procès-verbal might be drawn up and an inquiry instituted. The story which reached Paris on the following day, was that the guard had met in the corridor two persons, one dressed in green with an edging of gold and wearing a couteau de chasse, and the other attired like an abbé, but without bands, and his hair smoothed down, who politely accosted him, inquiring if he could obtain admission for them to witness the ceremony of the grand concert, they being strangers from the country. The guard replied that it was not in his power to do so, but they persisted in their request, and even offered him money to oblige them. After a few moments' reflection he desired them to follow him, and led the way up-stairs, but they shortly stopped, saying they must go back, as the passages were so intricate. They accordingly retraced their steps, and the guard returned with them to the corridor, where, suspecting something wrong, he drew his sword to arrest them. The two men then fell upon him, broke his sword, and wounded him with the couteau de chasse, leaving him in that state, and then making their escape,' his punishment; the other case happened in Henry the Third's reign, when the offender was beheaded. La Chaux was then taken to the Conciergerie, where he made an appeal, demanding the assembly of the Chambers, Tournelle and Grand' Chambre, parce qu'il était bou gentilhomme," and it was thought his punishment would have been commuted to imprisonment for life in one of the royal castles. He did not, however, avail himself of his letters of nobility, and no assembly of the Chambers took place, but he was tried again at the Tournelle, on the 11th of February, and instead of being broken alive on the wheel, his sentence was to be merely hung ("la Cour le condamne seulement à être pendu)." On Thursday, the 14th of February, the unhappy victim of a barbarous law was brought out in the tombereau; "he made his amende, and was then taken to the Grève, where he was hung at half-past four o'clock in the afternoon, in the presence of a great number of people, and died with great resignation." Labels were affixed to his back and front, bearing these words: "Fabricateur d'impostures contre la sûreté du roi et la fidélité de la nation.” a wealthy citizen was lately walking in the Thuilleries, a person came up to him and bid him be on his guard, for that night he would be murdered. The citizen retired after supper, as usual, to his bedchamber, having furnished himself with fire-arms. At midnight three men actually entered the room. One of them he shot dead, and with a second shot broke the arm of another. The third ran away. The person killed proved to be his own son, and the wounded person his nephew, who is now in prison along with the third assassin. This, says the writer, is the second instance of the kind that has happened at Paris within the last three months: to such a height is licentiousness risen in that capital." This lame story occasioned a good deal of discussion in Paris for a day or two, but "on Saturday, the 9th," says Barbier, "it all fell The "peine forte et dure" might with greater to the ground, for then the report came from justice have been applied in such a case as this: Versailles that the guard was a scamp, a fellow" Feb. 26.-They write from Paris, that as who had formerly been a Protestant, but, by abjuring his religion, had obtained the protection of Madame Adélaïde" (one of the king's daughters), "that he was a man given to inventions, that he had perhaps been engaged in some private pursuit, or that, even without a quarrel, he had got up this story in order to show his zeal and earn some reward, that he had no serious wound, and that his coat was only cut on the arm and one or two other places, which he might have done himself; no abbé or any man in green had been found, but it was added, as a certain fact, that the guard himself was arrested and sent to the Bastille." These rumours proved correct, but from the great political prison, La Chaux was transferred to the Grand Châtelet, and thence brought to trial. There were no witnesses against him, but a knife was found on his person, the discovery of which led him to acknowledge that the whole story was a fabrication, and that he had invented it for the sole NEW purpose of getting a pension. The poor wretch, in making this confession, wept bitterly, as well he might, for the sentence passed on him was to be broken alive on the wheel, having first made the amende honorable before the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, at the Louvre, opposite the gate of the Tuileries, and at the Grève, in front of the MR. CHARLES DICKENS'S NEW READINGS. Hôtel de Ville, prior to the application of "the On the 15th of March will be published, price 58. 