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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XVII. The Judgment

Chapter XVII. The Judgment.

"They have taken thy brother and sister dear,
They have made them unfit for thee;
They have withered the smile and dried the tear
Which should have been sacred to me.
To a blighting faith and a cause of crime
They have bound them slaves in youthly time;
And they will curse my name and thee
Because we fearless are and free."

Innocent and unconscious of all, little Pearly and Valentine came sailing over the blue waters of the moonlit harbour, as the s.s. Orange majestically glided into her berth at the Mississippi Quay. The immediate surroundings of the splendid sights in the river mouth engrossed their attentions and they knew nothing of what for almost two months had been going on in the national court One little episode alone that occurred at Galveston might have presented itself for reflection to their verdant minds page 466when at play a little girl belonging to Jonathan Scatter after falling out with Pearly piqued her little pert individualism against her and told her that she was no good and that was why her mother wouldn't live with her.

The symbolic agony pourtrayed on their father's face as, like Alice in Wonderland, they stepped down the accommodation ladder to the quay, they instinctively noticed. "Puppa, Puppa! listen, listen!" said Pearly; "I'm out of the second and Vallie's out of the first! and it's such a nice school, puppa, and such nice teachers and flowers. I'm going to get a prize Chrissims and Vallie's going to get a prize too lady said so. Puppa what you think Vallie's got a doll, he made it out of a backle and he puts it to sleep evvie night and he's broke the rockle-horse puppa! and he says you'll get him anunner. Little girl such a nasty little little girl she says me an' Vallie's no good. I are, are I puppa? and Vallie hit her and pushed her over so she cried and tole her mudder." "I knock her over iv dat illie finger jess like dat," put in Vallie, "and I don't care for her mudder neiver." "Puppa," alternated Pearly, "me and Vallie wants to go back to that unnie pace with the summer-house and the beach and take Prince: I could get anunner accordeon dress and Brosie says he'll come to play the castanets." "Mamma's not comin', is she puppa?" "She might find anunner whip." chimed in Vallie, and Pearly avowed "She's a naughty mumma lady tole me and when I get a big girl I'm going to be mumma, eh puppa? and mind the pace," "Oh yes!" concluded Vallie, "and I'm goin' to be a B'osie and pull out all Pearly's toofs for nuffin."

Eugene told his sorrowful father the details of the verdict, grieving again over the calamity of the inevitable pendant to the decree that Pearly and Vallie must go with the divorce, when they both pricked up their ears and importuned him for the information as to where they were going. Telling them they were going back to their mother, they both began to cry; Pearly rubbing her chubby little fist into her eye, saying she was a naughty mumma, and Vallie evincing sudden terror of the lashings which she had given him at Myamyn.

Disconsolate and dismayed, he walked about with them, for the last time he thought, on the sandy shore. When it was getting dark he took them to the Cross and Crown Hotel, and at bed-time carried them upstairs to their beds. They said the little verses he had taught them. He thought them appropriate to himself. The lines had just been published; Pearly lisping—

"Art is long and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts though stout and brave
Still like muffled drums are beating
Funeral marches to the grave."

and Vallie with greatly improved articulation—

"In the worl's byoard fiel of backle,
In the bivyouack of life,
Be not like drum djiven cackle,
Be a hearer in the shtife."

page 467

The Psalm of Life2 contained the last verses he heard from their infant lips, and soon the little voyageurs were sound asleep again.

In desperation he wandered away to the house of his legal adviser, leaving his father in charge of the children. He found the lawyer quite overpowered with the disastrous defeat, brooding over all manner of misgivings and unable to account for the inscrutable responses of the jury. Opportunely Eugene drew his attention to the information which he had received from his own witnesses—that Marvel's slavish friend the busybody Simon Bubtitt followed the jurymen wherever they went after leaving the court and entertained them at the Oxford Hotel night after night, fraternizing with them tor hours.

"If I only had a little money." said Eugene. "I would certainly appeal to the grand court against such an infamous decision, or even the Grand National Council of Judges; but I have none, and thereby hangs a sad tale. You have done your best and I wish to honestly thank you for your noble services, which I will pay for as soon as I possibly can." His voice faltered.

