terraces, close-shaven lawns with choice floral glories; a fountain, too, and fish, silver and gold; a lake, also, in the distance, with swans sailing on its bosom—beauties grouped in rich profusion to captivate the senses, making of this and that enchanted castle a fit habitation for the gods of earth. The fair creatures seen sauntering down the sloping lawn in sweeping trains of stiff brocade are Mistress Sadai, Mistress Iva, and Mistress Merlee, accompanied by all the adjuncts which serve to adorn quality ladies—a screeching peacock, pet poodles, and a monkey in a silken vest—the latter pet is no fiction, Jacko and Zee are bosom friends. If the scene and the damsels are too stately, Zee, shedding over them her rollicking humor, quickly changes them into blithe, sprightly belles, to each of whom she apportions a serving-woman, a splendid equipage with outriders, and caps all with lordly suitors and subsequent jubilations.

Professing great love for water parties in tiny pleasure boats manned by inexperienced rowers, Friday, the cheat, is doomed to figure at one such party. What is more delightful, when the nerves are in tune, than sailing, as our friends did, on a narrow meandering river, screened from the sun's fierce rays by a steep bank over which the tangling vines, woodbine and convolvulus, spread their all-encircling arms, while a wide expanse of richly wooded hill and dale lies peacefully before them? Here and there the margin of the river is dyed blue by the bright-eyed forget-me-not, some of which flowers the gallant Friday must present to Zee; and, lest he should be supplanted, the Cockney, in his insane haste to reach them, set one foot on land, thereby sending the cockleshell of a boat a foot or two farther from the water's edge than was agreeable. And there was Friday, with one foot on land and one on sea, somewhere, anywhere between heaven and earth but where he wished to be! A stalwart arm, however, pushed the boat in, so that our exquisite saved his skin and his courage by jumping to land.

In those, to Friday, truly awful moments, when he had the rare felicity of seeing his manly form mirrored in the pellucid waters expecting to explore the realms of the finny tribes perforce, the saucy Zee did not even smile; but the instant he was safe her laugh rang out loud and clear. And talking loudly of payment aside, Friday—would you believe it?—in all the primitive ignorance of his Cockney education, positively accredited Zee with having all but slipped the boat from beneath him. No. He trusted to the treacherous waves instead of the faithful Zela, who said it was almost to be regretted that he had not fallen into the water in the act of clutching the flowers and taken them, poetically, down with him to kiss the slimy bed of the river, then to have thrown them to her as he rose to the surface with “Forget-me-not” on his despairing lips, when she would have earned the Humane Society's medal by frantic efforts to save him by means of her cambric pocket-handker-chief.

Aye! what a dance she led the dear fellow! yet never was there a more harmless pair of goody-two-shoes. Friday did sometimes lose his senses, raving about “bright eyes,” etc., when Zee would add, with an archness that made him bound off to a safe distance, “aquiline nose, damask cheek, ruby lips, pearly teeth, dimpled chin, swanlike neck,” so on and so forth. Still, never did Friday whisper tender word, nor by any kind of casuistry attempt to spell “opportunity.” Whether or not he knew of her engagement, she did, and that sufficed. Wrax must have been absent on leave surely, as never so much as his shadow was seen; and even admitting that Zee went to the end of her tether, she did not play football with Friday's heart, nor did he play with hers.

The father being rather much of a prude, anything ever so little askew looked ugly to him; and hearing of Zee's “flirtation,” he quickly brought her to book. Girls and boys had a wholesome dread of being closeted with the duty-loving. duty-doing father, whose verdict of “guilty” was equivalent to being sent to Coventry till self-reproach died a natural death. Now Zee's turn had come, and the father wound up his lecture by saying that “Mr.—was not worthy to wipe the dust from Wrax's feet.” The highest commendation he could offer.

Zee questioned not his verdict. She liked Mercury well in its way, but Friday, who was so much laughing-gas, never could have touched the deeply-earnest side of her nature; he was, nevertheless, a host in himself, whereas Wrax was miserably prosaic. Still, in a fair contest, the latter would have carried off the prize, since if there was more stolidity in Wrax there was, Zee thought, also more solidity, and she esteemed gravity above levity. Wrax, too, inquired what such “goings on” meant, but was silenced by a word from Zee.

In truth, the existing social relations between the sexes are as monstrous as if their interests were antagonistic, not identical—their purposes impure, not pure. When there is no passion to confess nor to conceal, much pleasant and profitable intercourse between the sexes is possible, but ungoverned passion is a betrayer. The one unanswerable argument against the prevailing animalism is for women to be bright, clever and incorruptibly good. But so long as the generality of women are what they are, men are likely to treat them as toys, if nothing worse. To gauge their worth, take away their love of ease, of dress, of cant and scandal, and what remains—what soul is there?

Chapter 4 Unsophisticated.

AREN'T you impatient to hear that Zee has caught some faint echo of the music of the spheres? Fancy a girl possessing twenty years as wedding portion unlettered in affairs of the heart! In setting up her standard of excellence, she must have flown over the heads of the entire bachelor order; and yet she was capable of complete abandonment where the affections were concerned, but withal so given to look before she leaped, that she could not “fall in love,” as the stupid phrase is, with her eyes shut, nor be beguiled into taking thorns for roses, nor gall for honey. Mental blind-man's buff had no charms for her, and yet had she used her brains as well as she used her eyes she would have had no history.

There never was a moment that Wrax was not free to take himself off and plight his troth to some more gifted, more enchanting fair one. With every-day girls he was the prince of song and story, and they were ready to champion him to the world's end and a little beyond it; deeming him most unlucky in his choice, they queried what he could see in that odd girl to bind him her willing slave. It is certain, however, that she had hooked her fish securely enough to draw in and pay out her line in a way exceeding tantalising to the ill-fated gudgeon. And it is equally certain that Wrax was one of those undisciplined yet essentially masculine beings who must pursue, even though it be a will-o-the-wisp. Hence, if Zee had loved him with all the bent of ungoverned inclination caprice would have been her safest weapon of attack, that the retiring modesty and delicate shrinking of supposed doubtful affection might have lent piquancy to the pursuit.

A dear old aunt, who is sitting on some one's foot-stool in the New Jerusalem, used to shake her curls at Zee, and try to read her a lesson; but she invariably cajoled the antiquated belle, whose beaux had slipped through her fingers, into such a betrayal of her own weaknesses that the auntie was fairly ruled out of court as censor. If but once started on her theme of themes, the doting old lady expatiated, with fervid eloquence, on the ecstacy of the “first kiss of love,” declaring there was no other sensation like unto it, and that it could be experienced but once in a life-time. The auntie took that “first kiss” with her to the skies—all that remained of it, at any rate. Zee protested, irreverently, that “kisses had been given to her in such round dozens that she knew no difference between the first and the last, so that the superlatively sweet kiss was yet in store for her. That, in fact, she preferred motto kisses to the essence of two lips, the former being good to eat, but the latter good for nothing.”

Merlee, having early bewitched a cousin of Wrax, their affinities led the cousins, quite naturally, to the door of the fateful dwelling; but once over its threshold their lines diverged. The cousin's mystic course was so calmly serene, that he could afford to joke at Wrax's expense, and entertained the girls, at subsequent trysts, with his (Wrax's) wild vagaries, when led agate by a frown of the vixenish Zee, whose spirit unwittingly kept the woe-begone lover hovering on the confines of her, to him, boundless realm.

The March lion and lamb, at whose dictation Zee came into the world dancing a reel, were each by turns rampant in her; and clearly she would not have suited Wrax had she been one of the flat and stale sort. It may be that in those moments of intense absorption—in which, according to the cousin's account, Wrax was wont to indulge—his better nature triumphed, and he communed with himself much as follows: “Aye, Zee, I cannot tell what thou art to me. I never had faith in a living soul until I knew thee. Oh, would that I were more worthy of thee! Thou inspirest me with the noblest ambition of which I am capable; but I am weaker than thou knowest, and my better self prompts me to acknowledge my sins. But, oh, I dare not risk the confession. If thou shouldst scorn me I am lost: to part thee and me would be to wrench my being asunder. When once thou art the presiding genius of my hearth, thou shalt be to me wisdom and strength. If thou couldst but give me thine unquestioning love, how full of content life would be! that thou canst not is more my fault than thine. Woe is me! Guilt often skirts despair. Alas, my Zela!”

True, most true, foolish Wrax! thy guilty secret stains thee more than thou knowest, going deeper and deeper into thy nature the longer thou concealest it. Be a man! Trust Zee; she will neither betray nor desert thee. Her tender susceptibilities are ever sending out feelers for solid rock in thy character, to which she fain would cling tenaciously; but an empty void in thyself throws her back stranded when she longs to trust.

Like all girls similarly circumstanced, Zee had to pass the crucial test of an introduction to the family of her lover, whose sisters, educated by the Misses Smirke and Pout, had laid aside school drudgery when Zee commenced it. But distance, together with religious (nay, sectarian) differences — that fruitful bone of contention—separated the two families. Hence against Wrax's family Zee's ignorant prejudices were to some extent in arms. Nevertheless, as their intimacy ripened, its every member won her respect and confidence, as signally as Wrax had failed to do. And notwithstanding his apparent frankness towards herself respecting his own affairs, to his own immediate relatives, however reasonable were their inquiries in reference thereto, he equivocated with an unblushing effrontery which disgusted Zee, whose remonstrances on the subject were met with: “You don't know my family; I had better give the town-crier a shilling to publish my affairs than take them into my confidence.”

Zee was silenced, not satisfied, thinking: “If he deceives his own friends he may deceive me,” feeling confident, likewise, that in speaking thus slightingly of his family he was guilty of the grossest injustice towards them. Zee's father had taken his children, at an early age, into his confidence, and they made his joys and sorrows their own, nor ever abused his trust.Close would have applied to Zee, if to any one of his children; yet, try how she would, she failed utterly to excuse Wrax's unjustifiable secrecy. Indeed, his endless scene-shifting and prevarication, in reference to his own affairs, caused Zee at times to recoil from him with a loathing which made their engagement a stupid farce, likely to result in little happiness to either party. Besides which, a serious charge was preferred against him in his business transactions—which, however, fell through, reflecting more daniagingly on the man who made it than on Wrax himself, on whose part there had been more or less of indiscretion, but nothing remotely criminal. Pending the investigation of the matter, Zee, who was only too ready to write Wrax down guilty, peremptorily closed all communication between them, but on finding she had wronged him, penitently healed the breach. She not unfrequently made such blunders; yet on the whole her judgment was sound, though apt to be arrogant because she stood alone.

It would, nevertheless, be wrong to convey the impression that Zee perpetually snubbed Wrax. His society was acceptable when she succeeded in quieting inward misgivings as to whether he was or was not all that he ought to be. Despite his taciturnity, there was intellect equal to her need, but there was no repose in his character. He never appeared sufficient in himself for his own needs. Then his words, too, sometimes had a hollow ring in them that evinced the want in his character of which Zee was so painfully conscious, though unable to define.

In order to appreciate what follows, the reader must have sickened of all cold-blooded mortals, useless alike to God and man, who, affecting to despise “the grovelling cares of earth” and the beautiful robe yelept human nature, arrogate to themselves a saintliness which, if their pet shibboleth be refused, shows a face and a heart like a flint even to the excellent of the earth. And in justice to Wrax, to show the disadvantages under which he labored, it must be confessed that, in defiance of her better judgment, Zee had permitted herself to be talked into adopting the above order of saintliness.

The debased selfishness she presumed to call “religion”—a kind of top-dressing, to be put on and off at will, a something outside and apart from herself—blurred instead of beautifying her life, by instilling a contempt almost amounting to hatred towards “unbelievers.” And becoming, by “making a profession of religion,” a worse, not a better, woman—a Pharisee, exclusive and repelling—she lost much of the ingenuousness native to her, and substituted a conventional pretentiousness which taught her to shun, as she would shun the devil, all who were professedly less favored of heaven than herself, lest she should fly in the face of Providence and imperil her “precious, never-dying soul.”

How far this black heathenism, which she called “religion,” tinged her distrust of Wrax and raised a barrier between them, it is impossible to say. But in so far as Wrax refused to subscribe to her sectarianism he was better than she, and had he been a truer man, would have given Zee and her pietism—a mere cloak as it was, not her very self, as it ought to have been— the cold shoulder.

Zee's father was a Bethel-pillar, as was also a neighbor of his, a man Savage by name and by nature, and his God, thanks to his creed, was more savage than he. Such a father would have made a devil incarnate of Zee, probably. He had too much iron in his constitution—too much faith in the ramrod; whereas Zee's father, though rather straight-laced, was naturally a better man than any creed as then propounded could have made him. He had no creed; his religion was therefore vital, making his life, like the child's sky, “full of gimlet-holes, to let the glory through.” His words and deeds, based on the most chivalrous tenderness, were governed by strict rectitude down to the smallest act.

What mere animals were some of the Bethel parsons of other days whom Zee's father entertained! Parsons were parsons once upon a time, and fared sumptuously, one of them being an abomination to the quizzical girl. How that fellow made the viands fly! and his potations were equally liberal. Zee declared he must have a second stomach, like “Jack the Giant Killer.” Elijah's ravens never could have satisfied him, unless kind heaven had taken away his appetite. And yet, with characteristic flippancy, he called himself a “pensioner on heaven's bounty for a morsel of bread and a cup of cold water.”

And there are children still to whom “religion,” so called, takes as grossly sensual forms as those of the Bethel parson and Bethel pilgrim of the Savage order, whose evil influences are never counteracted by the Christian's beautiful life. And for such children's sake, who are drifting no one knows whither, it were well to declare that our religion is what we are—true if we are true, false if we are false—since, if loved and lived, Christianity proper never fails to make men as gentle and tolerant as was its founder. To be thus relentlessly nailed to our colors will be fatal to all pretentiousness.

Even among the Savage order of men, despite their glaring inconsistencies, there is to the reflective mind a depth of misdirected conscientiousness which only needs to be turned to good account to make their characters as admirable as they are now too often execrable; and to good account it will be turned when once men understand that they have souls to form, in contradistinction to the popular notion of souls to save. The formed soul is the saved soul—formed through great inward tribulation—as will be carefully elaborated as the story proceeds.

However, despite the crape and bombazine in which the popular orthodoxy more or less enshrouded Zee's spirit, it is certain that with all her faults, and they were manifold, Wrax loved her for what she was in herself. Her very blemishes were the offshoots of a too richly abounding life. There was in her all the conceit which usually accompanies ignorance and good natural ability, ability her very stupidity evoked, against which stupidity her whole life was a conscious protest. Her self-love, too, was as pronounced as was that of her neighbors, and as bitterly as they she resented the wounding of it. But her truthfulness was acknowledged perforce. She was, indeed, made of such transparent stuff that deliberate, persistent wrong-doing was impossible to her, and her wide-awake habit of looking straight into one made common-place mortals wince to the depth of their deep self-complacency, and such soon shun the disturber of their peace. Hence a sympathising friend she found not, though she gave good entertainment.

