BELGRAVIA.

OCTOBER 1884.

THE

The Lover's Creed.

A NOVEL.

BY MRS. CASHEL HOEY.

'One, and one only, is the Lover's Creed.'-OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE STORY OF MAVIS.

HE new year in France had no great advantage over the new year in England except in the matter of its skies. The moral atmosphere of the two countries respectively was more alike in the first months of 1855 than it ever had been previously, or than there is any likelihood that it ever will be again. The external aims and objects of England and France were identical, their interests of a certain order were harmonious; the things that had to be done and were to be suffered were alike in kind, although different in degree. These visible bonds of union were not, however, the strongest that united the traditionally antagonistic countries during that memorable period in the history of this century; the origin of the sympathy lay deeper in human nature, even so deep as those two great motives, love and grief. The homes in which the time-honoured salutation: A merry Christmas and a happy New Year,' was uttered with a heart-sick reservation, and the homes in which la bonne année' was ceremoniously wished,' with the same, were scattered through the length and breadth of England and France equally. For the duration of that war, waged in brotherly accord against the common foe, the silver streak meant no division. In the French capital there was more show of gaiety and good cheer than in London. The imperial court was extraordinarily splendid and hospitable, while the armies of France were making the military fame of the Second Empire; fame that had need to be dazzling

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indeed, with the blinding light of the renown of the First Empire ever turned upon it. In country places in England, and ' en province' in France, the time passed in similar ways. The men were in scenes of danger and hardship,

Men with sisters dear ;

Men with mothers and wives;

and the war was the one paramount topic among the instructed and the ignorant alike.

Réné de Rastacq had come in for his share of hard knocks early in the long day of the war; he had survived them; he was destined to come through it safely, and keep up the family renown in arms. His mother's family traditions were of the law, not the sword; but 'noblesse de robe' was a profitable dignity after the Restoration, and the 'dot' of Mademoiselle Guesle had saved the inheritance of de Rastacq. The relation between the mother and son was all the closer that their fortune was derived from the former, and that the latter had hardly known his father.

Madame de Rastacq was a devoted mother, but she was not a nervous or fanciful person. She was endowed with good sense, a strong will, firmness of purpose, and as much judgment as could fairly be expected to exist with narrowness of mind caused by her true French concentration, her ignorance of other moral horizons than her own, and her unexpansive sympathies. She had no imagination, and her spirits were of the even and equable kind generally attendant upon good health, and a limited range of solicitude.

In Madame de Rastacq's friend and neighbour (for in Brittany they do not mete distance with our measurement) she found a sympathetic listener, whose unflagging power of taking an interest in the things that concerned herself not at all, might have impressed itself even upon egotism so compact and complacent as that of Réné's mother. No such comparison was, however, suggested to the self-satisfied mind of Madame de Rastacq, who held it to be quite natural that Madame Vivian should be vividly interested in Réné, while she did not observe that her friend's demands upon her for interest or sympathy were both rare and restricted. She was provoked, as it has already appeared, because she could not find out the amount of Sybil's 'dot,' and whether a project of marriage for her daughter formed a portion of Madame Vivian's business in England; but outside of those facts, she was philosophically indifferent to all that made the occupation of her friend's thoughts, and formed her daily life. She could push curiosity to the limits of good-breeding as freely and unblushingly as any lady in any land; but she rarely

felt that sentiment in the abstract; the element of at least a potential interest of her own was necessary.

As this potential interest existed in the case of Sybil Vivian— whom Madame de Rastacq really cared for apart from her designs upon her there was no coldness, such as might have revealed her hollow-heartedness to her single-minded and unsuspicious friend. Madame Vivian's view of their relations was a characteristic one; to her mind the great bond between them was their respective loneliness and motherhood. Each had one sole object and motive in her life; each had a past that was a sealed book, and a future in which self could have no place and no history. Under such conditions neighbours must needs be friends, on pain of a breach of the law of charity; and, if Madame Vivian felt that there was a wide expanse of her mind and feelings as far from the ken of Madame de Rastacq as if they two had belonged to different species, this was only what she had felt about everybody, for years. That expanse, in which thoughts, feelings, and fancies, not only solitary but incommunicable, flourished, grew in extent as she went on writing her novels in the solitude of her unsuspected literary life, and she believed that if people concerned themselves less about her than she did about them, this was not their fault, but her own.

Madame de Rastacq had not taken cordially to Miss Warne. There were two reasons for this. The lady who was altogether French disliked the easy confidence with which the lady who was half English treated a young person of whom so very little was known, and she also disliked the influence that Miss Warne soon and easily exerted over Sybil. Those romantic ideas which Madame de Rastacq deprecated in the case of Madame Vivian were also, she felt convinced, to be apprehended in that of the grave, graceful young woman for whose unexplained melancholy her employer showed so much consideration.