6d., THE SIXTH VOLUME. WORK BY THE AUTHOR OF In Number 151 will be commenced NO NAME. BY WILKIE COLLINS. question, ordinary and extraordinary," for the On Thursday, 13th March, at ST. JAMES'S HALL, Piccadilly, crime of lese-majesté in the second degree. There were precedents for this cruel sentence, two similar cases having occurred, one of them in 1629, in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, in the Château of Fontainebleau, the culprit being the Chevalier Georgian, who underwent at 8 o'clock precisely, Mr. CHARLES DICKENS DAVID COPPERFIELD AND MR. BOB SAWYER'S PARTY, The Right of Translating Articles from ALL THE YEAR ROUND is reserved by the Authors. Published at the tree. No. 96, Wellington Sepet, Stranu. Pruted by C. WHITING, Beaufort tione, cut dicks ALL THE YEAR ROUND. A WEEKLY JOURNAL. CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS. WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS. No. 150.] SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1862. A STRANGE STORY. [PRICE 2d. more immediately before the wasted form of the young magician (he, still bending over the BY THE AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," "RIENZI," &c. caldron, and hearing me not in the absorption CHAPTER LXXXVII. THE fifth hour had passed away, when Ayesha saiddo me, "Lo! the circle is fading; the lamps grow dim. Look now without fear on the space beyond; the Eyes that appalled thee are again lost in air, as lightnings that fleet back into cloud." I looked up, and the spectres had vanished. The sky was tinged with sulphurous hues, the red and the black intermixed. I replenished the lamps and the ring in front, thriftily, heedfully; but when I came to the sixth lamp, not a drop in the vessel that fed them was left. In a vague dismay, I now looked round the half of the wide circle in rear of the two bended figures intent on the caldron. All along that disc the light was already broken, here and there flickering up, here and there dying down; the six lamps in that half of the circle still twinkled, but faintly as stars shrinking fast from the dawn of day. But it was not the fading shine in that half of the magical ring which daunted my eye and quickened with terror the pulse of my heart; the Bush-land beyond was on fire. From the background of the forest rose the flame and the smoke; the smoke, there, still half smothering the flame. But along the width of the grasses and herbage, between the verge of the forest and the bed of the water creek just below the raised platform from which I beheld the dread conflagration, the fire was advancing; wave upon wave, clear and red against the columns of rock behind; as the rush of a flood through the mists of some Alp crowned with lightnings. Roused from my stun at the first sight of a danger not foreseen by the mind I had steeled against far rarer portents of nature, I cared no more for the lamps and the circle. Hurrying back to Ayesha, I exclaimed, "The phantoms have gone from the spaces in front; but what incantation or spell can arrest the red march of the foe, speeding on in the rear! While we gazed on the Caldron of Life, behind us, unheeded, behold the Destroyer!" Ayesha looked and made no reply, but, as by involuntary instinct, bowed her majestic head, then rearing it erect, placed herself yet and hope of his watch): placed herself before him, as the bird whose first care is her fledgling. As we two there stood, fronting the deluge of fire, we heard Margrave behind us, murmuring low, "See the bubbles of light, how they sparkle and dance-I shall live, I shall live!" And his words scarcely died in our ears before, crash upon crash, came the fall of the age-long trees in the forest; and nearer, all near us, through the blazing grasses, the hiss of the serpents, the scream of the birds, and the bellow and tramp of the herds plunging wild through the billowy red of their pastures. Ayesha now wound her arms around Margrave, and wrenched him, reluctant and struggling, from his watch over the seething caldron. In rebuke of his angry exclamations, she pointed to the march of the fire, spoke in sorrowful tones a few words in her own language, and then, appealing to me in English, said: "I tell him that, here, the Spirits who oppose us have summoned a foe that is deaf to my voice, and دو "And," exclaimed Margrave, no longer with gasp and effort, but with the swell of a voice which drowned all the discords of terror and of agony sent forth from the Phlegethon burning below-" and this witch, whom I trusted, is a vile slave and impostor, more desiring my death than my life. She thinks that in life I should scorn and forsake her, that in death I should die in her arms! Sorceress, avaunt! Art thou useless and powerless now when I need thee most? Go! Let the world be one funeral pyre! What to me is the world if I perish? My world is my life. Thou knowest that my last hope is here, that all the strength left me this night will die down, like the lamps in the circle, unless the elixir restore it. Bold friend, spurn that sorceress away. Hours yet ere those flames can assail us! A few minutes more, and life to your Lilian and me!" Thus having said, Margrave turned from us, and cast into the caldron the last essence yet left in his emptied coffer. Ayesha silently drew her black veil over her face; and turned, with the being she loved, from the terror he scorned, to share in the hope that he cherished. Thus left alone, with my reason disenthralled, VOL. VI. 150 disenchanted, I surveyed more calmly the extent | see the blank of the gap in the ring! Guard of the actual peril with which we were threat- that breach-there, the demons will enter." ened, and the peril seemed less, so surveyed. "Not a drop is there left in this vessel by It is true, all the Bush-land behind, almost up which to replenish the lamps on the ring." to the bed of the creek, was on fire; but the "Advance, then; thou hast still the light of grasses, through which the flame spread so the soul, and the demons may recoil before a rapidly, ceased at the opposite marge of the soul that is dauntless and guiltless. If not, creek. Watery pools were still, at intervals, Three are lost!