"Man was made to mourn," said the lawyer. "There ought certainly to be an appeal, but the judge's notes alone will cost five hundred and fifty dollars at the least, and I have been at such a heavy loss already that I can bear no more. There could be an appeal on the ground that the judge misdirected the jury on the subject of habitual intemperance. It was the funniest way of reckoning up a habit I ever heard. If it had been any one of the barristers in the case he might have reckoned up ten years just as easily, or thirty in the case of Brassy and his brother. Then again, he was wrong in directing the jury to find no condonation and no contributory conduct on your wife's part. There was a strong causal connection between the desertion and the drinking. I never thought he would take such a view as he did. We should have brought out the evidence on these counts more fully; but as for the question of cruelty after the evidence of such witnesses as we put in the box, I am totally at a loss to understand the verdict of the jury—it's a puzzle to me with a vengeance altogether. They have made the logical blunder common to juries, the blunder of begging the whole question."

The doctor then explained to his erstwhile counsel that even if an appeal were lodged it would require to be done at once and that he would not be able to remain in America for the hearing of a new trial, or the hearing of an appeal, inasmuch as he had accepted an offer to join an expedition against the Kaffirs at the Cape of Good Hope, where he intended to sail by the sailing ship "Rosalind."

Further questions put to the barrister as to the feasibility of his taking the children away with him the next morning to the new country were productive of a strong disapproval by the lawyer of his doing anything of the kind. He even went the length of telling Eugene that if he made any attempt to remove the children out of the jurisdiction of the United States page 468it would be his bounden duty as a member of the bar to at once inform the other side.

Hard he pressed his counsel to urge with all his might and main upon the judge the fact that he had fairly fought for and won the children before, and the justice of making an equitable compromise and leaving him one of them — either Pearly or Vallie, whichever the judge would allow. The lawyer promised to do his best in the morning, and consoling him with the hopes of rescuing one of the children from the rapacious clutches of their mother, he left and returned to the Cross and Crown Hotel. After his father had gone to bed he slowly stole upstairs in silence. All night long he sat remorseful and dejected, watching over his little ones as for the last time they slept under the jealous guard of Eugene, dreaming their little forebodings of uncertain days to come. Had he any means for taking them away, he would have forgotten or banished from his mind all fears of pains and penalties for contempt of the court, which he felt had unjustly judged him: but he had not one loophole of escape.

As the day dawned and across the prairie the sun shone in all its august magnificence upon the window, he looked forward to their awakening as they had always done betimes at Myamyn. Long after sunrise they lay, while he watched over them and pined over the brief interval of time before they would be ravished away out of his sight; sleeping their last tired sleep under the far-away look of their father, suffering as he did the extremes of mental torture and parting with his little treasures in a slow and languishing farewell, as tired after their long voyage they lay together before him "their eyelids almost blue as if the sky of dreams shone through"3 in the breaking twilight of their deep sleep.

Dressing them as they awoke in time for their breakfasts, again and again they catechised him about where they were going that day. His heart was full! it was more than he could do to answer them. They followed at his side when after their breakfasts they walked away from the Cross and Crown in the direction of the national court, where at half-past nine the last act in the melodrama of the dissolution of the marriage of the bird of Paradise was to be played, and the union of Eugene with the wife he had dearly loved was to be broken down for evermore: the coarse, iconoclastic American divorce court to smash to atoms the happy home of little Pearly and Vallie and the altar of the Universal King; the butchering of the innocent and the cruel work of "man proud man placed in a little brief authority"4 before the eyes of the unseen God.

The children followed him into the interior of the national court before the stare of a thousand spectators, whom, as before, Pearly thought were the congregation of a church, and Vallie all clowns and silly-billies. Disconcerted and bewildered they sat by his side, passing their mother by in the court and preserving uncommon decorum for children. A dead silence fell over the whispering crowd! Immediately up sprang the crude page 469guffawing Lord Dundreary, with his head in a bag, to make an application for a decree nisi. It was as a matter of course granted.

No sooner was it granted than up sprang Carrick, his colleague, with a demand for the custody of the children in accordance with the act of congress and the usages of the law, which made it an inevitable sequel to a decree nisi. He made a very long hectoring, blustering and palavering speech, after which the junior counsel for Eugene quietly asked for the custody of one of the children in a very few words. Disconcerted by the former defeat, in spite of the urgent solicitations of his client to make a long earnest appeal for at least one, the lawyer collapsed in a pusillanimous sort of way after a few half-hearted words! Wilmington did not appear at all, and had minimised his labours by the vicarious miserable appeal of his delegate, finishing amidst signals of distress, while every pulse in Eugene's frame kept pumping away like a piston-rod, and Marvel sat still as a stone coddling her hand in a yellow ermine muff.