So far, in truth, had she herself fallen short of her own standard of true living that she despised herself more than others were likely to despise her; and if some far-seeing spiritualist had invaded the girl's cob-webbed domain called heart or brain he would have discovered that her fear of fears was, not whether Wrax was good enough for her, but whether she was the right woman for him—whether someone else might not make him happier than she could ever do. And, dwelling reproachfully on her want of faith in herself no less than in him, Wrax endeavored to reason away her fears as quickly as they presented themselves; and Zee, forgetting herself after such remorseful seasons, tried the harder to believe in Wrax through and through. There was nothing, save his excessive secrecy and his injustice to his family, tangibly wrong in him to warrant Zee's dishonoring suspicions. He was correct and plausible to a fault, and she tried to persuade herself her suspicions were largely due to her inherent whip-and-scorpion-making nature. And yet what could it be, that vague undefinedwant in him which, phantom-like, filled her with apprehension even while it eluded her pursuit? She had laid many a ghost, but this one, when she least expected it, arose and dogged her footsteps.

Then, too, she silently grieved over the fact that those whom she believed to be better and wiser than herself, because everyone liked them, cheerfully ignored in Wrax the want of the “one thing needful” so necessary to herself, personal regard and his good prospects appearing to outweigh all other considerations. Although as incapable of guiding her own steps as the steps of another, Zee agonised over the right and wrong of every question, and the delicate perceptions of the similarly circumstanced only can understand the surgings of her soul, hungering for leave to love, yet baulked in its every effort to grasp hold of its ideal, of anything indeed. True love lies only in respect for its object, and respect has its roots in sincerity and truth—nowhere else. Urged repeatedly to take everything on trust in reference to Wrax and “religion “in particular, Zee rebelled, crying inwardly: “No; God has given me sight. Don't, for pity's sake, put out my eyes. Let me see my road and make the best of it, be it never so stony.” And so should say all girls with better results than did Zee, whose mental eyes, shame to herself, had been blinded by false teaching.

All unconsciously to herself, however, matters were drawing to a close in Wrax's mind, and in demanding her release Zee had innocently rushed upon her doom, for Wrax urged marriage with a persistency which brooked no denial. Zee begged to defer her answer indefinitely, assigning sufficient reason for so doing, to which, however, Wrax refused to listen. Finally, Zee's consent was made subject to the approval of both families, which was too readily accorded to please her.

She knew instinctively that Wrax, ever infirm of purpose, was not strong to bear trouble, and feared to drive him to desperation. Nevertheless, the vital question opened a yawning chasm at her feet, from which she shrank back appalled. The risk was great, and great the stake. Wrax's happiness, no less than her own, hung in the balance; and she could not, however romantic, trust to marriage changing his nature. Only to the highest type of men, of whom Wrax was not, is the wife dearer than the bride. Zee remarked with intense pain that he wras not domestic in his tastes, that he disliked reading and the society of women, though he never wearied of her own; and long she pondered over how home was to be made attractive to such a man after its novelty had worn off. Too often the wife, in common with other treasures, loses value in possession, even though the oughts and crosses of married life make her incomparably more worthy of esteem than when, as a thoughtless young thing, the husband first won her.

Could she take him for better for worse with such a pretence of affection as hers seemed? For really she herself found it impossible to determine whether she did or did not love him. In all her helplessness, strength all gone, Zee promised to become Wrax's wife; and thenceforward until the marriage was consummated knew no peace, casting a gloom for a season over the coming event by refusing to hear it mooted. As to how many tears were shed by her silently and alone over the necessary preparations it were vain to conjecture. Her sadness, in truth, became too abiding to escape even casual observers, and a sister of Wrax demanded its cause of Sadai, who, with an impatient shrug, disposed of the question, saying: “Oh, it's just like Zee; she must be unlike everyone else.” Unreflecting Sadai!

The father and Zee—who is bound to accord the “quiet half hour” he requests—are to be closeted again, and Zee is to be placed martyr-like on the rack, a proceeding as painful to him as to her. Confessing that she was “a riddle to him,” the father deplored “the change which had come over her, deeming her cruelly unjust to Wrax, whose affection she had proved, and who was himself all that could be desired,” etc. Then followed various questions which naturally suggested themselves to the father, to each of which Zee gave an emphatic “No.” Then, with much loving counsel, the father urged; “Be your own merry self again, for no one can look forward with pleasure to an event which should be joyous so long as it is tabooed as if the bridal were a burial, the wedding-dress a shroud.”

Zee's words were few. Not even to her father would she whisper of her distrust, and her whole nature revolted against being regarded as a victim. Fancying that no one had a right to meddle with her sorrows, she deemed pity an impertinence, and would have none of it. She therefore hid—no one could do it better than she—a heavy heart under a glad countenance. And although to the reader is given a peep into Doubting Castle, to mere onlookers the girl appeared what she really was indeed, a buoyant, irrepressible spirit, riding the crest of every wave, though now and then dipping into the valley of humiliation on her own account.

But few men would envy the bridegroom of such a bride; yet Wrax knew it all, and his joy was boundless; he was content with such love as she had to offer, knowing full well her devotion to duty would be as unswerving as if inspired by love. To secure her at any price was his object, believing that his happiness would secure her own, as it would assuredly, if it were of the right kind.

Despite Zee's fruitless introspection of herself and of Wrax as far as practicable, the wedding-day was nigh at hand. The bride being involuntarily enshrined in all hearts for the nonce, a shimmering of beauty, real so long as it lasts however foreign to the object, encompasses her whose brow is adorned with the triple crown of love, honor, trust; whose self-forgetfulness renders her sufficiently consciously unconscious to be indifferent to spectators. Of whose number Zee was not, and now that her turn had come, she would not endure the gaze of familiar faces, but gained a tardy consent to “the knot” being tied in London, where privacy could be bought. She had taken a lively interest in the marriage of other girls —in the pretty gilt-gingerbread show, that is—and as hers was the first wedding in the family, she could not escape quite all the customary parade.

The night before the bridal, herself and Merlee, like two nuns bent on an errand of mercy, slipped quietly from the home-nest to town—the world and his wife-being none the wiser for the flitting. If the bride is happy on whom the sun shines, what is the bride on whom the rain pours in sheets? What a morning that was! How could Dame Nature look so glum? Her sweetest caress should have made her child a concentrated sunbeam, rippling in a sea of gladness, for she is to stamp her seal—her one priceless gem of girlish innocence—on the soul of her betrothed, and to be to him henceforth life's guiding-star, shining with ever-increasing lustre. But the rain it raineth all the time, and in vain the eyes turn wistfully skywards to catch the Dutchman's tiny patch of blue. The very sparrows were drenched to the skin, and the leaves of the trees wept as if bewailing Zee's untimely end —the end of the first stage of life's journey.

It was, moreover, imperative, for some sufficient reason, that the ceremony should take place an hour earlier than arranged, which made the wedding doubtful for that day, since a telegram could not expedite matters; it would but cross country friends on their way to town. The uncle, whose house was to be the stage of the tragedy, at once so old and so new, fumed at express speed, until Zee—who fancied she had placed herself in God's hand, and was prepared for the fabled “slip” at the last moment—laughed him out of countenance.

There was no loophole for Zee to creep out of; for lo! the habitually unpunctual Wrax, the radiantly happy Wrax, had taken the precaution to travel overnight—the safer the nearer the beloved, on the outskirts of whose dwelling he hovered. Hurrah! here they come, the whole troop of wedding-guests, the good father bringing up the rear—guests arrayed in bridal finery, and so laden with flowers and the sunshine of surcharged hearts, as to put cloudland to the blush.

And presently the deed was done. The happy pair had stood together at the altar, and uttered, with becoming dignity, the irrevocable “I will,” Zee at least tremblingly realising her position.

After all was over Wrax confessed that he trembled only lest Zee should “show the white feather at the last moment.” Put him to open shame? That would not have been like Zee, she was too honorable for that; she had too long looked her fate, which she now accepted as the will of heaven, steadily in the face, for any such whimsical nonsense. The only hitch in the august proceedings was the non - arrival of Zee's brother, whom the missive telling of an earlier knot-tying had failed to reach. Expecting to cut a figure in the auspicious event by helping to tie the knot securely, the young swell, who was just beginning to “find himself,” and was consequently on short-commons as to knick-knacks, had had a white waistcoat made expressly for the occasion; this, since he had missed the treat of treats, looked like a ruinous piece of extravagance, the mention of which, together with the disappointment experienced, caused the tears to roll down the poor lad's cheeks, and his grief was so touchingly simple that Zee freely mingled pearly drops with his. But little was needed to open the flood-gates.

Having done her part bravely up to that moment, she was rewarded by the cheery though watery rays of the noonday sun, as they danced in and out amid the delicacies of the breakfast - table, seated in the centre of which the bride, on being addressed by her new title, let her eye unconsciously run the length of the board in search of the lady in question, and was suddenly brought to her senses, and was dyed in rose-bloom on observing that the entire party was ready to explode at her expense.

She had, of course, the honor of putting the knife into the cake “fit for a duchess,” the doing of which was followed by the usual complimentary toasts and speeches, all being hilarity until the newly-wed bade adieu to the glum, ungracious city. Not yet could Zee take Wrax for her all, she must have her favorite sister, Merlee, with them on their tour; and the trio spirited themselves out of sight without any demonstration of old shoes. The cream and flavor of the feast had departed; but the friends left behind, refusing to be extinguished, betook themselves with one accord to Richmond, where they were entertained full royally by expectant relatives. And nothing occurred to cloud the enjoyment of a silver-letter day.

Chapter 5 Doves.

ONE of the maddest, merriest evenings gave cordial welcome to the trio as they dived far into the heart of Kent to explore its beauties. Nature put on bridal robes as Zee laid hers aside. What a gorgeous dress of living green the good mother wore, after having fresh washed her face, and smoothed out every wrinkle! The sun, meanwhile blithely holding the glass up to her, crooned over her “good-night.” But she was in such a wild humor that her eyelids fell with fitful wantonness, though spicy breezes wafted her to the land of nod. The very birds, too, whose matins had been interrupted by the downpour, were loth to leave their daily task undone.

During their jaunt the travellers visited an aunt of the girls, one of the kindliest creatures extant, to whom the grosser forms of selfishness were impossible. And with much wifely wisdom she counselled Zee to be hand, head, heart, love, duty, and delight to her husband; to anticipate his every word and whim, and all that. Possessing unbounded faith in mankind, the aunt little thought that ill-judged devotion could minister only to selfishness in the evilly disposed; so her wise saws were not laid by with her sheets in lavender, the only strife between herself and her husband being how best to emulate each other in self-forgetful love.

Applauding the aunt's policy to the echo, Wrax vowed he would recommend all Benedicts to take their wives to her for good advice, which, if well followed, would prevent all domestic ills. Zee, though never rash in making promises, accepted the said policy in all seriousness. If her judgment approved, it was easy, yea delightful, to her to obey. Her father ruled by love; Wrax would be as gentle and true as he.

Girls, as a rule, start well on the untried path, and the responsibilities of wifehood improve them, whereas husbands too often deteriorate grievously. Bolstered up in the belief insensibly fostered by social, educational, and political advantages, that marriage entitles a man to do as he likes, even though he likes to do wrong, Self is enthroned god forthwith, and the husband not unfrequently rules by everything but love. There ought to be but one code of morals between husband and wife. William and Mary must ascend the throne together; and he or she who knows how to rule will say very little about it—certainly never suffer the two wills to clash, nor be for ever thrusting the sceptre into the other's face. What matter whose hand holds the sceptre, if the rule be right?

Saying that he wished to speak to her, Wrax led Zee into another room, of which he locked the door. Then, taking her hands lovingly, sorrowfully, he suddenly became convulsed with emotion. Attempting to speak, he but wept the more excitedly, crying, “O, Zee, Zee, Zee!” Possessing no clue to any confession he might desire to make, Zee, though as anxious to share his sorrows as his joys, could not help him by so much as a word. But, becoming alarmed, she tenderly implored him to be calm—words which served but to increase his anguish, until at length she begged him to defer whatever communication he might desire to make. Oh, fatal blunder! A bad beginning for Zee. She ought not to have left that room until he had told her what he had to tell. Together with the agitation, alas! passed away the desire to take her into his confidence, to have done which would probably have given a different coloring to their whole lives. He never once reverted to the circumstance, and Zee felt that confidence must be voluntary to be of any worth; besides which, no Delilah-like efforts of hers, could she have stooped to make them, would have wormed his secrets from him.

Short as sweet was the mythical “moon,” leaving the more honey wherewith to consecrate their new dwelling, to which they slyly wended their way earlier than expected, hoping thereby to forestall the jubilant announcement that So and So “had brought home his bride.” Vain hope! Scarcely had they sheltered beneath the old roof-tree than the bells of the various churches rung out their tale-telling peal, which impudent officiousness must be paid for, else will the backward ringing of the bells publish far and wide the meanness of the newly wed, who for the time being are so over-ballasted with honors, merited or otherwise, that they have not the courage to torture the ears of the “oldest inhabitant” by the backward ringing of the would-be-joyous bells.

Having spent a pleasant evening with friends, the young couple started for their own cosy home, the door of which was opened by Emma, whose every feature beamed a glad welcome on the heads of the household as they entered their, in a new sense, own home—the home in which Zee then for the first time set foot, so fearful was she prior to marriage of being suspected of “nesting.” But now as they, Adam and Eve in Paradise, whisked in and out and round about each sly corner, they declared there was nothing half so sweet in life as their own snug cot, which the sisters had made home-like.

Zee sighed after a degree of wifely perfection by no means easy of attainment. Having read “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,” her ideal woman was very much after Miss Hannah More's mind, considering herself the more perfect the more Moreish she became.

Left to herself in her new home, Zee gathered sweets bee-fashion as she flitted about putting a hallowing touch on all things great and small, taking possession of Wrax and his belongings in the fullest sense, for had he not endowed her—her, mind; not himself—with all his worldly goods? “They are mine.” she murmured; “he has given them all to me, but he is better than them all.” “He must be God's good gift,” she argued, “since he had not forbidden the banns,” in arriving at which conclusion a millstone rolled off her heart, and she dared to be thankfully, joyously happy. Her lot was by no means a hard lot, after all. Having given herself, her best energies would follow, and her new duties, rightly appreciated, would become the best possible recreation for both body and mind.