-as it is, One is doomed." left in the bed of the creek, shining tremulous, Thus adjured, silently, involuntarily, I passed like waves of fire, in the glare reflected from the from the Veiled Woman's side, over the sere burning land; and even, where the water failed, lines on the turf which had been traced by the the stony course of the exhausted rivulet was a triangles of light long since extinguished, and barrier against the march of the conflagration. towards the verge of the circle. As I advanced, Thus, unless the wind, now still, should rise, overhead rushed a dark cloud of wings, birds and waft some sparks to the parched combus-dislodged from the forest on fire, and screaming, tible herbage immediately around us, we were saved from the fire, and our work might yet be achieved. in dissonant terror, as they flew towards the furthermost mountains: close by my feet hissed and glided the snakes, driven forth from their I whispered to Ayesha the conclusion to which blazing coverts, and glancing through the ring, I came. unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating by "Thinkest thou," she answered, without rais-me, bright-eyed and hissing; all made innocuous ing her mournful head, "that the Agencies of by fear: even the terrible Death-adder, which Nature are the movements of chance. The Spi-I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the rits I invoked to his aid are leagued with the hosts that assail. A Mightier than I am has doomed him!" circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away. I halted at the gap between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the crystal vessel. Were there, indeed, no lingering drops yet left, if but to recruit the lamps for some priceless minutes more? As I thus stood, right into the gap between the two dead lamps, strode a gigantic Foot. All the rest of the form was unseen; only, as volume after volume of smoke poured on from the burning land behind, it seemed as if one great column of vapour, eddying round, settled itself aloft from the circle, and that out from that column strode the giant Foot. And, as strode the Foot, so with it came, like the sound of its tread, a roll of muttered thunder. Scarcely had she uttered these words before Margrave exclaimed, “Behold how the Rose of the alchemist's dream enlarges its bloom from the folds of its petals! I shall live, I shall live!" I looked, and the liquid which glowed in the caldron had now taken a splendour that mocked all comparisons borrowed from the lustre of gems. In its prevalent colour it had, indeed, the dazzle and flash of the ruby; but, out from the mass of the molten red, broke corruscations of all prismal hues, shooting, shifting, in a play that made the wavelets themselves seem living things sensible of their joy. No longer was there scum or film upon the surface; only ever and anon a light rosy vapour floating up, and quick lost in the haggard, heavy, sulphurous air, hot with the "Courage!" said the voice of Ayesha. conflagration, rushing towards us from behind."Trembling soul, yield not an inch to the And these corruscations formed, on the surface demon!" of the molten ruby, literally the shape of a Rose, its leaves made distinct in their outlines by sparks of emerald, and diamond, and sapphire. Even while gazing on this animate liquid lustre, a buoyant delight seemed infused into my senses; all terrors, conceived before, were annulled; the phantoms, whose armies had filled the wide spaces in front, were forgotten; the crash of the forest behind was unheard. In the reflexion of that glory, Margrave's wan cheek seemed already restored to the radiance it wore when I saw it first in the framework of blooms. As I gazed, thus enchanted, a cold hand touched my own. Hush!" whispered Ayesha, from the black veil, against which the rays from the caldron fell blunt, and absorbed into Dark. "Behind us, the light of the circle is extinct, but, there, we are guarded from all save the brutal and soulless destroyers. But, before!-but, before!-see! two of the lamps have died out! I recoiled, with a cry that rang loud through the lurid air. 66 At the charm, the wonderful charm, in the tone of the Veiled Woman's voice, my will seemed to take a force more sublime than its own. I folded my arms on my breast, and stood as if rooted to the spot, confronting the column of smoke and the stride of the giant Foot. And the Foot halted, mute. Again, in the momentary hush of that suspense, I heard a voice-it was Margrave's. The last hour expires-the work is accomplished! Come! come!