In momentous moments for Eugene and the children thereupon Grant J slowly delivered his ultimatum:—"It is not within my power to order that one or both of the children remain within the custody of their father. It would be at variance with the act of Congress and all precedents at law. It appears to me that no man could have shown greater affection for his children, or could have done more for them, or fought harder to retain them in the face of desperate conditions; but I have not the power to refuse the mother, after such a verdict, a quasi custody of the children. I have, however, the power to order that Pearly Imogen Gould Whitworth and Valentine Gordon Whitworth, the infants of the marriage of Eugene Percival Whitworth and Marvel Imogen Narramore Gould (which marriage, after hearing the verdict of the jury empanelled, I now declare to be dissolved by this court, upon a decree nisi, to date from the first day of June, in the year of our-Lord one thousand eight hundred and fiftyfour) be made wards of the United States of America, and I further order that the high sheriff of the State of Louisiana do prepare a scheme for the maintenance and education of the said Pearly Imogen Gould Whitworth and Valentine Gordon Whitworth—such scheme to be submitted for my approval. Finally, it is ordered that the said Eugene Percival Whitworth shall have and enjoy the right of access to the aforesaid children whenever he chooses, and that the costs of the sitting on both sides, in accordance with the law, be paid by the respondent in this cause,"

His mind was stunned; when their father rose the children rose. As he walked down the aisle they followed him along the carpet, around the court to the opposite side.

In martyrdom, bidding them farewell and silently wishing them Godspeed, he formally consigned them into the charge of their mother. He turned and walked away—humbly walked away.

They ran down the aisle away from their mother after him instanter, but were captured by Carrick and Lord Dundreary and carried back screaming to the granite-hearted Marvel.

page 470

"Va Vivtis!" was the motto of the flinty and cold-blooded cidevant wife now sterilised by the purgatorial court. She urged the barrister to hurl with his diatribes a Parthian shaft at her conquered husband by asking Grant J. to make a more drastic order that their father should be debarred from seeing them oftener than once a month, and that any presents to them from him should be prohibited, and their patronymic designation be deleted from their names. The request was indignantly refused by the judge, who remarked that it would be like an order at war to kill the women and children, and Marvel straightway commenced to scold them for crying when they felt into her clutches. The inflated and exaltée bird of Paradise had escaladed the highest peak in the mountain of mendacity and on that cloud-capt eminence she had made a lengthy sojourn, falsely accusing her faithful husband of every breach in the decalogue5 with the hopes of bringing about his undoing for ever with her well-draped lies. She now carried away her false ceramic crown of chicanery amidst ironical plaudits from her parasites and the undercurrent of odium in a large section of the public. Her disinterested public supporters might have gone home in a cab. What lady will envy her triumph?

Broken-hearted, Eugene walked out of the court to make his arrangements for an early departure for South Africa. He waited outside a little while. Lord Dundreary came out guffawing inopportune insolences. Eugene struck him a blow on the mouth, shook him by the throat like a rag, and walked away!

The "Rosalind" was advertised to sail punctually at the advertised time, but an alteration in the time-table had been made since the advertisement was inserted, and, while the following steamboat was arranged to leave earlier than advertised, the one by which Eugene had taken his passage left too soon for time to serve him to meet his children again. His lawyer had arranged that he should visit them at the office of Hallam, Brassy and Hoare on the day after the "Rosalind" had sailed with him away to Port Elizabeth. He had called at the office to inquire where they were, as they were kept in the city for a few days prior to Marvel's departure for Edenhall; but he was informed very curtly by Brassy's jack-in-office that he had come on the wrong day and that Brassy did not know where they were. On the same occasion he received a parchment compilation commencing "Know all men by these presents,"6 and describing how his marriage had been dissolved on the ground of cruelty.

Thus he was rendered unable to see Pearly and Vallie once again before he left in the twilight at the sound of the evening bell the shores of the spacious delta; at dark to feel the empty sorrows of farewell at the parting of the ways with the children and the loss of his little harbingers of happiness and love.