Busy fancy wrapped Zee in Elysium. How could one who lived on day-dream unsubstantialities be expected to think of such mundane affairs as eating and drinking? Oh, for the rod of the necromancer! Behold the dinner hour, and with it the hungry Wrax; but the gods had not provided the feast! The empty larder flashed on Zee's mind in an instant, and, throwing up her hands, she looked at Wrax aghast. Divining the state of the case, he kissed away Zee's regrets a thousand times over as, laughing heartily, he promised to make capital against a rainy day out of all her blunders, asking, further, how long she considered it necessary they should live on air? The old home, to which Emma was despatched with a note telling of the dilemma, was better than the conjurer's rod, for in double quick time Emma placed on the table a piping hot repast, to which even the ghost of a Zee did ample justice.

Hey - day, young wife! wool - gathering already? What would Miss Hannah have said of her disciple? “No dinner,” was a standing joke against the model housewife, and she was well roasted instead of the joint. The mother would have amply supplied their larder had they not taken time by the forelock. Since dreamland and fairies of wonder-working notoriety had failed Zee at the critical moment, Emma, who had concluded that her master and mistress were to dine from home, since she heard no mention of dinner, was enjoined by Zee to refresh her memory should it again play truant, lest Wrax should fall into many a snare, in his haste to grow rich out of the capital her blunders supplied. What a beautiful course life's rugged journey would become if a like glamor were thrown over its small vexations! It is strange that simple joys should pall; perpetual love-making, like perpetual motion, awaits discovery; self-love is the bane of the former, and of the latter, may be, who knows?

Zee's mishaps were a godsend to Wrax, whose delight was extravagant in having, as he said, “his wife all to himself in his own home.” He had been kept at arm's length so long, that his now merry gambols were the safety-valve of his long pent-up emotions. For Zee had seated him upon his throne as her lord by right divine; having absolved him of all treachery, though with many serpent wiles he once tried to hold her with so tight a grip that, with all his tact and diplomacy, he could never feel sure that he had gained an inch in her good graces.

And thankfully taking note of his hilarity, she met him with a gay enthusiasm which told better than words how perfect was her trust. And as Wrax went out into the world so old and yet so new, with a bounding step indicative of a lightness of heart pleasant to witness, Zee said fondly: “This must last. Gleesome and frisky as a kitten now, sir, you must not settle down into a grumpy old Tom with long, sharp claws; nor must you sport with me as if I were a toy. Our love shall grow young as we grow old together, that each in the heart of the other may fill as large and green a space fifty years hence as to-day, or woe-betide us. Hand in hand, strong in that oneness of soul which alone constitutes true union, we will, with bold front, together breast the full tide of prosperity or adversity as it advances.” Meanwhile Wrax placed her on the pinnacle of the temple of fancy, saying: “Admire my idol, all ye that pass by!” What would Miss Pout have said to the “idol”? And if in her May-day splendor Zee was made too much of, it may stand over against the period when she received justice at the hands of no one.

The to be or not to be questionings of Zee's mind having been silenced, she was the last to doubt the propriety of giving full swing to a merriment guileless as free—to roll up the sunshine as a scroll in haste to meet the cloud, to strew her path with thorns instead of with roses. Nay, verily, she was brimful and “running over with animal spirits, sparkling with diamond dew, as, putting on her coronation robes, she surveyed her future from the hill-top reaching to heaven, converting her once waste howling wilderness into a bower of content. Never in courting-time had she been half so winsome.

And Wrax had found his tongue. Indeed, he continued so rapturously absorbed he was quite another Wrax, all glorious; and honoring him with a reverence her father's example instilled, Zee would never tire of looking up to him with wide-open, child-like eyes. His love had been no mercenary speculation, no golden reasons had dazed his brain. Believing that Zee was better than gold, he had taken her just as she was, with a disinterestedness quite verdant to those who in marriage sometimes bow so low before the golden calf that they crawl ever afterwards. Gold may be bought at too high a price, and if happiness pure and unalloyed be the quest, it were better to adorn the brow with the beads of honest toil.

As month followed month the honeymoon spread itself out interminably, as the doves revelled in their second Eden. Its spell would never be broken; there were no dregs to such blissful intoxication, no gall in such an entrancing cup; threescore years and ten would find their Eden only the more refined. The triple powers of world, flesh and devil would be powerless to quench the torch lit at and fed from the Zeeshrine—the Zee who found she had to keep square too long to support the dignity due to her position, so accepted wifely homage with her usual ease and impudence.

Having commenced business in an extensive way the day after he attained his majority, and both families being as able as willing to give Wrax substantial support, a career of honorable usefulness opened before him such as is rarely presented to so young a man. Naught but himself could come between him and his wildest hopes until prosperity's cup would scarcely carry a rose-leaf in addition. As a matter of course, Wrax's capital would be locked up in his business, and from the first week of marriage he very properly allowed his wife to share his monetary anxieties, and the dreadful “bills” becoming due this week, next week, always, as it seemed to this inexperienced girl, frightened her possibly more than Wrax intended, for she could scarcely dare to eat with those “bills” hanging over her head. But, assuming those “bills” caused her needless alarm, if he erred at all, Wrax erred, on the right side. It was better at, starting to make their wants and tastes few and simple than, by rushing to the opposite extreme, to drive all before them for a season, then tumble down with a crash.

Responsibilities often change witless girls into reasonable women, women who prefer serge to satin rather than imperil their husband's reputation; for it is so essentially woman's nature to save, to conserve all good, that wasteful extravagance does violence to her nature, so much so, in fine, that meanness is one of the many vices she has to conquer. And the men who have extravagant wives, if such there be, made a false start on the threshold of married life in all probability.

Having put life's harness on, Zee would never wince under a fair share of its burdens. Nothing pleased her better than the taxing of her ingenuity in culinary operations, so long as only moderately rich dishes were expected from nail-parings. She modestly professed to stop short at creation. Deftly, too, her magic needle could make old things new, but in those young days she had no old things to metamorphose, an ample wardrobe having been provided. For wardrobe Sadai would have substituted trousseau doubtless but she was fond of “expressive French,” and talked French to Zee—to Zee, you know, who knew nothing of her mother tongue even. You can fancy how expressive” it would be. And notwithstanding that Sadai condescended to interpret her “expressive French,” Zee's mother-wit occasionally despoiled Sadai's “larnin”’ of its gloss. To the plain-speaking Zee all French and Latin words and phrases (except such as have become popularised) in English books looked very like pedantry.

Chapter 6 A Cloud as big as a Man's Hand.

HAVING gone thus far with Zee, does the reader demand that she shall continue to skip merrily down-hill, carolling bird-fashion, until her voice is lost in the far distance? Such were a fitting termination to a novel; but such is not life. It is a pity to let the curtain fall on the girl, but there is a dark background to bring into view. Tulle-illusion may be a pretty web for a bride, but it does not wear. Zee had all too soon to don the serge of this work-a-day world.

Professing to have flirted with his wife longer than was business-like, “neglected books” claimed the attention of Wrax, whose office, in which much of his time must necessarily be spent, was, unfortunately, a short distance from the house, which he would leave of an evening ostensibly to “lock himself in his office and write hard.” Demurring to his running away, Zee promised, if he would bring his books home, that her electrical presence should clear his brain and make the pen fly over the page with unwonted celerity. To which Wrax, who was quick in expedients, made so many reasonable objections, that Zee reluctantly conceded the point, and he kissed away her half-smile, half-pout with a cheery “I won't be long,” as he hurried off night after night.

Strangers calling of an evening occasionally, to see Wrax on business, were sent to the office, and on finding it vacant returned to the house with a message, and excusing his absence on receiving the message, Wrax not infrequently said too much; for his wife discovered quite incidentally again and again that he misstated facts. But on hinting at these seeming discrepancies to Wrax, his explanations were so prompt and feasible that Zee accepted them fully; nor did a shadow of doubt arise in her mind until his hours became irregular, and she observed with pain that— although tolerant of her solicitude, even anticipating it by making it appear he was constantly the victim of vexatious interruptions—he disliked being asked, never so lovingly, “where he had been, or why he had lingered so long?”

“Writing to do” being an insufficient blind, “important business transactions” calling him hither and thither henceforth offered a wide-open door of escape. They dwelt among their own people, whose visiting circle was a wide one, and to Zee the kindly interchange of social amenities was pleasant recreation; but to Wrax, who in thirsting for “life” refused to be debarred more congenial pursuits, private parties were an intolerable infliction, though he bowed to “the claims of society” sufficiently to avoid remark. Or when “business” excused his absence to his wife, he so sedulously avoided saying where he had been that, try as Zee did to lull a suspicion of wrong-doing, she failed to cheat herself into believing that all was right.

Then Zee bethought her of the strange emotion Wrax displayed a few days after their marriage— was the key to its solution in her hand? Had he, as a bachelor, contracted habits, which he believed would be easily overcome with a wife and a home of his own? Was it of these bad habits, which now proved too strong for him, he desired to make a full confession? The traitor-fear of losing Zee would seal his lips before marriage, and in the first flush of a brighter future, how could he dash her newly-acquired trust? She would have been painfully shocked, doubtless, but she would have hoped so much from the mere fact of his owning his weakness, that notwithstanding that her quick sensibilities would have rightly gauged the adventitious circumstances that environ the weakling, and from which she was powerless to shield him, encouraging words girding him round with a sweet magnetism would have inspired him with the manly resolve to shun every path that leads astray, making him at once strong to resist forbidden pleasures, and insensibly drawing him homewards.

Viewed from a distance, his coveted treasure appeared to have his world at her feet: marriage was to lift him at a bound into a purified region; and having faith in Zee's power to save him from his baser self, he failed to realise that its unattainableness alone gave value to his koh-i-noor; faith become fruition, his old craving for excitement, “life”, demanded fresh stimulus.

But having mastered the impulse to confess his sin (all violation of God's laws, moral and physical, is sin), he guarded his secret with a miser's vigilance, congratulating himself possibly that it was safe; and yet from what a life of misery the confession might have saved him! It was one of Wrax's proudest boasts that he “never made admissions on principle.” Pity his “principles” had not made admissions unnecessary; and to effectually combat what might be wrong in his vaunted “principles” much skill and judgment would be called into requisition, since to a man of lax morality unflinching rectitude would look very like tyranny.

Of the evils of excessive drinking in all their ghastliness, Zee was utterly ignorant; she yet knew instinctively that to tamper with their insidious approach must be suicidal to all manliness. She had, too, some faint idea how tame and insipid the quiet enjoyments of home must become to one who loved the giddy hilarity of the commercial room and its “convivial bowl,” for whose sake Wrax's subterfuges became at length so flagrant that as his eyes fell before her penetrating gaze, in anything but a reassuring manner, Zee could hear her heart beat. He was all the world to her henceforth; to him her whole soul was pledged; he must be noble and manly. Tenderly solicitous of his best interests, it was Zee's ambition to help to secure them, to which end she told him what his conduct appeared to her. But telling her she “knew nothing of business to which he must apply himself in good earnest,” he toyed with her “hair-splitting,” adding lightly: “My home is my castle, and you are my queen. I shall never tire of it or of you. Would you, silly child, pin me to your side, and give me thimble-pie if I attempted to bolt? My Zela would never wish me to neglect business.” No! anything like spooneying was distasteful to her, but she had the sense to know that business proper does not, ought not, to occupy the whole of a man's time. Zee was practically more correct than intelligent unfortunately; only by example could she appeal to Wrax's sense of justice—man's noblest attribute; and if himself and his conscience had parted company, her chance of saving him would be small indeed. Moreover, the grace of fitness so completely makes or mars one's actions, that it is possible to err even with purity of motive. She had gained really nothing by her talk with Wrax; by idle banter he had waived the question of right and wrong, but he wound up with: “Well, I won't be a naughty boy again.”

It would never do to arouse suspicion thus early; hence, despite press of business and those everlasting books, Wrax walked and visited with his wife, quite at his ease and willing to be pleased; and resolved to believe the best, Zee showed in many ways how perfect was her trust. Never would she relax her efforts to secure his happiness; would they be reciprocated, appreciated even? It takes two to make married life happy.

Alas! his heart was already truant; vain were Zee's efforts to tie him to home and duty. Very guardedly, with his old eel-like slipperiness, Wrax contrived to steal away to “business.” More painful to Zee than the dread of his becoming too fond of the glass—so low a vice could not be entertained even in thought— was the hardihood with which he prevaricated. Was he deliberately acting and uttering lies, arming himself against his wife in a panoply of lies? Fearful questions to force themselves on the truth-loving, few months' old wife! How could he wish to hide from her, his best friend, how his idle hours were spent? Lie to his wife! if false to all besides, and his fellows brand him coward, he will surely keep his home inviolate, have one anchor sure and steadfast. Fear, lying, were so alien to Zee, she had no conception that naked truth could present a chilling aspect to a craven soul; truth was just what it wanted to make it strong. She had to learn that the love of drink indulged makes liars and cowards of all, women included.

Wrax was without excuse in seeking stimulants abroad; his cellar had been stocked with wines and spirits by Zee's father, to which Wrax himself added ale, etc.; and Zee failed to see why their moderate use should afford less pleasure in his own home than in the public room. And putting it as a question to him, on whom she scorned to urge abstinence, believing it to be altogether unnecessary, he readily admitted in theory what he denied in practice, viz., that he “ought to shun the company he sought, since it was wholly corrupting.” And on his boon companions Zee, woman-like, vented her impotent wrath, convinced that they exercised despotic sway over him. But no; headstrong to a degree, Wrax stood like a rock in his proud self-will; strong to do the right, choosing to do the wrong.

The first Christmastide was a sad one to Zee. Returning at midnight on Christmas eve, Wrax had to her excited fancy taken too much, and her cheeks crimsoned at the bare thought that his tastes leaned ever so little that way. Then, as always, herself and Wrax joined in the family gathering next day in the old home; and if a portentous cloud rested on her usually high spirits, and a something trembled on the eyelids, she played hide-and-seek with them. No one must guess that all was not right within—that a grimacing mute, waving sable plumes in her face, had already posted himself on the threshold: not that he would be permitted to enter, never! Overtaken in a fault Wrax might have been, but given over to appetites of a degrading tendency, impossible!

Bleak and wintry at best her reflexions must have been, as she surveyed her simple, yet to an appreciative mind, costly wares. Sated of her society, already; his home all that it should be, but it was not enough. The home and herself had become less than nothing, in truth, to the only being whose appreciation she prized.

