The right of Translating Articles from ALL THE YEAR ROUND is reserved by the Authors.

Published at the Office, No. 26, Wellington Street, Strand. Printed by C. WHITING, Beaufort House, Strand.

ALL THE YEAR ROUND.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1861.

No. 130.]

A STRANGE STORY.

[PRICE 2d.

As I rode somewhat fast through Sir P. Derval's park, I came, however, upon the steward, ," "RIENZI," &c. just in front of the house. I reined in my horse and accosted him. He looked very cheerful.

BY THE AUTHOR OF MY NOVEL,"

CHAPTER XXVIII.

"Sir," said he, in a whisper," I have heard from Sir Philip; his letter is dated since-since-my good woman told you what I saw;-well, since then. So that it must have been all a delusion of mine, as you told her. And yet, well-well --we will not talk of it, doctor. But I hope you have kept the secret. Sir Philip would not like to hear of it, if he comes back."

"Your secret is quite safe with me. But is Sir Philip likely to come back ?"

THE Conversation with Mrs. Poyntz left my mind restless and disquieted. I had no doubt, indeed, of Lilian's truth, but could I be sure that the attentions of a young man, with advantages of fortune so brilliant, would not force on her thoughts the contrast of the humbler lot and the duller walk of life in which she had accepted as companion a man removed from her romantic youth less by disparity of years than by gravity "I hope so, doctor. His letter is dated Paris, of pursuits? And would my suit now be as wel- and that's nearer home than he has been for comed as it had been by a mother even so un-many years; and-but bless me - some one is worldly as Mrs. Ashleigh? Why, too, should coming out of the house? a young gentleman! both mother and daughter have left me so un- Who can it be ?" prepared to hear that I had a rival? Why not have implied some consoling assurance that such rivalry need not cause me alarm? Lilian's letters, it is true, touched but little on any of the persons round her-they were filled with the outpourings of an ingenuous heart, coloured by the glow of a golden fancy. They were written as if in the wide world we two stood apart, alone, consecrated from the crowd by the love that, in linking us together, had hallowed each to the other. Mrs. Ashleigh's letters were more general and diffusive, detailed the habits of the household, sketched the guests, intimated her continued fear of Lady Haughton, but had said nothing more of Mr. Ashleigh Sumner than I had repeated to Mrs. Poyntz. However, in my letter to Lilian I related the intelligence that had reached me, and impatiently I awaited her reply.

Three days after the interview with Mrs. Poyntz, and two days before the long-anticipated event of the mayor's ball, I was summoned to attend a nobleman who had lately been added to my list of patients, and whose residence was about twelve miles from L. The nearest way was through Sir Philip Derval's park. went on horseback, and proposed to stop on the way to inquire after the steward, whom I had seen but once since his fit, and that was two days after it, when he called himself at my house to thank me for my attendance, and to declare that he was quite recovered.

I

I looked, and to my surprise I saw Margrave descending the stately stairs that led from the front door. The steward turned towards him, and I mechanically followed, for I was curious to know what had brought Margrave to the house of the long-absent traveller.

It was easily explained. Mr. Margrave had heard at L much of the pictures and internal decorations of the mansion. He had, by dint of coaxing (he said, with his enchanting laugh), persuaded the old housekeeper to show him the rooms.

"It is against Sir Philip's positive orders to show the house to any stranger, sir; and the housekeeper has done very wrong," said the steward.

"Pray don't scold her. I dare say Sir Philip would not have refused me a permission he might not give to every idle sight-seer. Fellow. travellers have a freemasonry with each other; and I have been much in the same far countries as himself. I heard of him there, and could tell you more about him, I dare say, than you know yourself."

You, sir! pray do then."

"The next time I come," said Margrave, gaily; and with a nod to me, he glided off through the trees of the neighbouring grove, along the winding footpath that led to the lodge.

"A very cool gentleman," muttered the steward; "but what pleasant ways he has. You seem to know him, sir. Who is he-may I ask?"

"Mr. Margrave. A visitor at L—, and he

VOL. VI.

130

"His orders were not to let the Court become a show-house-to admit none without my consent-but I should be ungrateful indeed, doctor, if I refused that consent to you."