It was not alone the spirit of Eugene that was crushed by the unfathom-page 471able verdict of that arbitrary jury. Two others who had been closely associated with him in camaraderie towards the children suffered, if not the sundering of filial ties, the explosion of their good names and the consequent sneers and taunts of the ever cold and cruel world.

More immediately connected with the divorce case. Lillie Delaine, who had innocently compromised her theretofore unblemished name and her perfectly chaste moral character by bringing messages for the doctor from ids mother, was involved in the tidal wave of ruin; she was pointed at by the unfailing finger of scandal in some sections of the community, although the public in general upheld the opinion of the medical gentlemen and supported the judgment of the jury upon the blameless girl. All seems yellow to the jaundiced eye, and she found St well-nigh impossible to obtain a respectable situation or one where she would be properly treated, and she was compelled to stay at home with her aggrieved mother, whose faith in the virtue of her daughter was corroborated by the outcome of the trial. Though for a long time, however, they struggled together with the assistance of the married son, the toiling fisherman, like a nine days' wonder hi due course there was little or no talk of the much-discussed lillie Delaine in die city. Her life itself gave the lie direct to the accusations which adumbrated her good name, and wherever she was known she was respected as a girl of irreproachable character and goodness. She worked for her living unmolested again, bat the undeserved and cruel stain put upon her by her master's divorced wife was never forgiven nor forgotten. Like an Indian, she waited for years for her revenge, longing and longing for the time when her tormentor should have her day of penance for her sins; though, when that day diy come, she had no hand, act, or part in the downfall and destruction of the hated Mrs. Whit worth, or whatever her name was supposed to be then. A divorced woman must necessarily be a woman of indeterminate status.

With what fulsome fawning, kid-glove sympathy and obsequious adulation the ignoble world serenades the ones who meet with success! How ready it is to kick the ones that float down the broad river of life's hill! Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing fails like failure! The buoyancy and commonplace hauteur of the paradisal bird after the trial, which she fancied had covered her with glory in the eyes of the nation, for which she ought to be patted on the back, and whose result most have been a great treat to her after so many former and well-merited defeats, developed itself into a licentious style of living. Money melts!

The costs were somewhere in the vicinity of thirty thousand dollars. Reflecting not that her husband was an impoverished man, and that her lawyers would in consequence demand payment of all the costs which she had incurred from herself, she spent as much money upon grandeur at her modiste's studio, and as much on fleeting pleasures, revelry and gaiety as would have paid them twice over, and to spare. She had her portrait taken every month for the next three years.

page 472

Within a month after the divorce was granted it was bandied from mouth to mouth about the city that she was engaged to be married again to one of the leading baritones of the opera bouffe7. Whether there was any truth or not in the rumours, which were wide-spread over the circles through which she moved, the dénouement was sine die postponed. Hundreds flocked to the conservatorium of Edenhall, which she had bought from the estate of her father some time before her return to Myamyn. Unremittingly, there they brought myrrh and frankinsence, and burnt clouds of incense before the shrine of the golden calf8. Names of new suitors for the favours of the bird of Paradise, who had cast her skin like the diamond-backed rattlesnake and had entered the cathartic womb of the judiciary and was born again, were in everybody's mouth from day to day. Her flightiness and giddiness were disparagingly discussed by hosts of her enemies, and their name was Legion.

Although in the witness-box her husband had suppressed all condemnatory allusions to his wife, vague suspicions awoke in the minds of the people that everything was not comme il faut9, and a feeling of repugnance at the verdict set in among thousands. Her reckless statements were also viewed with disfavour by those who had known her husband. Again and again was heard the saying that if Whitworth were at law an habitual drunkard three parts of the men in the city were irretrievably worse.

There arose a considerable outcry and a vast amount of talk about raising a subscription to defray the costs of an appeal against the inept judgment of the jury, or bring about a new trial. Proofs were obtainable that Marvel and seven of the most useful witnesses for Marvel had committed perjury, having been inveigled into the snare by the nefarious temptations of Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark's clerks. The medical authorities, whose scientific opinions had been flouted by the barristers for the petitioner and a goodly number of other partisans actively interested themselves in the movement, and it seemed that plenty of money would have been forthcoming if it had not been the case that Whitworth was going away. Letter after letter he received from various parts of the State before he left urging him to accept appointments of one class and another in the medical profession, for he was a man of great surgical daring and heroic original enterprise and ingenuity, and whatever his hand found to do he did it with all his might. Offers also came from briefless barristers of their services in a sort of speculative litigation at anew trial. His duty, however, called him away, although Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark made an application to the judge for a warrant ne exeat10 to prevent him from levanting11, but it was indignantly refused. Contrariwise, soon afterwards an extradition warrant was required for the bird of Paradise herself, who had suddenly disappeared from America with the wards of State, and after baffling the pursuit of the long arm of Justice for six months she was finally caught in Austria and escorted to the aloes and palms of the law courts, where the exotic bird was fined one hundred dollars for her contumely, and expressed her surprise by ejaculating "The page 473Devil!" before Grant J. which exclamation brought the fine up to one hundred and fifty.