-aid me to take the caldron from the fire-and, quick! or a drop may be wasted in vapour, the Elixir of Life, from the caldron !" At that cry I receded, and the Foot advanced. And at that moment, suddenly, unawares, from behind, I was stricken down. Over me, as I lay, swept a whirlwind of trampling hoofs and glancing horns. The herds, in their flight from the burningpastures, had rushed over the bed of the watercourse-scaled the slopes of the banks. ! Snorting and bellowing, they plunged their blind | way to the mountains. One cry alone more wild than their own savage blare piereed the reek through which the Brute Hurricane swept. At that cry of wrath and despair I struggled to rise, again dashed to earth by the hoofs and the horns. But was it the dream-like deceit of my reeling senses, or did I see that giant Foot stride past through the close-serried ranks of the maddening herds? Did I hear, distinct through all the huge uproar of animal terror, the roll of low thunder which followed the stride of that Foot? CHAPTER LXXXVIII. WHEN my sense had recovered its shock, and my eyes looked dizzily round, the charge of the beasts had swept by; and of all the wild tribes which had invaded the magical circle, the only lingerer was the brown Death-adder, coiled close by the spot where my head had rested. Beside the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered, the fire, arrested by the watercourse, had consumed the grasses that fed it, and there the plains stretched black and desert as the Phlegræan field of the Poet's Hell. But the fire still raged in the forest beyond. White flames, soaring up from the trunks of the tallest trees, and forming, through the sullen dark of the smoke-reek, innumerable pillars of fire, like the halls in the City of Fiends. Gathering myself up, I turned my eyes from the terrible pomp of the lurid forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled sward for my two companions. I saw the dark image of Ayesha still seated, still bending, as I had seen it last. I saw a pale hand feebly grasping the rim of the magical caldron, which lay, hurled down from its tripod by the rush of the beasts, yards away from the dim fading embers of the scattered wood pyre. I saw the faint writhings of a frail wasted frame, over which the Veiled Woman was bending. I saw, as I moved with bruised limbs to the place, close by the lips of the dying magician, the flash of the ruby-like essence spilt on the sward, and, meteor-like, sparkling up from the torn tufts of herbage. I now reached Margrave's side; bending over him as the Veiled Woman bent; and as I sought gently to raise him, he turned his face, fiercely faltering out, "Touch me not, rob me not. You share with me! Never-never. These glorious drops are all mine! Die all else! I will live-I will live!" Writhing himself from my pitying arms, he plunged his face amidst the beautiful, playful flame of the essence, as if to lap the elixir with lips scorched away from its intolerable burning. Suddenly, with a low shriek, he fell back, his face upturned to mine, and on that face unmistakably reigned Death. Then Ayesha tenderly, silently drew the young head to her lap, and it vanished from my sight behind her black veil. I knelt beside her, murmuring some trite words of comfort; but she heeded me not, rocking her self to and fro as the mother who cradles a child to sleep. Soon, the fast-flickering sparkles of the lost elixir died out on the grass, and with their last sportive diamond-like tremble of light, up, in all the suddenness of Australian day, rose the sun, lifting himself royally above the mountaintops and fronting the meaner blaze of the forest as a young king fronts his rebels. And as there, where the bush fires had ravaged, all was a desert, so there, where their fury had not spread, all was a garden. Afar, at the foot of the mountains, the fugitive herds were grazing; the cranes, flocking back to the pools, renewed the strange grace of their gambols; and the great kingfisher, whose laugh, half in mirth, half in mockery, leads the choir that welcome the morn--which in Europe is night-alighted bold on the roof of the cavern, whose floors were still white with the bones of races, extinct before, formed to "walk erect and to gaze upon the stars," rose-so helpless through instincts, so royal through Soul,rose MAN! But there, on the ground where the dazzling elixir had wasted its virtues, there the herbage already had a freshness of verdure which, amid the duller sward round it, was like an oasis of green in a desert. And, there, wild flowers, whose chill hues the eye would have scarcely distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Towards that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark ;-blind to the bloom of the wild flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects-one hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and well-nigh achieved through such dread, fleeting back to the earth from which its material was drawn, to give bloom, indeed,—but to herbs; joy, indeed, but to insects! And now in the flash of the sun, slowly wound up the slopes that led to the circle, the same barbaric procession which had sunk into the valley under the ray of the moon. The armed men came first, stalwart and tall, their vests brave with crimson and golden lace; their weapons gaily gleaming with holiday silver. After them, the Black Litter. As they came to the place, Ayesha, not raising her head, spoke to them in their own Eastern tongue. A wail was their answer. The armed men bounded forward, and the bearers left the litter. All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the black veil-all knelt, and all wept. Far in the distance, at the foot of the bluc mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if from the earth; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs and