showed him a club-room in a detached build-public-house, where every one can call for ing in the garden. It was eighteen feet what he pleases, and enter upon business. high, and forty feet long by twenty feet There is then a good deal of stiff ceremony, wide. The mouldings and ornaments had and filing and countermarching, the justice been grand. The faded red hangings still taking good care to duly cut in before the remained on the walls, and on the faded squire. On the first landing, a maid, squares where Kneller's portraits had been coming up with coals, disturbs the prohung the numbers and names still remained, cession, which gets locked by aid of the written in chalk, for the guidance of the mischievous young Templar, and but for hanger. a noise in the street, which Steele wickedly suggests is a fire, upon which they run down anyhow, the checkmate would have been interminable. But, says the delightful chronicler, "we drew up in very good order, and filed off down Shire-lane, the impertinent Templar driving us before him as in a string, and pointing us out to his acquaintances who passed by." Slipping between the justice and the squire, Steele hears the latter whisper to the steward, "that he thought it hard that a common conjuror should take place by him, though an older squire." At Temple Bar, Sir Harry and Sir Giles get safely over, but a row of coaches cuts off the rest. At last they all land, and draw up in very good order before Tooke's (a bookseller), "who favoured our rallying with great humanity.' From there, with equally serious monies of precedence, they proceed to Dick's Coffee-house, where, repeating their civilities, they mount to the high table, "which has an ascent to it, enclosed in the middle of the room," the whole house being much moved by the entry of persons of so much state and rusticity. Sir Harry at once calls for a mug of ale and Dyer's Letter, and, on being told the letter is not taken in there, cries, "No? then take back your mug. We are like, indeed, to have good liquor at this house." Here the Templar gives Steele a second wink, and would be confiding did not Steele look very grave. The gentlemen not seeming inclined to begin business before a morning draught, Steele calls for a bottle of Mum, soon for a second, then for a third, and at last Sir Harry tells him, in a low voice, that the place is too public for business, and he would call upon him on the morrow morning and bring some more friends with him. The Trumpet (afterwards the Duke of York), No. 86, Middle Serle's-place, was, if not the stronghold of the Kit-Cat, at least a tavern sacred to the memory of Steele, for there, in No. 86 of the Tatler, he makes old Isaac Bickerstaff (the character he himself assumed), on Thursday, October 27, 1709, receive that distinguished deputation of Staffordshire conntry gentlemen, and delightful, pompous old fogies, Sir Harry Quickset, Baronet, Sir Giles Wheelbarrow, Thomas Rentfree, Esquire, justice of the quorum, Andrew Windmill, Esquire, and Mr. Nicholas Doubt, of the Inner Temple, Sir Harry's grandson, wait upon him at the unconscionable hour of nine in the morning. Nine arrives, the chairs are set. The tea equipage is fixed. A knock comes at the front door. Steele opens it; there is a long silence, and no one enters. At last he hears the punctilious old fellows saying: "Sir, I beg your pardon. I think I know better." C6 Nay, good Sir Giles." Steele looks out slyly, and sees the worthy people, every one with his hat off and arms spread, offering the door to each other. After many offers they enter with much solemnity. "I met my old friend Sir Harry," Steele says, "with all the respect due to so reverend a vegetable. I got him with great success into his chair by the fire, without throwing down any of my cups. The knight bachelor told me he had a great respect for my whole family, and would, with my leave, place himself next to Sir Harry, at whose right he had sat every quarter sessions these thirty years, unless he was sick." Steele offends the justice by asking him to sit down after the simple squire, but this error he promptly corrects, and requests the gentlemen who have done him this great honour to drink a dish of tea. They all declare they never drink tea of a morning, and the young Templar winks at Steele, and puts out his tongue at his grandfather, as much as to say, "Tea, indeed." The steward," in his boots and whip," after an ominous silence, then proposes that they shall at once all adjourn to some cere In No. 132 of the Tatler, the same delightful humorist sketches a club of fogies at the Trumpet, with whom he says he is in the habit of spending two or three hours every evening to unbend his mind after study, and to prepare himself for sleep. This club of heavy, honest men originally consisted of fifteen members, but "the severity of the law in arbitrary times,” as Steele slyly says, and the natural effects of old age, had reduced the society to five persons. Sir Geoffery Notch, the patriarch of the club, had sat in the right-hand chair time out of mind, and was the only man of the set allowed to stir the fire. He was of an ancient family, and had run through a great estate with hounds, horses, and cock-fighting. He looked upon himself as a worthy, honest gentleman, who had had misfortunes, and he regarded every thriving person as a pitiful upstart. Major Matchlock, the next