And the secret of his indifference lay in the fact that Zee had become his property, his slave, by marriage. Wrax would have been a devoted husband—an immeasurably better and happier man, and Zee a by no means worse woman, had she been free—free as Wrax was free. He would then have respected in her what he valued above all things in himself, the subtle potency of recognised being—the all of dignity comprehended in the wordspersonal liberty; but having become a wife, she was comparatively worthless.

Yes Zee, being that worthless thing a wife, thou art safe; and Wrax kisses his hand to thee, as he goes out into the night, willingly turning his back on thee and heaven; heaven he'll take at a venture, if earth but yield him one long draught of sensual delights. In courting days he never dared lay down the weapons of his warfare, but, as far as Zee was concerned, kept his armour bright perforce; now, glaring meteors lure him on, he knows where to step and when to stop, and of what cup to sip with safety: yes he is wise, and would fain persuade himself that he strolls in “by-path meadow,” that the wisdom of the serpent may extract the greater sweetness from the dove. Ignorance is innocence to thee; he would keep thy soul pure, that he may be the more at liberty to sin—a game too expensive for two to play at. Oh! the strength of a perverted will. The will is the man, and if it be perverted the man is lost until it be restored.

Zee had left no stone unturned which could contribute to the comfort of home—there was nothing more within her reach in that direction; she, nevertheless, redoubled, if that were possible, the effort to make herself personally attractive, and if she failed, what chance, except to be killed by inches, would a tamely good wife have had with such a man as Wrax? Such as she is, Zee is presented in homely guise, that her very naturalness may touch a tender human chord; and if a niche of sympathy be cheerfully accorded her, it is to be hoped she will wear better than do the cooing, flummery-voiced women—the very incarnation of selfishness—who are falsest when they seem most fair.

Viewing the fortuitous circumstances which environed Wrax, he may have been the envy of many a youth who must plod wearily in the teeth of adverse fate; but let him plod courageously on and on, concerned only to know his work well done. It was Wrax's misfortune that he did too well—had much too smooth and easy a course. Prosperity has whelmed many a man whom adversity would have nerved to endure nobly. We must, nevertheless, see things as they are. The true man rises superior to every trial and temptation, whereas the moral coward, the man of the deliberately perverted will, is certain, sooner or later, to go to the wall, however felicitously propped up. Unstable as water, because ever hankering after what was beyond his reach, Wrax was better and worse by turns. Now Zee's hopes ran high, now they fell with sickening foreboding; but even at his worst she met him with a welcoming smile and an inspiriting voice, quite too true to have a false ring in it, for the anxious concern she then felt for him was a something vastly better than the whimsical conceit that is white heat to-day and an icicle to-morrow. White heat in the affections soon wears itself out.

After unusual excesses, so degraded did Wrax become in his own esteem that, seeing nothing but his deserts, he literally tore his hair and gnashed his teeth in his bitter self-reproaches. He could not so much as look at his wife even while he clung frantically to her, begging her to “curse him” for what he called his “cruelty to her,” as he called loudly on heaven to witness the sincerity of his repentance and his promises of amendment, blessing his wife no less loudly for having borne “patiently with him.”

To his humiliation not one word of Zee's intentionally added a pang, although she earnestly implored him to “crush the weakness in its bud!.” In its bud! She little knew how long the tempter had him in possession—how long he had hugged his self-imposed chains. With her arms round his neck and her warm breath on his cheek, it were hard to tell whose tears fell fastest, or which felt weakest, as they knelt together craving pardon for the past and strength for the future. And as the waves of sorrow rolled over his soul, it was so beautiful to see his better nature asserting itself that, abounding in hope, Zee took heart of grace. She was not too immaculate to go with him where he went, although in her anxious care there was much of the pitiful tenderness a mother feels for her poor maimed child. For, oh! when the sinner is your husband, you are in a sense linked with him. in his degradation, and you go backwards to cover him with a mantle all of shame and pain. Still—you cover him.

But Wrax grew impatient of the would-be ministering spirit. Yet how much Zee could have done for him—nay, how much he could have done for himself! All things good and great were possible to him; but, alas! short-lived were his attempts to conquer wayward appetites. Ere Zee could make ready the fatted calf, Wrax was at his old tricks again, and Zee's head hung like a bulrush.

It is strange that Wrax should have desired to enter a family so dead against flagrant immorality as was Zee's. Surely his associates, whose tastes were as his own, must have possessed gay, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, play-going sisters, running greedily to every excess of riot, from whom Wrax might, have chosen a wife. Yes; but his horse-leech passions demanded that his wife should save that he might spend. He never tired of preaching economy to her.

In the present instance, as is not unfrequently the-case, the doings of the “graceless scamp” are all too late exposed. And a lady-friend told Zee that, “feeling certain that, if Wrax's habits were known to her he would not continue her accepted suitor,” she bad determined to enlighten her. But his “scandalous proceedings” being a fruitful theme of gossip to a gossipping circle, it was taken for granted that her family must be cognisant thereof; hence the lady's husband peremptorily forbade what he denounced as her “interference.”

And a similar non-intervention policy silenced other lips possibly. So certain, indeed, were Wrax's more dissolute companions that the courtship would “come to nothing,” knowing Zee's all but puritanic strictness, that bets ran high and at long odds against the marriage, which bets, together with the fact—known to Wrax, but of which Zee was in blissful ignorance— that another and a better man longed, as the phrase is, “to cut him out,” served, perchance, to whet Wrax's ardor in pursuit of Zee.

The marriage consummated, the betting fraternity may have said: “See what your pious ones will wink at to secure a husband for their daughter!” It had been better to have assured themselves that the “pious ones” knew what the man was. Such haunts and habits as Wrax affected were an abomination to Zee's father, brothers, and friends, who were, moreover, incapable of believing deceit to be deliberately practised; hence the ease with which Wrax turned aside the shafts of suspicion. And Zee could but hope that they might never know of the blight resting upon her husband, who looked so black in comparison with them.

Furthermore, prior to marriage Wrax had a sudden severe fti of illness; he was long delirious, raving wildly and fighting with monsters, that were, he declared, crawling over him, over the bed, and filling the room. The doctor called the disease “congestion of the brain.” Zee now believes it to have been delirium tremens. Thus every one seemed to conspire to keep her in ignorance of his true state. Late though it was, it afforded Zee a grim satisfaction to know that Wrax's habits were of no recent growth; but for which knowledge she would have added to her galled shoulders the burden of a great fear, that she had disappointed him, however innocently.

 

Chapter 7 What is is Wrong.

"UNTO us a son is given” has carried joy to myriad households since angels heralded the lowly birth of the Divine Man; and each bud of promise is a fresh throb of love from the Great Father's heart. Softly folded in viewless wings the given and the taken are ever ascending and descending Jacob's ladder. The taken bear upwards love's heavy-laden sighs, which return in heart's-ease to those who yearn for the pet lamb and its merry gambols; the given bring down from above stray notes of the never-ending song of peace and goodwill.

Looking forward with absorbing interest to the advent of the little stranger, a softened radiance lit up the young mother's face, as giving fond welcome to her jewel from the spirit-land, Zee sunned herself in the newly opened sanctuary of purest bliss. How much of weal or woe, by her moulding the wee thing might one day express! The possible good made her happy; the possible ill made her tremble. Will Wrax be God or devil to his boy? A strange question to ask of one who, given his bride scarcely twelve months before, had vowed for her sake to do and dare all that became a man.

Zee augured hopefully from the father's pride in the new toy. Yes, the boy will prove his good angel, beckoning him away from the fellowship of those who have but too successfully estranged him from home, to which home the child will give fresh interest, as winding himself into and filling the father's heart, he will be constrained to wear the responsibilities of paternity bravely. What sacrifices will he not make, but that love owns no sacrifice. He will be the richer, the happier, for his every act of self-forgetfulness.

Heir to all but his father's infirmities, Rex, being the first of the third generation on the mother's side, was hailed enthusiastically by a swarm of very youthful aunts and uncles. The eyes of one small aunt were flooded on finding that her nephew had arrived before she had “quite finished his pretty shoes.” But she was consoled by Wrax's saying: “Well, I don't think he'll run before they're done, if you make haste and finish them.” Away she flew on the wings of the wind, to spread the glad tidings and finish the shoes.

Despite Zee's professed indifference to good looks in men, when her own boy was under criticism, the “crow” vanity was not a little gratified to find that Rex was voted a “second edition of Wrax.” One aunt exclaimed, “Why, he has features!” The more perfect the boy, the better fitted for his task; for the little rogue had his work to do from the moment he saw the light. Saw the light, indeed! he slept his time away, nor allowed his mother to see the color of his eyes.

Wrax had of late so far humored his wife as to have his books brought home of an evening when he had “writing to do;” and their boy was but a few days old when, kissing Zee “Good-night,” Wrax said: “I shall sit late writing, but I shall want nothing, so all can go to bed;” and he thereupon made a needless parade of locking up the house. The diligent scribe had, in truth, locked and unlocked the street-door and taken himself off to drink the health of wife and child with his roystering companions, which could probably be done with more unrestrained convivality in the bar-parlor than at home.

Every young mother who values her husband's sympathy will understand how cruelly mean the double lie appeared to Zee. But for his having extinguished the gas, thereby necessitating nurse's return to Zee's room for a light, on finding that something wanted during the night had been forgotten, Zee would never have known of his having decamped. The skeleton again in all its grimness! And that she might watch for his home-coming, the silly child requested that the door of her room might be left open. Not until the small hours of the morning did she hear the chink of his latch-key. He then lit his candle, and crept noiselessly up the carpeted stairs, but extinguished his light on finding his wife's bed-room door open, which he passed with averted face. Zee made no sigh, lest she should betray him to nurse; but he pleaded guilty next morning in spite of himself as his eyes fell before Zee's appealing glance.

No wonder that the doctor, ignorant of the weary vigil the anxious wife had kept the livelong night, found her feverish and ill, worse instead of better that day, and puzzled over the cause. Wrax, however, was on his best behavior for a while, and one ray of hope, then as always, lifted Zee out of cloudland. She could not nurse the dolefuls; she forgot herself ere she was aware. But as her strength returned, his pleasant home became irksome to the truant-hearted man, whose French leave of absence was again sheltered by the old plea of “business.” His good resolutions were but as tinder, ignited by a single vicious thought; and, great as were her resources, Zee sorrowfully realised that she was powerless to help him. She possessed no new galaxy of appreciable arts wherewith to wean him from looking over the home-line for what was still beyond his reach.

While yet Rex's age was counted by weeks, his father bought, and furnished in excellent keeping with the house, a handsome property, to which they at once removed. But to Zee, notwithstanding her appreciation of material comforts, all was hollow and unsound—a fine house without a head—a head and no head. Still, of course, everything was outwardly inviting. A decorous top-dressing concealed unsightly weeds, since no one knew better than did Wrax the value of a nicely-balanced conformity to popular prejudices re chapel-going and suchlike—conformity in harmony with his way of looking at things—a canting way without doubt, the cant of the beer-barrel.

And, paradoxical though it appear, it was at once the depth and shallowness of Wrax's nature that created the want in him of which Zee was so painfully conscious, yet unable to define. Nor has this want been invented to suit the narrative, which simply strings facts together regardless of seeming inconsistencies. To the reflective mind one thing must tally with another, because absolutely true—unless, indeed, the writer blunders in her mode of truth-telling.

Denied a liberal education, the greatest of all wrongs, the majority of women are incapable of putting their thoughts in such logical sequence as shall command the public ear. Trained by repression, however, woman is slowly beginning to realise her power to manufacture public opinion by direct appeals to her own sex, to whom facts are more potent than reasoning drawn out to infinitude. And if pioneer work be precious in proportion to the difficulties surmounted, this simple story, pioneer in its unvarnished truthfulness, must have its merits, for its labor has been prodigious. It is written by the unlearned for the unlearned, especially women and girls, to raise them in their own estimation, by proving that notwithstanding they have failed to reach the high standard of goodness possible to them even in their ignorance, that every difficulty vanishes, nevertheless, before the resolutely disciplined will. And though asking much of men, the writer expects nothing from this appeal except to set women thinking.

A member of the House of Commons some years since declared it to be his conviction that “women endured much needless domestic tyranny in private life, but that no efficient help could be afforded them until they themselves made their wrongs known and asked for redress,” both of which objects, in addition to that above, this book in some small measure aims at.

And in showing something of the woes four walls hide, lifting life's heavy curtain higher than is wont, it is hoped that the present narrative will possess a throb of spring-tide vitality that will constrain the reader to exclaim; “This verily is life!” It were a weakness to draw upon the imagination, to open successive chambers of horror, now that much more than mere surface excitement is aimed at For, unhappily,to deeds of blood the public mind has already become so callous by familiarity that society's stopgaps, selfishly happy women even, like to have their ears tickled with a feeling half pleasure half pain, as they listen indolently to what they are pleased to call “frightfully exaggerated pictures of low life.” A stab from such women for “raking up disagreeables,” is the highest possible compliment. But one falls back falteringly before the outraged sensitiveness of the wife, who has trodden a like thorny road to that which Zee is treading; the wife whose love does but refine her own soul, as jealously guarding her secret from the world's rude prying and herself from its ruder pity, she clings convulsively to the lauded potentiality of silent suffering, and is thus saved from the hopelessness of despair.

Silent suffering! what recks the drunkard of it? it is but wood, hay and stubble in his path; of value only as, by playing into his hands, it screens him from observation, and helps him to trample out the life of his victim by slow degrees, than whom no other beast of burden whom he dare to maltreat is so completely under his thumb as the wife he has sworn to “love and cherish,” whose forbearance (patronising tenderness from a slave-wife, think of it!) provokes his intensest hate and scorn. A man in his cups is “possessed,” and his all but irresponsible power goads him to madness, as much as does the senseless endurance of his wife.

And the now slumbering but deep emotion of which good men are capable must be aroused by a pen dipped in warm blood—the very life-blood of suffering humanity—blood which shall drop like molten lead on the great universal heart of the nation, and burn with an intensity that refuses to heal, until the best energies of man and woman jointly are spent, all spent, in rending the very roots of the giant vices which are at once our boast and bane.

To tell woman “to do well the work that lies to her hand before she seeks an enlarged field of action” is to propose to her an impossible task; besides which, the women who demand legal freedom, full and unconditional, for their sex, are just the most capable women, in every respect, who will bear favorable comparison with any duty-loving man, and demand legal freedom, because they are at present crippled in their duty to their kind, especially to their children, for whose sake truth and justice must be exalted high above all compeers, that the line of demarcation between right and wrong may be clearly defined. Children are quick to see that might means right in the domestic economy; that the mother is a slave, and the mannishness of the father repeating itself in the little four-year-old, he will be found snubbing his mother with an insufferable audacity, encouraged too often by the father.