While the time was wearing away during which Mavis was waiting for a reply to her letter to her father, she often thought of how she would have described her life at the Château de la Dame Blanche to Jack. There was no one now to whom her story was of interest, and if there had been, she would have had no heart to tell it. She wrote only once to Jane Price after the terrible news; it was to tell her that no more letters for her friend would be sent to her care. Then she felt that there was nothing farther to say; the correspondence dropped, without unkindness or real forgetfulness on either side. If Jane should ever have anything special to tell her, Jane would no doubt write; if any change befell herself she would inform Jane of it. She had also written once to Miss Metge, according to promise, and had told her that

her life at the Château de la Dame Blanche was all that kindness and consideration could make it. But there was no need of farther communication between herself and Miss Metge; there was no link, ever so slight or accidental, between herself and the time that was so recent, but from which a great gulf now divided her.

With Jack, her past had died. He had in reality come into her life for only a few weeks, but he had absorbed it all, and now it had neither past nor future. There was the living on from day to day, as nearly as she could up to her ideal of what he would have expected of her, and there was the hope that maketh not ashamed' of the life beyond the grave. These formed her interior strength, the outside life was devoted to her duties.

Mavis had made a plan in her mind, that in the case of her father directing her to join him, she would pay a brief visit to her old home. She should have to sail from Liverpool, she supposed, as her father had sailed, and she would stop at Chester on her way thither, to visit Bassett and the Farm. It never occurred to her to speculate upon whether the people who had known the Wynns at Bassett were aware that she had not gone to Australia with her father. She did not want to see anyone except Mr. Reckitts. She knew he would willingly allow her to look her last on the old rooms, and the scene that were at first so dreary, but had all at once become so dear.

She would venture to visit the house on the hill, too, if, when the time came, she could nerve herself to bear the trial, and she would find some pretext for asking to see Mr. Bassett. The poor girl thought she could be courageous when she should be going away to the other side of the world for ever; and would ask Miss Nestle to let her go all over the house. She wanted to see the rooms where her lover had lived as a child, a boy, and a man; her brave young lover, sleeping in his foreign grave, in the country of the enemy, with the tumult of war around his great silence and unchangeable peace. Afterwards she would be able to see a vision of those rooms, in the weary days and nights that were to be hers, beyond those great and awful oceans which Jack would have traversed to bring her home, had it pleased God to give to him and to her their hearts' desire.

Even though Miss Nestle were to consider such a request a liberty, and to hold that Mavis was not observing the golden rule; she would still be bold enough to press it, and she would tell Miss Nestle how often he whom they mourned at Bassett had spoken of her at the Farm with affection and gratitude. This would touch Miss Nestle's heart, Mavis could not doubt, and she would allow her to see the rooms. She pictured them to herself;

silent, vacant, with a thousand tokens of his presence in them, until she could hardly endure the agony of her own fancy, and yet longed with a desperate impatience to realise the pain of it. In imagination she saw herself in the presence of his father, the old man stricken with the great grief of childlessness, to whom she might have spoken of a sorrow equal to his own, but harder because hidden, and she said to herself that if his voice came to her with any note of the music of that other voice which she was never more to hear, she could hardly bear it for mingled joy and sorrow. In her dreams she frequently saw the old rooms at the Farm, and the riverside arbour, and sometimes her gentle stepmother's presence would return to her in sleep. But, as the months passed, and the seasons changed, the silence that she observed, and the absence of any link of association, caused the sense of distance between herself and what had been to increase out of due proportion with the actual lapse of time.

In her capacity of companion to Sybil Vivian, Miss Warne, little as she resembled the notion that Sybil had derived from her mother's description, proved eminently satisfactory. Her steady efforts to do her duty bore the beneficent fruit of all efforts of the same kind; reacted upon herself, and they laid upon her grievous wound the unfailing balm of a good conscience.

To the distant horizon of the other duty that lay before her, if her father should summon her, she rarely directed a straining gaze. She did not doubt her strength when the day should demand it; her own will and her own way were no longer of primary importance to the stricken girl. The strongest feeling connected with the present time, and with her actual life by which Mavis was now actuated, was that inspired by Madame Vivian. The im. pression Mavis had recorded in that letter which Jack was never to see, was deepened, as the disposition and personality of Madame Vivian revealed themselves, in an association marked from the first hour by mutual kindliness.

It was not only the intellectual superiority of Madame Vivian over any other woman whom Mavis had ever known that interested her so profoundly. This was hardly surprising, for her experience had been very limited; she was more impressed by the largeheartedness, the sound judgment, the easy capacity with which Madame Vivian ruled the little realm over which she held sway. 'If ever there was a perfect lady,' Mavis would say to herself, 'surely this is one.' Among the ladies whom once she had wished to see, because they formed Jack's society, none, she thought could be superior to Madame Vivian; so gracious, harmonious and full of good will and good deeds was her daily life,