We had now come to the end of the state apartments, the last of which was a library. 'And," said the old woman, "I don't wonder the gentleman knew Sir Philip, for he seemed a scholar, and looked very hard over the books, especially those old ones by the fireplace, which Sir Philip, Heaven bless him, was always poring over."

Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fireplace, and examined the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the works of those writers whom we may class toI tied my horse to the rusty gate of the terrace-gether under the title of mystics-Porphyry and walk, and followed the steward up the broad stairs Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivoof the terrace. The great doors were unlocked. gius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, We entered a lofty hall with a domed ceiling; at too, were there, by writers less renowned, on asthe back of the hall the grand staircase as-trology, geomancy, chiromancy, &c. I began to cended by a double flight. The design was un-understand among what class of authors Mardoubtedly Vanbrugh's, an architect who, beyond grave had picked up the strange notions with all others, sought the effect of grandeur less in which he was apt to interpolate the doctrines of space than in proportion. But Vanbrugh's designs practical philosophy. need the relief of costume and movement, and the forms of a more pompous generation, in the bravery of velvets and laces, glancing amid those gilded columns, or descending with stately tread those broad palatial stairs. His halls and chambers are so made for festival and throng, that they become like deserted theatres, inexpressibly desolate, as we miss the glitter of the lamps and the movement of the actors.

"I suppose this library was Sir Philip's usual sitting-room ?" said I.

"No, sir; he seldom sat here. This was his study;" and the old woman opened a small door, masked by false book backs. I followed her into a room of moderate size, and evidently of much earlier date than the rest of the house. "It is the only room left of an older mansion," said the steward, in answer to my remark. "I have The housekeeper had now appeared; a quiet, heard it was spared on account of the chimneytimid old woman. She excused herself for admit-piece. But there is a Latin inscription which ting Margrave-not very intelligibly. It was plain will tell you all about it. I don't know Latin to see that she had, in truth, been unable to resist myself." what the steward termed his "pleasant ways."

The chimney-piece reached to the ceiling. As if to escape from a scolding, she talked The frieze of the lower part rested on rude volubly all the time, bustling nervously through stone caryatides; in the upper part were the rooms, along which I followed her guidance oak panels very curiously carved in the geowith a hushed footstep. The principal apart-metrical designs favoured by the taste prements were on the ground floor, or rather a floor raised some ten or fifteen feet above the ground; they had not been modernised since the date in which they were built. Hangings of faded silk; tables of rare marble, and mouldered gilding; comfortless chairs at drill against the walls; pictures, of which connoisseurs alone could estimate the value, darkened by dust or blistered by sun and damp, made a general character of discomfort. On not one room, on not one nook, still lingered some old smile of Home.

Meanwhile, I gathered from the housekeeper's rambling answers to questions put to her by the steward, as I moved on, glancing at the pictures, that Margrave's visit that day was not his first. He had been over the house twice before; his ostensible excuse that he was an amateur in pictures (though, as I have before observed, for that department of art he had no taste); but each time he had talked much of Sir Philip. He said that though not personally known to him, he had resided in the same towns abroad, and had friends equally intimate with Sir Philip; but when the steward inquired if the visitor had

valent in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, but different from any I had ever seen in drawings of old houses. And I was not quite unlearned in such matters, for my poor father was a passionate antiquarian in all that relates to mediæval art. The design in the oak panels was composed of triangles interlaced with varied ingenuity, and enclosed in circular bands inscribed with the signs of the Zodiac.

On the stone fricze supported by the caryatides, immediately under the woodwork, was inserted a metal plate, on which was written, in Latin, a few lines to the effect that "in this room, Simon Forman, the seeker of hidden truth, taking refuge from unjust persecution, made those discoveries in nature which he committed, for the benefit of a wiser age, to the charge of his protector and patron, the worshipful Sir Miles Derval, knight."

Forman! The name was not quite unfamiliar to me; but it was not without an effort that my memory enabled me to assign it to one of the most notorious of those astrologers or soothsayers whom the superstition of an earlier age alternately persecuted and honoured.