Seeking, as this story does, primarily to prove that woman cannot “do well the work that lies to her hand” in her present ignorance and degraded position, it attempts likewise to work out the meaning of vicarious suffering, which is substitutionary only in the high and holy sense of rendering suffering superfluous, when its lessons of wisdom and strength are practically appropriated. This is the fact of facts that needs to be emphasised with Calvary's awful emphasis.

And if life were read aright, it would teach that woman, by virtue of her more delicate organism, is nearer to the heart of things than man can ever be; and that the burden of suffering has been laid upon her that her delicate intuitive perceptions, healthfully developed, may work out the divine plan of the moral universe. The true woman's sympathies are wholly on the side of right, and if man and woman were one with the divine idea of oneness, every good man would be ten times the man he is, to defy the powers of darkness, to champion the cause of truth. But, instead of being helpful to each other, each sex is a standing problem to the other, and virtually as wide apart as are the poles; with an estrangement painful to contemplate. Furthermore, man never will work with woman appreciatively, until she is free as he himself is free; for so long as the law declares her nonentity men will profess to believe in her incompotency, despite their individual experience to the contrary, and, despising her co-operation, will continue to believe that, in her present undeveloped condition, she has reached the zenith of her powers and will remain what she is if educated as man is educated. A gratuitous insult! In the best and deepest humiliation possible to man, he has yet to learn that God knew what he was about when he gave woman, his most perfect work (a God-like compliment to both sexes), to man as “helpmeet.” A help “meet” for all the walks of life, social, commercial, political, and religious; “meet” with an infinite sense of meetness as wide as man's being. But, thinking he knew better than God, man doomed woman to ignorance and, shutting her within doors, became to all intents and purposes his own and woman's betrayer—not her protector, as God intended. To be one with man, it is by no means necessary that woman Should be ever at his side; the home is unquestionably her sphere; but a liberal education for woman would dignify the home as much as the mart; being much more necessary to woman, indeed, than to man if she is to be “helpmeet” in any worthy sense, since she forms the youthful mind, or it goes unformed, as a rule.

In vain men seek to resist the inevitable. The emancipation of woman, full and unconditional, must come, for the sake of all the liberties involved therein. It is the greatest cause now pending in the world; and conventionalism never cursed the world with a deeper curse than when it made the woman question unpopular. Human decrees that contravene the laws of God (men and women are equal in his sight) must yield when the two are brought into conflict. God will never do for man what man ought to do for himself. God has made woman's cause man's care, and he shirks it at his peril; man and woman shall rise or fall together; their interests are identical, not antagonistic. And to teach man that he can and must control the animal passions, and to so raise woman in her own esteem that she shall refuse to sacrifice herself to man's lusts, it is imperative that both sexes shall stand on an equally free social, and above all moral, platform.

Sex, not mind, has ruled hitherto with deplorable results, as legalised infamy too clearly proves, the Contagious Diseases Acts among the rest. But once realise the every-day-beeoming-clearer fact that the religion of Christ means character, not creed, men will catch an enthusiasm for personal improvement. The Christianity of creeds has signally failed; the Christianity of character has now to be tried; men will not quarrel with real goodness, when they see it embodied in living forms. Perfect as God is perfect is Christ's ultimate of human nature: he was the most perfect gentleman that ever lived: all that he was we can become. He says so, that is enough.All wrong, then, legal and otherwise, must meet the full blaze of day. And since the drink skeleton too is in almost every home, either in its first, second, or third degree of loathsomeness, but little should need to be written to enlist the sympathies of the good on behalf of helpless women and children; for even the vilest of women are cruelly punished in becoming the property of drunken husbands. And cruelly oppressive as is woman's legal thraldom, it is the wrong she sees, not the wrong she suffers, that wrings the womanly heart. It is the bad man's abuse of all law of which she complains; and it would subvert society but that the majority of women are governed by an innate love of right doing. Hence the reason that the bad man's vicious propensities are not more flagrant.

The only royal road to the formation of character is to persistently live down every selfish thought of self, both in one's self and in others; and to do this successfully becomes quite a revelation, a new heaven and a new earth are opened to the mind's vision, and our now degraded human nature develops marvellously in all its God-like attributes. Think how devillike are pride, vanity, conceit, covetousness, an un-governed temper, etc.

Heart-culture, then, is precious above all price; but to it, preferring the inanity of mental indolence to the energising might of self-conquest, Zee proved traitor when she resolved to become like other people. Notwithstanding that her soul was in a chronic state of revolt against her practice, the too popular peace-at-any-price domestic creed she adopted under inward protest, made her life one long base lie. She must steep her soul in sin to conceal the sins of her husband, and eat her words, lest she wound the vanity and self-love of the man whom she, in her ignorance, promised to “love, honor, and obey,” yet found it impossible to do any. Oh, false theology, to exact such a pledge! It is said that “All women are hypocrites” (are all men true?); it is well for the wife's peace of mind, though her honor is sacrificed, if her hypocrisy occasion her no scruples of conscience.

Passing an evening with Zee in her home, friends and relatives must have remarked that Wrax was conspicuous only by his absence; but never a tear rested on Zee's cheek, when witnesses were by, to tell to what unseasonable hours his “business” occupied him. Her naturally high spirits, though often forced, made it comparatively easy to cast a rosy glow around. Rarely did even Wrax surprise in her the sign of grief; he resented her kindliest remonstrances, was angered at a word, declaring she “wanted to drive him from his home altogether.” Hence, a whining voice would have been to him a sufficient excuse for deserting her entirely.

In her deepest misery, stifling a tumult of angry passions, rather than mope over her woes, she has choked back fast rising tears, and hastily donning bonnet and cloak, bolted out into the green fields. In the birds, the trees, the flowers, the breeze, there was life, sweet life for Zee; but, oh! how unlike the “life” Wrax coveted! Ignorant of the necessity of driving away hard thoughts, in order to return to her home with a glad heart and free, a sister-in-law, habitually heedless in her remarks, twitted Zee—who was never so burdened by family cares as to neglect aught by such outings—with being “always out.”

However, through it all, that boy of hers was a constant diversion, making up for much that was wanting in his father. The mite talked and crowed, cut his first teeth and his last in princely order; indeed, all the ills of babydom gave him a friendly nod and passed on; and Zee, by frequent walks with him and his nurse, kept her health up to the mark, so that a bad heart-ache on Wrax's account failed to make her its prey.

Comporting himself as if made for state occasions, the toddling nonsuch was exhibited for an hour at the double wedding of Sadai and Iva, the sisters being led to the altar at the same hour from the old home. They were too proud of their right-hand supporters to desire to hide away, and get the disagreeable affair over, so made gala-day of the interesting occasion for Mr. and Mrs. John Bull and small fry, “Queen's weather” with its broadest smiles gracing the scene. And, in due season, Sadai had the gratification of presenting her first-born to the gentleman who had doomed her to celibacy. But apple and orange bloom fade away with the brides, who are therefore dismissed with old shoes and good wishes.

As of old, the sisters' path is still strewn with roses; Zee's with sharp flints, and in going over the ground with her the reader's patience will be taxed, unless, entering of his own accord into the nature of the vice to which she is wedded, he can understand what it must have been to have lived her life. For love's dear sake, for the sake of the preventible misery which curses the world through drink, go every inch of the road with her. Tread with gentle footstep as the door is opened on the inner life of the neglected wife. Go, sit by the girl, place your cool hand on her fevered brow, feel the throb of her heart as the hurried life-blood courses through her veins; but, dumb in the fulness of soul-moving sympathy, utter never a word.

Yet suffer as she may, Zee is so entirely Zee at all points of the compass, that in her are seen the life, not death-throes, of a soul wrestling valiantly, however impotently, with threatening ills; low in the dust she lies awhile, but never wallows in it. One with her husband in his degradation, though an utter stranger to his joys, how could she pick her way, or take heed thereto, when it led through sin's giddy mazes and darkness? Oh! it was hard for the girl to have to wade knee-deep in moral pitch with him on whose arm she hoped to lean trustingly, as they became daily nearer and dearer to each other. Still strong in a sheltering, though mistaken, love, she goes down with him to ward off what of evil she may—a steady prop in his unsteady path, ready on the instant to lead him out of it if there be but a willing mind.

Chapter 8 A Criminally Weak Will.

IN total abstinence alone lay Wrax's hope of rescue, and, yielding to Zee's example and entreaty, he signed the pledge with his wife. Happy day! Happy Wrax! How glad he was to have done the right thing at last! and how sweet to Zee to catch “the faintest cooing of returning affection!” Very sufficient were husband and wife to each other then. In the dark days Zee had done her best to keep things straight; but there was no substitute for the master's eye and mind. Now she laughed at care, rolled it on to Wrax's shoulder, in truth, and well he did his part, readjusting all which had gone awry. His moral nature once aroused, his eye and brow soon cleared, his hand and step became firm, and he looked every inch the king of his castle. Solomon in all his glory was totally eclipsed by Wrax, as Zee decked their future in rainbow hues. Hers was too deep a nature to give its all, and cry because she had no more to give; her very giving enriched her, it was so full, so free. Weaknesses, successfully struggled against, bind rather than sever human kind. The struggle dignifies the man, the woman; it should be easy, therefore, reverently to confess faults one to another.

In the sweet peace which followed in the train of abstinence, husband and wife caught a fleeting glance of the happiness the—to them—unknown world of oneness has in store for pilgrim feet. But all too soon a growing listlessness in Wrax, indicating a wavering of right principle, constrained Zee to ask of herself: “Will he continue to wear the armor of faithful service, or has he sworn eternal fealty to his baser passions?” The very desperation of their case excused the energy with which she implored him to be a man, to give no quarter to the foe, crying: “Only persevere, and the future shall be the brighter for the past; yield, and all is lost. What can I do to make you happy in your home? You never can become so steeped in vice as to remain indifferent to those whom you ought to love, without your judgment and conscience disputing your every false word and act. Oh, be steadfast to the end! This is the turning-point. Now, now you'll triumph!”

Unfortunately, he would not be persuaded that, in order to abstain, he must manfully shun old haunts and associates. The reader, therefore, will be prepared for the wretched alternative. His criminally weak will succumbed to the love of drink, and Zee was left alone with her bitter disappointment—the more bitter for his having broken his pledged word. He writhed at times under the lashing of conscience, as only a strong, guilty man can. Loud in his professions of unchanging love for his wife, he blessed her again and again for having borne patiently with him, as he craved her forgiveness, sincere as earnest so long as the fit lasted.

Still silly Zee purposed hiding his sins—so great to one reared as she had been—and what an eternal lying that hiding was. She fancied her reticence on the subject, by shielding him from remark, would make his return to home and duty all the easier. Coward souls, both of them; the fear of man, not the love of God, was in their hearts.

In such sad moments the bitterness of death, as concerned her husband, being upon Zee, her forced and hollow laughter made friends look on anxiously. She was, indeed, so far over-acting her part that Merlee told her she had “long feared all was not right.” Right? Zee could but shake her head, and gulp down that dreadful rising in the throat which so unmans one.

The truth once admitted, friends made the kindest efforts, verbally and by letter, to check Wrax in his mad career, but it availed not. “Their meddling,” as he phrased it, exasperated him beyond all bounds, and as his fury must have vent, it fell on his wife—he dared visit it nowhere else. And “she,” he declared, “would never be happy until she had ruined him.” He flattered himself that, sheltered by his wife's and his own duplicity, outsiders could not possibly become cognisant of his habits. He forgot that the guilty one is his own tale-bearer, that dumb witnesses confront him at every turn, and so mysteriously trumpet his disgrace that danger is often nighest when security is highest.

As for Zee, she was glad to be censured, however wrongly, if it might but lessen his load of guilt. Wrax was not all bad, and as she retired more and more in upon herself, her patience stretched to meet the demands he made upon it. Her faith, such as it was, had never relaxed its hold on Wrax. She had in some measure reached Paul's eminence when he wished himself accursed from Christ for his brethren's sake. Zee could perhaps have given her soul in Wrax's stead to save him, but such sacrifice in the sense in which Zee would have offered it is not accepted at our hands, one soul being as precious as another in heaven's sight.

Like a maddened steed, Wrax plunged and kicked against the pricks of conscience, as beer, wine and brandy blood obliterated all trace of manliness in him. He was seldom to be found in his business proper—himself, his all, were drifting away into that awful vortex which engulfs humanity's best and worst. The drink-vulture is satisfied with nothing less than the whole man and all which pertains to him. And Wrax was sinking lower and lower with stolid indifference, until, swelling with a bombast quite farcical but for its pitifullness, he ceased to command or to desire the respect of good men, calling them “sneaking, drivelling idiots.” “He never cringed and licked the dust as did other men.” No. He scorned, or professed to scorn, the life led by the virtuous and honorable.

Of women, too, he spoke with a contempt acquired, not inbred, imbibed with his beer at the public house, as was all that was base in him. So infamous a school fully explained his ruffianism. “I'll never let a woman talk to me, not I, indeed,” he often said; and the louder he ranted, the more completely he fancied he had Zee— who quailed before brute force, in which he was greatly her superior—in his power.

Never, perhaps, was a baser lie fathered on the credulity of men than that which declared the drunkard to be one of the most generous of his sex. Find an essentially selfish man, and in his selfishness you have all that is necessary to make a good (if it be not a contradiction in terms) drunkard. It is true that all selfish men are not sots, and equally true that among the sots are found men who give because they cannot keep. But to whom do they give—to their wives and hapless children? Indeed, no; but to their boon companions, to be reputed jolly good fellows.

One of Zee's many foolish attempts to call Wrax home was that of sitting up for him, in the hope that he might return just a little the earlier; and for years she hung on his footsteps in that way. Till at length, as midnight stillness crept over all things, her restlessness increased so much that she grew too nervous to sit alone in her pleasant room; so taking care to have all the hinges well oiled lest they should betray her, extinguishing the hall gas, she nightly took her stand at the front door, to watch for his home-coming. If a carriage or a straggler chanced to appear, she fell noiselessly back, and they passed on, leaving her alone with the night and her sorrow.

Come when he would, how he would, she was glad to have him in safe hiding; and so long as she could meet him with a smile Wrax returned it, though with but a shame-faced sort of a grin. But it sometimes happened that, being very tired, she had controlled her feelings until an inward start warned her of his approach, when the sight of him, proving too much for her jaded powers of endurance, to her deep mortification, a deep, half-choked sob, she was powerless longer to restrain, burst forth, making Wrax wild with passion.