spears, and looking towards the spot on which we were; strangely thus brought into the landscape, as if they, too, the wild dwellers on the verge which Humanity guards from the Brute, were among the mourners for the mysterious Child of mysteri 66 "There is but one road known to me through the maze of the solitude; that which we took to this upland." "On that road Death lurks, and awaits thee! Blind dupe, couldst thou think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head rests on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which had filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so loved and so cherished him-me, he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a hairbreadth the span of his being. But what matters to me his crime or his madness? I loved him-I loved him!" She bowed her veiled head lower and lower; perhaps, under the veil, her lips kissed the lips of the dead. Then she said, whisperingly: "Juma, the Strangler, whose word never failed to his master, whose prey never slipped from his snare, waits thy step on the road to thy home! But thy death cannot now profit the dead, the beloved. And thou hast had pity for him who took but thine aid to design thy destruction. His life is lost, thine is saved!" She spoke no more in the tongue that I could interpret. She spoke, in the language unknown, a few murmured words to her swarthy attendants; then the armed men, still weeping, rose, and made a dumb sign to me to go with them. I understood by the sign that Ayesha had told them to guard me on my way; but she gave no reply to my parting thanks. CHAPTER LXXXIX. future now mastered all in the past. "Was Lilian living still?" Absorbed in the gloom of that thought, hurried on by the goad that my heart, in its tortured impatience, gave to my footstep, I outstripped the slow stride of the armed men, and, midway between the place I had left and the home which I sped to, came, far in advance of my guards, into the thicket in which the bushmen had started up in my path on the night that Lilian had watched for my coming. The earth at my feet was rife with creeping plants and many-coloured flowers, the sky overhead was half-hid by motionless pines. Suddenly, whether crawling out from the herbage or dropping down from the trees, by my side stood the white-robed and skeleton formAyesha's attendant, the Strangler. I sprang from him in shuddering, then halted and faced him. The hideous creature crept towards me, cringing and fawning, making signs of humble good will and servile obeisance. Again Irecoiled-wrathfully, loathingly; turned my face homeward, and fled on. I thought I had baffled his chase, when, just at the mouth of the thicket, he dropped from a bough in my path close behind me. Before I could turn, some dark muffling substance fell between my sight and the sun, and I felt a fierce strain at my throat. But the words of Ayesha had warned me; with one rapid hand I seized the noose before it could tighten too closely, with the other I tore the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round on the dastardly foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot. His hand, as he fell, relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from the knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit plain. I saw no more of the armed men or the Strangler. Panting and breathless, I paused at last before the fence, fragrant with blossoms, that divided my home from the solitude. The windows of Lilian's room were darkened all within the house seemed still." Darkened and silenced Home! with the light and sounds of the jocund day all around it. Was there yet Hope in the Universe for me? All to which I had trusted Hope, had broken down; the anchors I had forged for her hold in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the drifts of the storm, had snapped like the reeds which pierce the side that leans on the barb of their IDESCENDED. into the valley; the armed men points, and confides in the strength of their followed. The path, on that side of the water-stems. No hope in the baffled resources of course not reached by the flames, wound through recognised knowledge! No hope in the daring meadows still green, or amidst groves still un-adventures of Mind into regions unknown; vain scathed. As a turning in the way brought in front of my sight the place I had left behind, I beheld the black litter creeping down the descent, with its curtains closed, and the Veiled Woman walking by its side. But soon the funeral procession was lost to my eyes, and the thoughts that it roused were erased. The waves in man's brain are like those of the sea, rushing on, rushing over the wrecks of the vessels that rode on their surface, to sink, after storm, in their deeps. One thought cast forth into the alike the calm lore of the practised physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter. I had fled from the common-place teachings of Nature, to explore in her Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason. Made brave by the grandeur of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the Demon, and my hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been trodden into dust by the hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I had scorned, as a dream more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man |