Charles Dickens.]

"The gentleman who was here to-day was very much pleased with this look-out, sir," said the housekeeper.

Who would not be? I suppose Sir Philip has a taste for astronomy."

The general character of the room was more view was bounded by the mausoleum. In this cheerful than the statelier chambers I had hitherto room was a large telescope, and on stepping into passed through, for it had still the look of habita- the balcony, I saw that a winding stair mounted tion. The arm-chair by the fireplace; the knee- thence to a platform on the top of the pavilion hole writing-table beside it; the sofa near the-perhaps once used as an observatory by Forrecess of a large bay-window, with book-prop and man himself. candlestick screwed to its back; maps, coiled in their cylinders, ranged under the cornice; low strong safes, skirting two sides of the room, and apparently intended to hold papers and titledeeds; seals carefully affixed to their jealous locks. Placed on the top of these old-fashioned receptacles were articles familiar to modern use; a fowling-piece here; fishing-rods there; two or three simple flower vases; a pile of music-books; a box of crayons. All in this room seemed to speak of residence and ownershipof the idiosyncrasies of a lone single man, it is true, but of a man of one's own time-a country gentleman of plain habits but not uncultivated

tastes.

I moved to the window; it opened by a sash upon a large balcony, from which a wooden stair wound to a little garden, not visible in front of the house, 'surrounded by a thick grove of evergreens, through which one broad vista was cut; and that vista was closed by a view of the mausoleum.

"I dare say, sir," said the steward, looking grave; "he likes most out-of-the-way things." The position of the sun now warned me that my time pressed, and that I should have to ride fast to reach my new patient at the hour appointed. I therefore hastened back to my horse, and spurred on, wondering whether, in that chain of association which so subtly links our pursuits in manhood to our impressions in childhood, it was the Latin inscription on the chimney-piece that had originally biased Sir Philip Derval's literary taste towards the mystic jargon of the books at which I had contemptuously glanced.

CHAPTER XXIX.

I DID not see Margrave the following day, but the next morning, a little after sunrise, he walked into my study, according to his ordinary habit. I stepped out into the garden-a patch of "So you know something about Sir Philip "What sort of man is he?" sward with a fountain in the centre-and par- Derval?" said I. "Hateful!" cried Margrave; and then checking terres, now more filled with weeds than flowers. "Just At the left corner was a tall wooden summer-himself, burst out into his merry laugh. house or pavilion-its door wide open. "Oh, like my exaggerations! I am not acquainted that's where Sir Philip used to study many a long with anything to his prejudice. I came across Travellers his track once or twice in the East. summer's night," said the steward. are always apt to be jealous of each other."

"What! in that damp pavilion ?"

"It was a pretty place enough then, sir; but it is very old. They say as old as the room you have just left."

"You are a strange compound of cynicism and credulity. But I should have fancied that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial spirits, when I found, among his favourite books, Van Helmont and Paracelsus. Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse still, Ptolemy and Lilly?" "Astrologers?

No! They deal with the future! I live for the day; only I wish the day never had a morrow!"

66

The "Indeed, I must look at it, then." walls of this summer-house had once been painted in the arabesques of the Renaissance period; but the figures were now scarcely traceable. The woodwork had started in some places, and the sunbeams stole through the chinks and played Have you not, then, that vague desire for the on the floor, which was formed from old tiles quaintly tesselated and in triangular patterns, something beyond; that not unhappy, but grand similar to those I had observed in the chimney-discontent with the limits of the immediate Prepiece. The room, in the pavilion, was large, sent, from which Man takes his passion for imfurnished with old wormeaten tables and settles.provement and progress, and from which some "It was not only here that Sir Philip studied, sentimental philosophers have deduced an argubut sometimes in the room above," said the steward.

"How do you get to the room above? Oh, I see; a staircase in the angle." I ascended the stairs with some caution, for they were crooked and decayed; and, on entering the room above, comprehended at once why Sir Philip had favoured it.