It was “temper,” all temper, nothing but temper, of course, and Wrax again scrupled not to cast the whole weight of his wrongdoing upon his wife, yet never dared to say, though importuned to do it, in what way the fault was Zee's, or how his sins were hers. Her heart might be breaking—what of that? It was the wife's duty, “just what he had her for,” to meet her husband with smiles, always with smiles, no matter in what condition he might roll home; and to believe her oblivious of his condition, Wrax would rather Zee had gone to bed; hence his greeting was sometimes a cruel taunt at her stupidity in sitting up for him. How irritating he could be! keeping carefully within the pale of the law while he subjected his wife to nameless indignities—converting the law, indeed, into a pair of pincers, wherewith to nip her to pieces, should she refuse to crouch, a slave at his feet.

Sometimes, after having helped her senseless log to bed, she has gone out under the silent sky to quiet her fierce inward surgings. She could not breathe with that loathsome object polluting the air; she must have room to walk about while she, Paul-like, fought with the “beasts” Wrax embodied—anger, malice, highhanded tyranny, and others. Full well she knew that if kind words failed, as fail they did, hard words were not likely to be more effective with Wrax; but flesh and blood, high-spirited woman that she was, could not always brook what she had to endure and keep silence. No, she occasionally retorted on Wrax with a bitterness to which truth added a scathing pungency, withering to a less hardened sinner. Still she could and would have borne it all heroically if good might have resulted; but wherefore this waste of time and strength, this hopeless misery? Ought Wrax, wicked as he was, to be thus almighty? Ought she to be thus entirely at his mercy? Could right ever come out of so much wrong?

Zee was learning hard lessons in a hard school—a school which would sharpen her wits if anything could—and it was well that she should begin to look questioningly on life and life's duties; it proved that she possessed even yet the elements of growth within herself. Never, even in her saddest moments, did she charge the wrong on God. It was of man, all of man; she knew that.

Rex, the sunbeam in the home of the shadow, was welcome everywhere. What a picture he was, aglow with ruddy health, his beautiful flaxen curls falling on his bare shoulders, his busy feet, hands, and tongue never long silent! When a sturdy little man of three summers, a tiny new brother was shown to him; and, being old enough to give baby something more than a passing thought, his prattle and bewilderment, as he capered about, trying to master the ins and outs of this fresh sprig of humanity, were perfect. Baby was a toy for his especial benefit, and he must have him on the floor all to himself. But, that pleasure being denied him, there was evidently a something over, or under, or round about that baby delightfully incomprehensible.

The dear little black-eyed rogue was his mother's image; nor did she love him the less for the likeness. Very tenderly were the children cared for—they were Zee's all, you know, and she was the important woman when she sent her two men out for a walk. The little kindnesses so sweet in moments of weakness were, as far as concerned Wrax, all wanting to Zee. He concluded that a good nurse and servants summed up all needful requirements, although, when gout laid its torturing demands upon himself, he was most exacting in the service he required of his wife. He would, nevertheless, have voted even his children insufferable bores, had the slightest care devolved upon himself.

Those who suffer much need to be made of tough metal to meet the demands made upon them. If Zee could have locked her trouble in her own breast, half the pain would have vanished. It was like probing a mortal wound for those she loved to speak of it; and, fight though she did with it, it still so shut her up within herself that it told upon her. And, to her dismay, she discovered that it had robbed her baby of its proper nourishment, which had been superabundant for the first child; but for the second there was almost none. Her doctor puzzled not a little over such an unusual deviation from the ordinary course of nature. His patient could have told him that the cause lay deeper than his skill could reach—a wounded spirit, not a distempered body, asked healing balm. Delicate from its birth, having to be brought up by hand, baby never thrived. No food seemed to agree with it; and, being as shamefully ignorant and unfit for so holy a trust as are almost all young mothers, Zee gave her tender plant what he liked best, though, perhaps, the worst thing for him.

So dense is woman's ignorance of all physiological knowledge, the marvel is that an infant ever arrives at maturity. To taboo subjects as “unfeminine,” “unbecoming,” which may be worth more to her than life itself, while a new-born babe is put into her hands to rear, is the maddest folly. If all knowledge came to woman by nature, if the “little stranger” came in its “monkey”-jacket, prepared to shift for itself, the instinct of cow and calf might suffice. But since it is not so, if life and health are worthy of one moment's consideration, to make women scale Alps of opposition in order to emerge ultimately from her worse (because of our boasted enlightenment) than Cimmerian darkness, will surely merit and receive the condemnation of history. The masculine cry of “indelicacy” raised against woman's study of medicine and of kindred subjects for pathological uses is quite in keeping with the “delicacy” which once required all young wives to wear caps. Feeling certain that her child is being sacrificed to injudicious treatment, her own and her doctor's felt incapacity has wrung many a mother's heart. And yet doctors, even, are jealous of woman trenching on the realms of physiology—a study more important to woman than to man, for man's sake, since no one can know how much stronger, longer-lived, and larger-hearted the entire human family would prove if wisely reared.

God does not “take” the thousands of little ones killed now by mistaken kindness, now by cruel neglect. Nature, shamefully abused as it is in many ways, is infinitely wise and strong, and so tenacious of life are the little ones that many of them refuse to die under the most barbarous treatment. But, since infanticide is not a Christian institution, the lamentable mortality among infants ought to provoke serious inquiry.

And since England does now possess a few educated women, it is to be hoped that our lady doctors will confer on society a benefit as lasting as the human race by inventing and popularising some simple contrivance which shall support the bust from the shoulders without in the slightest degree compressing the waist.

The praises of the “slender waist,” in whose honor many silly women have squeezed themselves out of existence, have been rung to nausea by unreflecting poets. But a better taste having pronounced shrine and victims alike worthless, has exalted nature—sym metry of figure—and consigned wasp-waist monstrosities to the vulgarisms of the dark ages. Man's figure is more symmetrical, therefore more truly graceful, than is woman's of the wasp-waist hideousness. Banish the wasp-waist for ever and for ever.

But to return to Zee, she stupidly persisted in watching for Wrax's home-coming, until all at once, as suddenly as inexplicably, she lost her nervous dread of retiring to rest. Exhausted nature triumphed, and longing for night with child-like weariness, she went to bed and to sleep with the birds almost, for about a fortnight, when her year-old baby fell sick, and wasting visibly, slowly pined away, the poor body telling how fierce had been the struggle for life. And having wished for a girl-baby at his birth, Zee now remembered with sorrow her keen regret at his being “only a boy.”

Conscious of having done her best, bad though it was, for the little man, all the hyena in her was stirred to its depths as she listened about midnight for the heavy thud of the father's uneven step as, with flushed cheek, lack-lustre eyes, or eyes aflame with the devilish light the bottle kindles, he came straight from his carousals to the bedside of his dying child. Zee felt she must tell him that he—he, by his cruel desertion of herself—had taken the precious God-given life. But, knowing Zee's excited state of mind, although she would have puzzled over the reason for wishing to save him from the truth, so dreadful because it was the truth, Merlee, who shared the sick-room anxieties, implored silence with so distressful a glance, as Wrax presented himself, that Zee averted her face and left Merlee to reply to him.

With increased knowledge, Zee believes the child to have been sacrificed to her own unreasoning ignorance rather than to anything wrong in Wrax, who, though absent from home, was proud to say he had not gone to the public house the night the little man died. What a boast!

Zee was so poverty-stricken in household gods, her heart-strings twined the tighter round her few treasures; and though she could not say “Goodbye” without a very painful wrench, she yet resigned her pretty bud with the feeling, “I wish thee joy, my darling.” Better that he be safely housed. What had she to offer beyond her fond encircling arms? Thenceforward the fluttering dove was a blessing in new guise. He just dropped the olive-branch and sped back to his ark of safety, beckoning her thitherward.

The sudden restfulness of spirit was explained now. God had closed the eyes of body and mind preparatory to the trying watch-night service he required of her. And she, whose trust was but partial at best, found comfort in the thought, “God cares for me.” She was learning, in passing through the furnace, that all things work together for good only in so far as we turn them to good account—a lesson that created a joyousness within, which never blushed at its own levity. And in such moments of clear shining she pleaded for Wrax as only a wife and mother can. She longed for him to enter life's deeper depths, where passion has no place. He was, indeed, so hidden away in her heart that God could see her only through him, and yet her shallow faith failed to see that, in refusing to be saved from his sins, not even God could save him in his sins.

After the death of the little one, Zee never again attempted to sit up for Wrax, who sometimes stayed out all night; but she was so slow to let hope die, that she caught at its veriest ravellings, and lived on them as long as possible; and difficult as it was, to a being like her, to know what to do for the best in her untried path, a mistaken sense of duty bade her to sit up for him. But she now deplores the time and strength fritted away in waiting on one so uncertain as he. Lie in bed to all hours of the day as he did, she could not for very shame; so that to sit late and rise early was certain to result in a breakdown sooner or later.

The fact that Wrax was kind to everyone but his wife, and cruel to her just because she was his wife—the creature of his convenience—was the one bitter drop in her cup. He was the last man to have treated a mistress or a servant as he treated Zee; they would not have been at his mercy, nor could they have felt, as did Zee, the gross injustice of placing the husband, by virtue of his sex, at the top of the social ladder, thus stultifying his desire for improvement to his own degradation and his wife's humiliation, yet requiring the wife to be intelligently companionable to her husband, while forbidding her to place her foot on the lowest rung of the ladder of learning proper. It is preposterous!

Himself and his beer were the only things Wrax loved, yet he was as strong as Zee was strong to resist the drink; and in selling himself to the love of drink and the vices thereby engendered, he was without excuse; it was wholly a question of a perverted will—the will to do wrong. Zee could see nothing before her but poverty and disgrace, and that man into the bargain—that man to whom she had given all, sacrificing herself, she fancied, to save him, who despised the treasure by his side, and cried like an idiot for sour grapes. How dare he so to blast her life, and make her feed on gravel and ashes? He, idle fellow that he was, would keep her nose to the grindstone as long as she lived; but what was to be gained by it? She could not bear it. And thinking to take her affairs into her own hands, she floundered in despondency's quagmire till the waves of despair quite hid from View the city of refuge. Oh! it was so hard to have a soul that would not die, try as Wrax did to blot it out!

Zee was passing through these straits, when the public mind was shocked by the trial of Madeline Smith for poisoning her lover, and Zee became possessed of the desire to poison either herself or Wrax. His death she meditated; she must get rid of him somehow, anyhow. “The devil,” she muttered between her teeth; “ah, if I could but kill him! To be tied to such as he for life, and receive nothing but insult and injury at his hands, would be worse than death.”

Intending, at Zee's solicitation, to make a really elegant ornament, by starting zinc to grow in an airtight globe of water, Wrax had given to Zee's special care an ounce of sugar of lead. But, though the necessaries for the zinc-growing had been provided, the procrastinating Wrax had failed in his part of the contract; hence, Zee's possession of the poison, over which she hung, deliberating as to how best to administer it with safety to herself. As to how much was necessary to destroy life she had no idea; and ardently though she longed to get rid of Wrax, she never touched the poison until one day, Wrax being present, she snatched it from its repository, her work-table, and giving it to him, said: “Throw it away, or I shall poison you with it.” Seeing she was dreadfully in earnest as he gravely scanned her face, whose pallor equalled his own, perhaps, he forbore his wonted sarcasm.

She was not prepared to die for Wrax twice over, and the probable consequences to herself alone prevented the committal of the rash act, Zee fancied. But she did not know herself, nor did she know how different a bad deed appears when evil passions are hounding their victim on to its consummation — to what it looks to the sensitive eye of conscience, when once 'tis done and done for ever. Supposing she could have murdered her husband without suspicion, she would have made a full confession; a guilt-burdened conscience would have made the crime all her own. There was in her none of the cowardice which fathers all wrong on the devil.

Like those who walk dizzy heights, the weary and heavy-laden must live by looking up, or one false step may sink them to irretrievable ruin. The poisondelirium was the densest battle - smoke and din through which Zee had ever passed, and the all-compassionate One turned and looked on guilty, trembling Zee, in pity for her sorrow as much as for her sin. He knew that she tried to say: “Thy will be done,” with something better than parrot-like meaninglessness, but she was weak, and could only, raise streaming eyes to heaven. Where else could she look? There is agony on which human eyes cannot gaze—agony which becomes at length cords of love, binding the sufferers so close to the heart of the Infinite that their sorrows become the most sacred part of their character, and in reference to outside sympathy they can afford to say: “Tarry ye here.” It seems almost profanity to write of it; put off thy shoes, for this is holy ground.

The beneficent Father clearly intended that man's social life should be as full of sunshine as is the world of nature. But is it so? and if not, why not? Simply because selfishness mars all that is good and beautiful in life. There are, nevertheless, drops of honey in the bitterest cup, and one of the most grateful to Zee was the comfort she had in her servants. Her first “Emma” and her “young man” having set sail for love in a cottage all taut and trim, her second Emma, of whom mention is now made, was devoted to her mistress, because being quick to note a willing mind. Zee had, with steady persistency, reduced Emma's blundering hands to order. Kind, faithful creature, how nervously anxious she was to do well her part; Emma acquired a personal interest in her work by acting out the fact that a clean, orderly house is less to the credit of the mistress than of the servant. Emma was seen all through the house, as she brooded with jealous care over its interests; nor was she less neat and nice in her person than in her work, possessing a good stock of clothes, she had likewise a bankbook and a fair sum laid by.

A judiciously kind mistress, being in earnest herself, can make what she will of her servants; whereas, the mistress who has no will of her own, who knows not her own mind, is certain to be tyrannically overbearing, and to treat her dependents as mere machines. Having no money, no might, domestic servants are capable of the most self-denying heroism—kindnesses which, like the dew, refresh and fertilise by stealth. The poorest in this world's goods know best how to give the “cup of cold water.”

By much unobtrusive tenderness, a silent but effectual way of pouring oil on the seething waters, Emma proved conclusively that she was one with Zee in her sorrow; nor could she remain ignorant of its cause, yet never did she venture a remark beyond: “Don't you feel well, ma'am?” on observing the breakfast untouched, perhaps, or Zee looking unusually sad, for whose lunch, of her own accord, Emma would try to find some choice tit-bit. She lived with Zee for years, and continued in her family until her marriage rather late in life.

Living in dread of the future, Zee assured herself she should be surprised at nothing which might happen; her unfailing though inadequate resources were, nevertheless, alert to ward off evils becoming daily more prominent. Still, it was not too late to retrieve the past, the turning-point in Wrax's history must certainly come; even those who had watched the signs of the hydra - headed monster's progress refused to believe him so lost as to throw to the winds such a home and such a prospect of ease, if not of affluence, as he possessed. Hence, if remarks were bruited abroad, they were held somewhat in abeyance, the surface of things being much brighter in reality than to the reader, who is behind the scenes.