On embarking aboard the "Rosalind," his fellow-passengers knew as soon as they saw Eugene on deck who he was, and during the voyage showed abundant sympathy for file harsh treatment which he had received at the hands of the jury. Still, on the breast of the bounding wave amid the wild multitudinous tumults of ocean, he paid little heed to their conventional feelings, feeling his soul drawn by the silken threads of affection to the place where his lost treasures were cribbed, cabined, and confined. Waking or dreaming, or standing on the deck of the storm-tossed "Rosalind," or lying in the wave-battered cabin, his whole thoughts were concentrated and focussed in refraction upon them in night reveries and day-dreams: depicturing Pearly and Vallie in the contemporaneous day playing among the shrubberies or the waving grasses of Edenball, or lying in dreams of their father in their uncongenial home, while escaping from the meshes of the law he was like a man condemned to fret out his life in foreign exile.

The blow to Guinevere by that one stinging question of the scurrilous barrister employed by the woman whom she had often in her youth chaperoned and befriended, in spite of her incisive and incontrovertible denial of the innuendo, cast a darkening glamour over her chaste and spotless life; while enemies from the malicious galleys of Edenhall still traduced her previously undiscoloured name.

To be in any way, good or bad, involved in the vague mistiness of a divorce case is not at all conducive to the aggrandisement or exaltation of any woman. The hard and ruthless world of scandal swelled itself out with great importance in its declarations that her name should have been substituted for that of Lillie Delaine. The evidence of the gynæcologists was almost universally upheld—there was no gainsaying that it was a paramount and conscientious scientific opinion. It was averred that the respondent had passively connived at the charge against the old servant, knowing it to be untrue and that it could easily be disproved.

Harmonious as the verdict of the jury appeared to be with the evidence of the scientists, which they could not reject nor discount, it lost some of its consonance when they reflected over the unbroken bond of friendship and platonic love which the doctor had shown towards Guinevere. Others again promulgated the theory that it was the relief which he felt in the society of the calm and scholarly girl from the tormentations of his own irascible and objurgational wife which attached him so much to Guinevere, whose tender heart had been steeled by the withering blasts of adversity against the torrent of human suffering, with its hot iron branding so very deep.

The irreclaimable Marmaduke took little or no interest In the progress of the divorce case. He wasted his substance in riotous living, when he had a little money; he eked out a miserable existence on beer, spending all the money which his still constant wife could afford Soon after the result of the trial was made known, the little school which shekept at Mobile page 474dwindled away to three pupils, one of whom was her own boy Cyril. The bloated plutocrats of the seaside village withdrew their patronage from the poor woman who had been implicated in a divorce case; it was inconsistent with their lofty notions of social purity, of which they were such divine exemplars, and in a most arbitrary manner they did not hesitate to give their reasons for such action.

Three months after the verdict of that jury was announced, she was compelled to subsidise her penurious income by working at home as a seampstress of childrens' clothes again. She further obtained two gold medals at the New York Salons for two water-colour pictures of Pearly and Valentine. She sold them to buy clothes for Cyril. From early mora till the dark she would sit with her camel-hair brush and palette lovingly over the dear little faces of the children, who had entwined their tendrils of affection amongst the well-springs of her heart, ever inundated with fond remembrances of her former little friends, whose history had finally so chequered her own.