The cornice of the ceiling rested on pilasters, within which the compartments were formed into open unglazed arches, surrounded by a railed balcony. Through these arches, on three sides of the room, the eye commanded a magnificent extent of prospect. On the fourth side the

ment in favour of his destined immortality.”
"Eh!" said Margrave, with as vacant a stare
as that of a peasant whom one has addressed in
What farrago of words is this? I
Hebrew.
do not comprehend you."
"With your natural abilities," I asked with
"do you never feel a desire for fame ?"
interest,
"Fame! Certainly not. I cannot even un-
derstand it !"

Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the thought that you had rendered a service to humanity?"

Margrave looked bewildered. After a moment's pause, he took from the table a piece of bread

that chanced to be there, opened the window, and threw the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the crumbs.

"Among the secrets which your knowledge places at the command of your art, what would you give for one which would enable you to defy and deride a rival where you place your affections, which could lock to yourself, and imperiously control, the will of the being whom you desire to fascinate, by an influence paramount, transcendant ?"

"Love has that secret," said I, "and love alone."

"Now," said Margrave, "the sparrows come to that dull pavement for the bread that recruits their lives in this world; do you believe that one sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a housetop for the sake of some benefit to other spar. rows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead? I care for science as the sparrow cares for bread; it may help me to something good for "A power stronger than love can suspend, can my own life, and as for fame and humanity, I change, love itself. But if love be the object or care for them as the sparrow cares for the general dream of your life, love is the rosy associate of interest and posthumous approbation of spar-youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon rows!" departs. What if in nature there were means "Margrave; there is one thing in you that by which beauty and youth can be fixed into perplexes me more than all else-human puzzle blooming duration-means that could arrest the as you are-in your many eccentricities and self-course, nay, repair the effects, of time on the elecontradictions." ments that make up the human frame?"

"What is that one thing in me most perplexing ?"

"This; that in your enjoyment of Nature you have all the freshness of a child, but when you speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I to close my eyes, I should say to myself, 'What weary old man is thus venting his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has forsaken him?' Outwardly the very personation of youth, and revelling like a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the herbage, why have you none of the golden passions of the young? their bright dreams of some impossible love-their sublime enthusiasm for some unattainable glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the illustration by which you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among the dismal fallacies of greybeards. No man, till man's energies leave him, can divorce himself from the bonds of our social kind."

"Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to you a prescription for the elixir of life ?"

"If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid to discover its ingredients."

And is it in the hope of that notable discovery you have studied chemistry, electricity, and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!"

Margrave did not heed my reply. His face was overcast, gloomy, troubled.

"That the vital principle is a gas," said he, abruptly, "I am fully convinced. Can that gas be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?"

"Phosoxygen? Sir Humphry Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen, and he suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the pabulum of life to organic beings."*

"Does he?" said Margrave, his face clearing up. "Possibly, possibly then, here we approach the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen Fenwick, I promise to secure to you unfailing "Our kind-your kind, possibly! But I-"security from all the jealous fears that now tor He swept his hand over his brow, and resumed, ture your heart; if you care for that fame which in strange, absent, and wistful accents: "I to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the wonder what it is that is wanting here, and of balm of a breeze, I will impart to you a knowwhich at moments I have a dim reminiscence." ledge which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with into common-place the boasted wonders of remore appearance of friendly interest than I had cognised science. I will do all this, if, in return, ever before remarked in his countenance, "You but for one month you will give yourself up to are not looking well. Despite your great phy-my guidance in whatever experiments I ask, no sical strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients."

"True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain."

"You have some cause of mental disquietude ?"
"Who in this world has not ?"
"I never have."

matter how wild they may seem to you."

"My dear Margrave, I reject your bribes as I would reject the moon and the stars which a child might offer to me in exchange for a toy. But I may give the child its toy for nothing, and I may test your experiments for nothing some day when I have leisure."

"Because you own you have never loved; I did not hear Margrave's answer, for at that certainly, you never seem to care for any one moment my servant entered with letters. Lilian's but yourself; and in yourself you find an un-hand! Tremblingly, breathlessly, I broke the broken sunny holiday-high spirits, youth, seal. Such a loving, bright, happy letter; so health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!"

At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed:

*See Sir Humphry Davy on IIeat, Light, and the Combinations of Light.