Happiness with Wrax was out of the question, for he was never to be found, or, if found, was pleasant to no one. Zee therefore went her own way, and made her own plans without reference to him; and as he had often of late declared it to be his determination “to go abroad,” the Christmas of 1858, the last possibly they would spend in old England, found Zee prepared for an unusually festive season. Wrax always insisted that in “money matters he was as safe as the bank;” and his wife, whatever were her fears, to be consistent with her peace-at-any-price cant, was obliged to act as if all were fair and sound.

But it is not safe to reckon without one's host. Some of Zee's friends, who had arrived by invitation on a lengthened visit, having thawed their half-frozen limbs by their cheery bed-room fire and arranged their private affairs, descended to the dining-room to discuss creature comforts, and ultimately reclined at ease with a sense of exquisite abandon, when their quiet chat was interrupted by a knock at the door, and in answer to “Come in,” Emma said: “Please, ma'am, you're wanted.” In the hall stood Wrax, to Zee's surprise, and he beckoned her into his office, when, lo! a stranger confronted her. Words died on her lips, but she divined evil as she glanced from one man to the other. Alluding to the stranger, Wrax said with the utmost abruptness, as he carefully closed the office door: “This is a bailiff in possession.”

Understanding only too well the significance of those dread words, Zee saw the beginning of the end of a bad career—an end all darkness, which should have been all light—and was as much horror-stricken as if she had never assured herself she was prepared for the worst. She was indignant, too, though that was no time to show it, with Wrax and his want of delicacy in telling her before that man; but his very want of soul made him crouch like a coward when he most needed to be a man. He could not tell her alone. The little courage he had ever possessed had evaporated in beer and tobacco-fumes. Ill-starred Zee was caught in a trap with strangers, comparatively, staying in the house.

“Pay the man and let him go,” suggested Zee. “Easier said than done,” objected Wrax. “Several things have to be seen to first. The man must stay where he is for the night; I'll get all he wants. No one—not even Emma—must know of his being here, and in the morning I'll make it all right with him, and there'll be an end of it.”

Finding that Zee staggered under the blow, Wrax on leaving the office with her made exceedingly light of it. Declaring that there was “not the slightest cause for alarm,” he begged her to “put away that scared look and make the best of a bad job.” Again, easier said than done. Under that sudden revulsion of feeling a sense of impending ruin occasions, Zee's all but undying energy and hope failed her. Here was an end of the pleasant Christmastide! Its glory had departed. She could never more bury her dead out of her sight. There was nothing real for her henceforth but pain and shame.

It was well, however, that she had to shake off the hard thoughts which obtruded; they could do no good, and she ere long joined her guests, with blanched cheeks, may be, and a dead-lock on her heart; yet she was such a practised dissembler, she could call up the hollow smile, though roses to the cheeks came not at her bidding. Her friends observed the change, but held their peace.

On Christmas day, the merriest of all the year, Wrax and Zee swelled the number of the family gathering in the old home, whose spacious, oak-wainscoated rooms rung again with good spirits, till the sides of the house must have ached from their reverberations, good spirits and good cheer lasting for days, until husbands and lovers returned to their merchandise perforce. Even then leave-takings cast but a momentary shadow. The beaux had departed, but the belles were forbidden to sit down with solitude in love's vacant chair; or if the cherry-ripe lips quivered, so long as forget-me-not's lingering caress dyed the cheek with peach-bloom at its ripest, the maidens valiantly shook off the wintry chill, and displayed only the bright-red holly-berries of good nature. Heigh oh, for the lads and lasses! it is well they cannot keep all Cupid's secrets to themselves, that others catch glintings of the sly rogue's coming and going; the world would be dun and monotonous without them; they keep a spot of greensward in the hearts of all but the uncanny.

But to pick up the darker thread of the story. For the day after Christmas-day the hapless Zee had issued invitations for the largest dinner-party she had ever presumed to give; and Wrax, who had discharged the bailiff according to promise, implored Zee to allow her arrangements to proceed as designed, solemnly assuring her there was “nought to fear unless she wished to arouse suspicion and ruin him by giving a tale-telling change to her plans.” But it was of no use talking, she was unequal to the task; she had grown tired of keeping up appearances; her nerves were unhinged by what had happened, together with what might yet be looming in the future. Friends residing at a distance arrived as expected, with whom a quiet, enjoyable day was spent. But even then, anxious as he was to keep up appearances, mine host failed to present himself the livelong day.

That first, worst breaking in upon the privacy of home would have been prevented had Zee known Wrax's financial position. She kept his books to the best of her ability, but never dreamed of opening his letters; better that she had; threatening letters, demanding a settlement of accounts, would then have received attention. If curiosity be a feminine weakness it belonged not to Zee; Wrax was the nagging, inquisitive one.

It was the eleventh hour with Wrax, and he was urged to recover lost ground by all that love and reason could dictate; and intending to afford him needful assistance, unless he proved hopelessly involved, his eldest brother, the best friend Zee ever had, requested of Wrax “a clear statement of accounts;” and his wife, in conjunction with other friends, entreated him to submit his affairs to his brother's sound judgment, and to make a fresh start with the new year, socially and commercially. But no; he who trusted no man expected all he said to be taken on trust; and loudly asserting that he was “all right,” and “could pay twenty shillings in the pound with any man,” Wrax, in his proud defiance, rejected his brother's aid, saying: “If he can't take my word he shan't see my books.” Thus, in his dogged obstinacy, he cut his only ladder from beneath his feet.

Events proved that he was right as to his solvency, but it is doubtful whether he, wreck that he was, could have made it clear even to himself; certainly no sane man would have accepted his mere word. Having at least a hundred men in his employ, his own surmises as to his solvency might have been wholly fallacious; since, singularly good though his business was, no master can with impunity leave his interests uncared for to the most competent of servants. The fact was that Wrax, in his abject condition, had lost the will and the power to make crooked things straight, and if too complicated for his own unravelling, extraneous aid would profit little. Who should care for his interests if he neglected his duty?

The February following that dreary Christmas, a third son saw life under a cloud. Having a mother to shield its blossoming, the nondescript article enveloped in flannel was as well tended as a royal prince—he was all-glorious within, whatever the outer regions might be. Wrax could not bear a sick room, probably never sat down in one, large and well-appointed though Zee's rooms were; but knowing that another wee lump of humanity claimed kinship with him, he took a look at him and went his way. Having grown used to his absence, Zee had ceased to mourn it; he did but multiply idle excuses as fresh duties had to be shirked.

Once upon a time Wrax half jocularly proposed marriage and emigration in a breath to Zee, who negatived the, to her, absurd idea; for was not his fortune already cut out for him, if not made—what could he want more? But had he frankly given her a sufficient reason for such a step, she would cheerfully have waived all personal objections thereto and have gone with him. Zee has reproached herself for having opposed his going, thinking he might have been a better man abroad.

But no, emphatically no, the man is the same in every place, weak at home, weak abroad, else what, where is his moral nature? Unquestionably the bands of wickedness have a fourfold strength, so long as the weakling permits himself to be hemmed in by men as idle and reckless as himself; but bad men, ready to ensnare the willingly ensnared, are found the wide world over. If a man means to break away from human blood-hounds, it must be by an internal, not an external, transmigration—all things must become new within the man.

Wrax's present determination “to go abroad,” idle freak though Zee deemed it, appeared to shape itself to his mind, since he recurred to it again and again; but vacillating as he was by habit, he would arrive at no decision in the matter. He talked of India, the last place for such as he; but anything was better than the apathy into which he had sunk, and he at length professed to have made application through an M.P. for one of the many lucrative appointments then offering for India, for which he waited, until having grown sick with hope deferred, his wife urged on his consideration the superior claims of one of the colonies.

Zee had possessed a splendid constitution, but it yielded at length; her baby's advent left her sinking lower and lower until “Excelsior” seemed likely to be the swan's death, not life-song. Being no longer able to fight ghosts, real or imagined, she sighed for a calm haven of inward peace, and welcomed death as the dear friend she would hasten to meet, come when he would, how he would. And he was coming, yes, coming, not as she had hoped, perhaps, to carry her off at a bound, but slowly and softly drawing nearer, so that his footfall was heard by her ear alone, and she watched with ardent longing for the one rude blast which was to shatter the now useless vessel, believing she held tight hold of the robe the deliverer was weaving for her—a light, most beautiful garment because a shroud. She only asked to be left alone to lay her head on the last, sweet pillow, without trouble to anyone. And if tears fell, they were all for the boys she must leave behind.

But there were those in the flesh who objected to her slipping thus stealthily through their fingers, so she was taken for change to the best place possible, the dear old home in the woods. There was the father with all a woman's tenderness; there, too, the mother, such a right good nurse, and sisters Merlee and Lulu (wives and mothers now), genuine English girls, whose genial humor soon made sunbeams play on Zee's fancy as veritable sunbeams danced on the wall. The saucy sprites resolutely posted themselves between Zee and the blues, and slyly wafted out of sight the cumbrous mantle of sighing and dull care she had in her feebleness wrapt around her. They were her constant companions in the merry spring-time, and entertained her as strength returned with book, or chat, or needle, as they basked in the sun's life-giving rays, anon driving round the country dear to the invalid, or strolling along shady lanes walled in by steep hedgerows, alive and fragrant with primrose and violet; leisurely extending their perambulations, they daily mounted higher and higher up the gaily-painted, gorse-covered hills, gazing with vivid appreciation on the ever-varying, richly-wooded landscape.

Zee was tranquilly happy; there was health in the very atmosphere of home; loving hearts brought healing balm. She was lifted, as by a spell, out of the cold isolation consequent on Wrax's craving for “life,” and dropped into a nest lined throughout with love's priceless floss of exquisite content, a graceful ferny drapery hovering over and about rather than touching the sensitive form of the stricken deer. The very buttercups and daisies made music for her till her heart and her pulse throbbed with renewed vigor. Moved by a common impulse, indeed, Nature and Zee put on a new dress and sported each in her own wild way. To get well was the only work she had now to do, and a teeming fancy made loitering on the road to convalescence very delightful.

Hurrah for the home in the woods! with its charms for eye and mind, its delicacies to tempt the truant appetite—the home which had done so much for Zee. The house, according to tradition, was “haunted”—by the footsteps of angels, Zee declared. Certainly the quaint inscriptions, oak panellings and sly dark corners of the large rambling antiquated place were suggestive of ghosts and goblins, and the stories current lost nothing to Zee's imagination, however often she went over the ground. In health her whole nature was aglow with Eastern effulgence. She lived in Aladdin's fairy palace, and his wonderful lamp illuminated, though it could not remove, the surrounding darkness. Whether she ever sat in the roomy porch of her home with the “headless lady in white” said to pay nocturnal visits to it, or dug for the crock of gold said to be deposited in one or other of its damp cellars, this chronicler wotteth not.

After a few weeks of absence from the home, good in itself but icily cold, which Wrax provided, Zee was her brave self again, ready to tread the old rough path with its roses here and there—briar roses, very sweet, but, oh! so thickly studded with thorns, Still, with restored strength, she would give the more earnest heed to duty, though but imperfectly understood.

Yes, Wrax certainly purposed going abroad, but being loth to break up their home, yet doing nothing to keep it intact, he procrastinated, according to custom, as month followed month at snail's pace. He continued, moreover, so pitifully irritating that Zee required to watch always lest a jarring note should prick him into rebellion. His very irritability proved he was not past feeling, but what his feelings were was left to conjecture, except that “the fates were in league against him. He was a much-abused, greatly-wronged man—the victim of a conspiracy, everyone, even his wife, being bent on making him a beggar,” and much to the same purpose. His spite against his own family amounted to insanity; and, undisguised though it was, they never relaxed their efforts to serve him. To his wild invectives against alleged injustice sustained at their hands, Zee listened quietly, unless he required direct confirmation thereof, when, suffer as she might for daring to differ from him, she never scrupled to say that his censure of them was wholly unmerited unless he had some cause of quarrel of which she was ignorant. She knew he was fighting his own shadow—an ugly one, truly. Glorying, too, in the wet sheet of stoical isolation, no stray beams of Zee's superabundant vital force could warm and thaw his fast-ebbing vitality. To drown reflexion he lived in a whirl of dissipation, studiously avoiding a quiet half hour with his wife; yet was he the more wretched of the two, for how could he face an angry world if he trembled before his wife? There was, however, no help for it but just to live a day at a time and trust to what the next would bring forth.

Rex was his mother's loved companion, she was rich in him. He was a rare boy; transparently truthful through and through, he had no idea what a lie could mean. Having a magnificently strong will, he was occasionally rebellious, of course, but a softening mood quickly followed; then came the cry: “Let me say my little prayer, mamma,” and until it had been penitently uttered, he never forgave himself. He had gambolled over his five years without an ache of any kind, but the delicate year-old Piri's ever-threatening dissolution culminated just now in congestion of the lungs. And Zee's good doctor (even in the matter of doctors husband and wife were divided — Wrax patronised another medical man when gout laid him low) exhausted his skill for the sufferer's benefit. Knowing, perhaps, of the shadow that darkened the home, and honoring the wife's silent endurance, the doctor never made a merely professional visit, but lingered long, taking a kindly interest in all that interested Zee. He never expressed sympathy, there was no need; his step, his touch, his very presence were a strengthening draught; he had that to offer, which few are rich enough to give—the wealth of appreciation—the power at man's command, the spikenard very costly, the cup of cold water, the only true charity; other charity is but quartz at best, not pure gold.

Happily, the little Piri, an aspen leaf for frailty, rallied once more under tender care.

At length, the promised appointment for India arrived, Wrax said, though he did not show it, even to his wife. But appointment or no appointment, acting on her doctor's advice, and choosing between hard work and indolence probably, Zee decided to India she would not go, firmly adhering to her decision for the children's sake, knowing full well that Wrax would never go without her. So, making a virtue of necessity, he subsequently yielded the point, and chose Auckland, New Zealand, for their future home.

But the dilatory Wrax kept them needlessly long in a transition state, notwithstanding that his wife encouraged him to expedite matters, by pleasant anticipations of the future, in which he would escape all untoward influences.

And to tell the truth, the last came too soon. Zee fancied she could surrender all without a pang; but fancy and reality are widely different things. Wrax was absent when the first dismantling of the home, which should have been the abode of peace and plenty, took place; and Zee readily enough superintended the removal of certain pieces of furniture. But when she turned to look at the too palpable blanks, and heard the grating of the wheels of the wagon, as it moved slowly away with its freight, made sacred to her by her sorrows and her joys, she fell into utter prostration, and rebelled as only a strong, helpless woman can.