Home, late in the following winter, the water-police sergeant and two watermen, who had given evidence in the divorce trial of a neutral character, brought what once had been the dearly-beloved university swain, who had lolled with her on the green knolls of the academical grounds at Philadelphia and who had spent so many sunny hours with her listening to the soft susurrus through the boughs of the orangeries and pomegranate trees— the man who had by his vices dragged her down from prosperity to the inferno of want and misery: the man whose gross derelictions had never dimmed the flame of her glowing constancy and devotion—Marmaduke Payne, her husband, on a shutter dead! Ever since he left Augusta he had prosecuted a downward career, and after becoming a member of the senatorial club the rest of the descent was easy: like the driver Hassan—

"Sad was the hour and luckless was the day When first from Shiraz' wall I bent my way."12

Void in purse and void in spirit, when once possessed of the devils of drink he lived the remnant of his life in a chronic condition of crapulence, rushing into the grades of moral declension and decadence like the swine of old to their destruction in the sea.

Drunk and dead-drunk had he been for a month, during which short time he had twice been arrested by the police and released from imprisonment by his wife. The police had urged her to take out prohibition orders against her husband, but she refused, saying it would bring him into shame. They dragged him out dead from the sea, from which, at the end of the pier where he had fallen off, he had been washed ashore.

So ended in ignominy the life of the man whohad princely opportunities for advancing himself in the world—health, strength, a lucrative profession, a wife cultured, tender and true—a peerless girl whose love and preferment should have stimulated any man more than hopes of gold—a helper and friend, whose tender pity overlooked and screened his every fault, and who sheltered him from slander when the wolves of shame were at the door page 475without one meed of praise—a fair mourner, who loved him carried hi as he was by the police that night, a pauper drunk and drowned through his own evil habits, and fished from the sea by the men who had many a time dragged him to gaol. Far as the poles was Guinevere from Marvel. The qualities of the voluptuous Marvel were the antipodes of her lofty and ethereal nature, whose form was the incarnation of devotion and platonic friendship, tinctured with the reverence which virtue feels for holiness. Marvel had beauty and a power of fascination like that of the basilisk for the bird. Guinevere had loveliness of a finer and nobler form, and within a substratum of ever-deepening love flowed a fountain with gems of faith and constancy of an unalloyed and enduring ring. Who builds on that builds on a rock that neither the battering waves of jealousy can shake nor the shifting sands of doubt let fell!

In a pauper's grave he lay, for she had not a cent to pay for his private burial, and her only friend in need was cut off by five thousand miles of ocean.

For the sake of her child she wrestled with destiny. She battled against the invidious calumnies of her despicable foes and the usage that patient merit of the unworthy takes. In fine, the frail white-winged yacht of her life so weathered the blackening storms that she was enabled to send him to a superior school and one of the best in the city, in defiance of the fiery darts of the wicked and the haughty disdain of the mordacious unwomanly woman, whose only benefactress in the spring-time of her life the spurned Guinevere had been.

The voyage of the "Rosalind" over the restless seas to the principal port of the Cape Colony occupied some four weeks, when Eugene found himself among new acquaintances, new scenery, new forms and modes of life, people of a newer growth and of a different bent of mind. The everpresent memories of the children were new incentives to fortune and distinction. Still the trail of the serpent dung to his name. The creeping dusky shadow of the pluperfect divorce followed him whithersoever he travelled. As soon as he landed at Port Elizabeth he was told by the muster-master that the threatened uprising of the Kaffirs had spontaneously subsided under the administration of Sir George Grey, who had left New Zealand on account of the danger of the outbreak.

In a strange country, without as much money in his purse as would carry him back to the United States, he was left stranded upon the shores where he had expected to find his salvation. Dismayed, but undaunted, he travelled on to his destination, arriving in the town of Somerset with the armamentarium13 of three shillings and sixpence in his pocket remaining.

There he commenced private practice among the people of the district and the outlying neighbourhoods of the half German, half English Boërs, along the ravines and alpine gorges of the Great Fish River.

By leaps and bounds, overcoming almost insurmountable difficulties, his aptitude in the broad field of surgery and his co-equal knowledge in the page 476domain of the theory and practice of medicine soon enlisted in his favour a reputation first and foremost among the clinicians of the Cape Colony. In his early experiences, a few successful cases of great gravity among the Boërs and the English and German population reassured his unqualified success in the new venture. Notwithstanding, among his many patients there was not one who carried so heavy a heart as he who ministered to their wants. The trial was no sealed hook to Eugene, for the love of the children still formed an integral part of his life; the simoon14 had swept away the treasures of his existence, and though life still offered cakes and ale, the wound smarted and ached without ceasing, and the flowerets withal lay withered on the way.

There for years, during which he had written letter after letter and sent present after present of curios from the Kaffirs and Boërs to his far-distant children, he never heard a single syllable as to how they were getting on at the school. His letters to the children were returned in finical15 dudgeon by the hoity-toity, fugacious, fire-fly Marvel, and packages of his presents, which the children had never been allowed to see, were scurvily treated and sent back to him broken to pieces, and their freight made payable by him for their return journey. Little-minded Marvel!

Along bridle-paths of the Zwater Ranges16 on as handsomely furnished a black thoroughbred mustang mare as ever looked through a bridle, and sent to him from Mexico for the expedition against the Kaffirs, he wandered in search of the fascinating and immortal bride of Truth in Science, whose bridegroom none can ever wholly be, but whom to serve and faithfully follow through her ascending and broadening paths brings an ennobling meed of praise passing in sweetness the love of women and the purest happiness mankind can ever feel; mountain passes, alpine precipices, and riparian17 ravines five hundred feet deep, with nothing but mosses, ferns, raging whirlpools, and the rushing waters of the Great Fish River below. Still on these giddy heights and still through the rugged ravines, the yawning gulches, the lonely wilds and the mesembryanthemum-covered woods as the lingering years rolled through their cycles, while reading the book of Nature, there ever and anon haunted his memory, as if they had never been taken away, like key-notes to every thought, the prattling voices of his children. Depicturing in his mind what they might be doing from day to day, treasuring up every word they had uttered, and with their ever-present images limned in fancy, the memories connected with them abided with him for ever. Enraged at the commonplace, petty and scurvy treatment which his missives and presents had received at the hands of his ci-devant wife, he instigated an appeal by his solicitors to the court against the scheme drawn up by the State-sheriff, whose gist was that the children should live in the same town as their mother, and as weekly boarders attend a rudimentary and plebeian school. Knowing how receptive their intellects were, Eugene vicariously urged upon the judge the advisability of sending them to a superior school. In course of time the scheme, drawn up for their mother's benefit more so than for the page 477advantages of Pearly and Valentine, was reversed by the judge, and they were both ordered to be sent to high-class academies for children in the city of New Orleans.

Feeling that it would be a sin to defraud them of their childhood's days by separating them at so tender an age from each other—when as it were the one little life was a portion and a counterpart of the other—he felt anxious that they should again be returned to the élite priory at Galveston, where they had been before they were legally usurped by their selfish mother, and where they had always been contented, excellently taught, and happy.

For years lived their father in the land of the diamond, the beryl, the carbuncle and the gnu. Prosperity followed his footsteps whithersoever he roved. Not a word but of praise was breathed about Eugene. Unjust suspicions may attach themselves to an innocent man, but the general consistency and integrity of his life sponges them all away. The best commentary on the verdict of the batch of worthies and wiseacres in the jury-box was the fruition of his life in South Africa, where every man thought the best of him, and his optimist spirit made him think the best he could of every man. Unshivered by the bolts of Marvel, he burst through the fetters so cunningly forged to bind him in the cell of immuring ignominy and rose like a volcano from the seas. Marvel had the ceramic but Eugene the laurel crown18. Comforted by the clinging reminiscences of his little cherubs, he watched them in his mind's eye growing into girlhood and boyhood; consoling himself in the dark hours, pregnant with the pangs of remorse, with the thought that they were still his little children in spite of the world, and that he could be no more robbed of his sweet memories of them than could the blackbird be of his song.

1 To William Shelley [The billows on the beach are leaping around it]. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

2 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

3 Jenny. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

4 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure. II.ii.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

5 The Ten Commandments. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

6 A standard opening to a legal document.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

7 French comic opera. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

8 A false idol. See The Bible, Exodus 32.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

9 As it should be.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

10 'Let him not depart'. Jones 1963:74.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

11 To run off. Green 2005.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

12 Hassan, the Camel Driver. William Collins.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

13 The equipment of medicines, instruments, and appliances used by a medical man. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

14 A hot, dry, suffocating sand-wind which sweeps across the African and Asiatic deserts. Allusively, a destructive power. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

15 Over-nice or particular, affectedly fastidious, excessively punctilious or precise. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

16 Unknown.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

17 Situated on the banks of a river. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

18 See book II, chapter 17 for Marvel's "false ceramic crown of chicanery"; the laurel crown was a classic emblem of victory.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]