It was a bitter experience! She could not bear to look around. Through no fault of her own, whatever were her errors of ignorance, had she been thus stripped of everything; herself, her little ones, thrust forth homeless wanderers; and with what to lean upon—a tower of strength? Nothing, worse than nothing. With outstretched hands and eyes blind with weeping, one long deep groan told all. She might not pass that cup away, but how to raise it to her lips she knew not. If she could have reclaimed Wrax, the sorrow would have been as nothing; but to suffer and see only bad results convinced her that there was something wrong somewhere. What was it?

Observe! Zee's peace-at-any-price mode of dealing with Wrax was only too entirely popular; if she had taken the right, because truthful, way of appealing to his honor and conscience in her persistent refusal to shelter wrong, even in her husband, unreflecting men, unreflecting women would have said she deserved to fail in her efforts to reclaim him.

But through it all, however, she fought well—now standing her ground, now worsted in the fight. Not yet had she given up Wrax. Even then she pleaded for the guilty one. He was more wretched than she, and in pleading for him she unconsciously slaked her thirst at the fount of pure blessedness. Her burden rolled off her heart, and if her face did not shine, her heart made melody, which was better. What Zee would have become without such religion as she had no mortal may know. Such as it was, it was infinitely better than none, because she was fighting for light with just faith enough to believe that God must have a purpose in calling her to suffer. Whatever may have been Zee's credulity, she will believe there is no God at the central helm when those who deny the God-faith and profess to teach how the universe lives, moves, and has its being by virtue of inherent unalterable laws alone, a presiding genius nowhere, will teach men how to wind up their mercantile and domestic interests, so that all things shall work smoothly together with an exquisite adaptation of means to the desired end by laws alone. If laws harmoniously regulate and sustain the universe, there surely ought to be laws of equal potency to regulate man's petty affairs. Perchance there will be when we become spiritualised. Certainly the labor-millennium will have dawned, scientists will have the world at their feet, when they can make all things go like clock-work without effort, especially if they can at the same time teach men how to form a beautifully-rounded, whole-souled character that can afford to give reputation to the winds with superb indifference.

Necessity is law. Yes, necessity is a complex chain of circumstances formed link by link from within, and helps to unfold the mysteries of life to those who look earnestly upon it, but it makes no pies, cakes, boots, coats, boats, houses, etc. Intelligent thought does all this; and to Zee's small mind intelligent thought rules the universe, before which thought she now bows with loving reverence.

It was done. The home, and such a home! was shattered into a thousand fragments, and this first tidal wave of anguish past, Zee settled other matters with composure. But, fooled to the end, she positively anticipated a few happy days under the old roof-tree, whither the family directed their steps on vacating their own home. In her father's house Wrax would never dare to be the ill-conditioned fellow he was elsewhere. Yes, he did dare. Hope of his amendment, unhappily, there was none. “Farewell suppers,” and what not, were the proffered excuses for his excesses.

And since Wrax was what he was, as the last days of parting drew nigh the good father, pressing Zee to his breast, wept aloud, saying: “I cannot give you up, my girl. With friends at hand you know not what trouble is, but as a stranger in a strange land your life will be one long martyrdom.” Wrax's own family, too, strongly urged that he should go alone to the far-off land, and make a position for himself before he subjected his family to the discomforts of colonial life. But Zee's brothers and sisters, as willing to sacrifice her as she was to sacrifice herself, said: “Go with him, Zee. If there is a chance for him it is with you, not alone.” The die was cast—Zee would go.

But Wrax still continued ill at ease and touchy to peevishness; and although Zee could no longer cloak his sins—his sins, not some other person's—as little should she parade them before him. She, therefore, in making one final appeal to all that was best in him, besought him to recover himself, to conquer for all time his wickedly-indulged habits before he set foot on the ship, where he would be surrounded by strangers, to secure whose personal respect should be worth the desired effort. He could conquer, it was wholly a question of will, he knew that, and she pressed him to do it, by all that he was, by all that he might become, for his children's sake, for his honor's sake. And then, putting away all regretful recollection of the past, finding their happiness in each other, they would start afresh under a cloudless sky, laugh at hardships, make them, indeed, stepping stones to honor and usefulness, and thus chain prosperity to their chariot-wheels. Alas, poor Zee! alas, still poorer Wrax!

The other members of both families were doing too well in the old country to desire a new one, and the change contemplated by Wrax and his wife, though admittedly wise in their circumstances, was looked upon as a tremendous undertaking—a something to be admired, not imitated. Hence friends outvied each other in kind consideration for “the outcasts.” Nimble fingers had long been busy on the outfit, for as there were no shops on board ship, there must be no stint, and as nothing could be easier than to send superfluities floating down stream, piles on piles of changes were provided, and such stores of good things that the uninitiated might have conjectured that open-house hospitalities for an army were brewing.

After having inspected the ship, Wrax returned to the home-circle quite jubilant, saying he had taken their berths and made satisfactory arrangements for the voyage, etc., and they were to travel “Intermediate.” Intermediate! a fine sounding word, belonging to the mid-air vocabulary, and meaning a something a shade below patrician state possibly. Pressed for the definition of the word, which he doubtless hoped to escape, Wrax admitted reluctantly — an admission received with ominous silence—that “intermediate” meant the third class part of the ship. When Wrax left the room Zee followed him out, and told him quietly, but firmly, that she “would not travel in that part of the ship, even though he had taken their berths.” Wrax talked a deal of defiant nonsense in his excited way, to which Zee objected not one word, but her decision was unalterable.

It had not occurred to any one that he would choose less than second-cabin fare for his family, or his services in the matter would have been dispensed with. On learning the terms he had made, the ire of his eldest brother was kindled not a little, and supporting Zee's resistance thereto, he proposed to accompany her to town that they might make their own terms, adding, as Wrax doubtless expected his brother would add: “You ought to travel first cabin, but lower than second cabin you shall not go, if I myself have to pay the difference.” They accordingly went through the ship, and secured their tiny second-cabin berths with less of disgust than might have been expected.

And on the last day of March, 1859, the emigrants waved adieu from the ship to friends still hovering on their outskirts, whose blessings caused Zee to gulp down, industriously, certain choking sensations. Happily all parties had been kept too excitedly busy to think, much less speak, of the severance of early ties and kindred melting subjects; so leave-takings shall be borne aloft by the secret-carrying bird, and the reader shall start on the voyage with the outward bound.

Zee laughingly said hers was a responsible post, seeing she had five men to take care of—a brother and a cousin of her own, youths of eighteen and nineteen, having decided to “rough it” with herself, her husband, and her boys. Expecting to pay toll to old Neptune as soon as tumbling about began, Zee, with characteristic energy, prompted Wrax to make their cabin ship-shape with due speed, and on him the task necessarily devolved, for nurse Piri he would not. He hated work, disorder riled him; he had never before been cramped for room, and a peep into their cabin showed it full to the brim, with “enough to sink the ship” he declared, and he threatened to “throw the whole overboard,” making Zee quake for her stores more than a little.

The as yet unsolved problem of how to put a cocoanut into a walnut-shell was, said Wrax, “enough to make a saint swear,” and since he was no saint, the reader may nod significantly and pass on. Still, appreciating his every move in a right direction, Zee cheered him on, for it was really hard work stowing away all those things so as to be come-at-able; it would nevertheless have been pleasant work had he but kept his temper, but that article was often lost as soon as found when his services were in requisition.

Every one lives in a glass house on board ship, and so long as Zee could do little but recline at such ease as she could command, she too was diverted by her opposite neighbors—a Church of England clergyman, his wife and grown-up family. No stickler for “order” should commit his clay tenement to the loving kindness of the deep until prepared to learn what is meant by “worse misfortunes at sea;” for the sea-king is no respecter of persons; he dashed about the starchiest of parsons and the stiffest of dames as if they had been common people.

Tropical weather agreed with Piri, but the change of food especially was too much for Rex, who failed with his first illness before they reached the line, and was confined to his bed for days in a burning fever. Then the doomed stores proved worth their weight in gold; the sick one lived on the delicacies they afforded. He had a cabin to himself, and a double cabin though it was, the fever and the tropical heat made his thirst consuming, and through the day his constant cry for “Water” was satisfied; but Wrax was his nurse (not a good one) through the night; he would have nothing to do with Piri, nor suffer any interference with his plans, and was moreover prone to assert that of all the sickness current (gout excepted) “nine-tenths is sham.” Hence, through the long night-hours, the poor child's faint gasp for “Water—water—water!” was oftener peremptorily silenced than satisfied. Denied the power to aid, Zee will never forget that cry for “Water—water!”

The change in the little man shocked every one, when he was first carried on the poop, as he began to mend; and a tiny saloon passenger shared her orange with him. How sweet to mother and child was that bit of orange—he had tired of baked apples, etc.; and later in the day, the little girl's papa gave Zee a large orange for the boy, saying it was “his last.” A whole orange! think of it! Gold could not have bought it. How happy the gift made both mother and son! carefully divided and placed within his reach, it would serve to quench his thirst through the night. Of the precious orange, Rex had sucked one, perhaps two, divisions, and the remainder was given at bed-time into Wrax's care. And—would you believe it?—it was “stolen”—stolen from the sick boy! Wrax said, and pointed out a burly Englishman as the supposed thief. “Stolen!” Zee said nothing. What could she say? The wretch who could steal it would deny the theft. The dear little fellow—his mother too, perhaps—cried over that orange. However, from the moment he breathed the fresh air under the awning on deck, he began to recover, and the voyage proved as beneficial to him as it usually does to both old and young.

Deeming light and air indispensable, Zee, in her nautical verdancy, chose their cabin close to the main hatch; but too much water down the hatchway soon placed light and air at a discount, and the captain, who was extremely kind to them, gave them a cabin “aft,” and Wrax fitted it up conveniently; it was quite a tip-top affair, in fact, with room to walk about and entertain visitors. But the instant lively Neptune began his pitching and rolling, they learnt the value of nut-shell dimensions. It is well to be boxed in when dashed about; space does but give force to the blows.

Despite its many drawbacks, life on board ship is very delightful. To all in health, the sea-air gives ravenous appetites; the simplest food is sweet, no one suffers from dyspepsia. The ship itself, with any number of passengers, is wonderfully clean, there is no dust in the air. Tropical sunsets are grand; the great luminary sinks swiftly to rest in such a sea of gold that its mid-day radiance is eclipsed by its “Good-night” glory. Its lustrous setting reflects perchance the magnificence of the children of light, as they kiss him into beauty at the end of his day's work.

Sparse of incident as is sea-life, the most trifling details of the wonders of the deep are hailed as exciting events; and the birds appearing where its monotony presses heavily, the catching and shooting of them offers an outlet for the surplus energy enforced idleness finds difficult to deal with. The birds follow in the wake of the ship, and are caught with the keenest enjoyment by means of baited lines thrown out astern. But it is sad, very sad, to see the fine albatross fall heavily on the water, and float grandly, silently away, with a broken leg or wing; sad, too, to hear the shouts of the men resounding far and wide as bird after bird falls to their small shot. Wanton cruelty!

The sky, new in its wondrous star-lit brilliancy, was eagerly scanned for the first glimpse of the belauded “Southern Cross;” and, beautiful though it is, now that distance no longer enhanced its beauty, it was declared outrivalled by other constellations, which, being more familiar, “the exiles” loved for their home-look. They as yet owned nothing in common with the Britain of the South Pacific.

Water, water everywhere, but never a speck of land. The sceptical Zee was sure they were “just sailing round and round, and would presently eat shrimps off Gravesend.” Love-sick swains sighed and hoped they were, if their bliss might be prolonged thereby. Love-making to kill time is such dangerous work that it were well the electric light should make “star-gazing” a vision of the past. A sudden lurch of the ship, which sent husband and wife no one knew where, was less cruel to the lovers. Wrax protested he had “no patience with the young fools.” “No one more spoony than yourself, of yore, sir,” suggested Zee, with timely satire; at which Wrax jerked himself off with a half shrug, half grin, at his folly or her fun. No man-traps were set by the girls. They were as purely modest as ever English matron reared, and, withal, so winning that, for the moral health of the male creation, one could but wish their like unlimited. Of practical attention Piri received the lion's share, since with him in his arms the star-gazing devotee could venture into closer proximity to his fair enslaver, who, however, until safely housed, made willing service available. How far the useful outweighed the agreeable during the voyage it were impolitic to surmise.

The welcome cry of “Land ahead!” made farewell suppers the topic of the hour. And, in return for unnumbered mercies vouchsafed by the gentler sex, the bachelors' farewell supper was to be “a stunner,” and for this supper many tit-bits that made their mouths water were laid half-grudgingly aside from their own short allowance, while of other folk they begged, borrowed, and—no, imagination shall supply the word. “Fast” as were the bachelors, the sea, as a rule, was faster, and mixed various ingredients above-board, instead of leaving nature to do her work; so that their own cooking operations usually resulted in a hodge-podge, “awfully moreish,” called sea-pie, a compound of oat-meal, sugar, meat, raisins, mustard, pickles, and what not.

But for the state occasion pretty fingers were pressed into the service, the beaux fluttering round to mar, not mend, operations. Presently the lads and lasses were seated round a board which groaned beneath such delicacies as the season afforded; and the lads, having fasted all day, were longing, as only healthy, sharp-set Englishmen can, for “a good go in.” “One of us” possessing “sea-legs,” was deputed to carry an appetising cauldron of soup from the galley. But on board ship there is many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip—the bachelors and the elements were at war; for as “sea-legs” was in the act of placing the savory mess on the table, the jovial sea-king sent him swimming in decidedly more than his share. Hungry men are hungry men the wide world over; and though roars of laughter, sounding hollow on empty stomachs, went round and round, blessings(?) neither few nor mild were held in check.

Although a professedly teetotal ship, liquors, at exorbitant prices, were nevertheless procurable, and on them some of the men had spent their last shilling and pledged the last article on which they could raise one, before they reached port. Wrax had lent money, at a high rate of interest, on a miscellaneous collection of articles which were afterwards redeemed. But for the drink, all but unbroken harmony would have prevailed throughout the voyage. Under its baneful influence some of the silly men figured in unpremeditated fighting matches, and often, after such onslaughts, the captain stopped their supply of grog for a day or so.

Behold the hour and the man! The pilot is greeted with deafening hurrahs by the emigrants strong of arm and of will, longing to have done with their do-nothing listlessness. Slow-going old England is henceforth in the background, and the land of which they have formed great expectations ranks A 1; but of it, with a love of grumbling inexcusable, a dismal tale is told by those who have just boarded the ship. But gathering up their wits, like true Britons, the emigrants walk off with a do-or-die resolve which ultimately proved the croak and croaker alike worthless.