senior, had served in the civil wars, and knew all the battles by heart. He thought nothing of any action since Marston Moor, and was much esteemed in the club for his nightly story of how he was knocked off his horse at the rising of the London apprentices. Honest old Dick Reptile (an ill-chosen name) was the third. Dick was a good-natured, robust man, who spoke little, but laughed at other men's jokes. He always brought his nephew, a youth of eighteen, with him, to show him good company, and give him a taste of the world. This youth was usually silent, but whenever he did open his mouth or laugh, his uncle constantly made the same jocular remark: "Ay, ay, Jack; you young men think us fools, but we old men know you are." The wit of the club was a bencher from the Temple, who in his youth had frequented the fashionable ordinaries round Charing-cross, and pretended to have known Jack Ogle. He knew by heart about ten distiches from Hudibras, and he never left the club till he had applied them. If any modern wit was mentioned, or any town frolic spoken of, he would shake his head at the dulness of the present age, and tell a story of Jack Ogle. This Trumpet Club met precisely at six o'clock in the evening, and at threequarters past six the major usually began his story of the battle of Naseby. On Steele's arrival, Sir Geoffery, to show his goodwill, offered him a pipe of his own tobacco, and stirred up the fire. In common gratitude, Steele drew him on to the story of old Gantlet, a favourite gamecock, on whose head the knight in his youth had won five hundred pounds, and lost two thousand. Gantlet's generations, diet, battles, and manner of life, roused the major to spur to Edge Hill fight, and a duel of Jack Ogle's naturally followed. Old Reptile was extremely attentive to all that was said, though he had heard the same every night for twenty years, and upon all occasions winked to his nephew to mind what passed. This innocent con versation was spun out till about ten, when the maid came with a lantern to light home old Bickerstaff. So, with a humour half like Goldsmith, half like Cervantes, Steele sketches an old haunt in the dingy London lane that has just melted into air. 66 Shire-lane, mean and obscure in its youth, splendid in its middle life, grew infamous in its old age. It had been christened Rogue's-lane" in the reign of James the First; latterly it became vile and squalid, and swarmed with thieves and their female companions. Nos. 1, 2, and 3, Lower Serle'splace, were infamous dens, that once possessed a secret communication, as the latest chronicles of the lane record, with No. 242, Strand, through which thieves could escape when they had beaten and stripped the fools they had decoyed. Nos. 9, 10, and 11, were beggars' houses, and known as Cadgers' Hall; not long since, several bushels of eleemosynary bread, thrown scornfully aside by professional beggars, were found there by the police. No. 19, a double house, was known as the Retreat, because thieves could run through it and dodge down Crown-court into the Strand. No. 13, a printing office, had formerly, says Mr. Diprose, been the Bible public-house, a house of call for printers twenty years ago. Jack Sheppard used to frequent this, and there was a trap in the middle of one room by which the agile young carpenter used, it was said, to drop through into a subterraneous passage and so escape into Bellyard, and from thence into his old Clare Market haunts. Jack died for the good of his country in 1725. Yet in 1738 the lane had not improved, for, on January the 18th of that year, Thomas Cave and Elizabeth Adams were hanged at Tyburn, for having robbed and murdered a certain unfortu nate Mr. Quarrington, at the Angel and Crown Tavern in Shire-lane. In the days of the blundering old watchmen, a man was one night thrown down-stairs and killed in one of the dens in Shire-lane. The frightened murderers acted like the men in the Little Hunchback story in the Arabian Nights, for they took the stiff body and propped it up against a neighbour's door, where the lumbering watchmen, turning on their lanterns, soon after found it. years passed without a clue. At last, two dangerous fellows confined in the King's Bench were overheard, during a quarrel, accusing each other of having had a hand in the Shire - lane murder, and Justice stretched out her sword. The Temple Bar Stores, formerly the Sun Tavern, had been a notorious house for Tom and Jerry Many frolics in the reckless times of the Regency. Strype, in 1720, speaks of the lower part of the lane as being filled with houses inferior to those of the Carey-street, or northern end. A tavern named the Antigallican in Shire-lane, was the great resort at the beginning of the century of sporting and fighting men. It was kept by Harry Lee, the father of Alexander Lee, the first and original "tiger," brought out and invented by the notorious Lord Barrymore, the eldest of the worthy kinsmen Cripplegate, Newgate, and Billingsgate. During the Chartist times, says a local antiquary, a policeman was sent disguised as a shoemaker to join a violent democratic club in Shire-lane. At last, during a meeting, a hatter suddenly rose, angrily told the chairman there was a spy in the room, and proposed to throw him at once out of window. A more humane member, however, proposed as a milder measure to open the door, and if the spy did not immediately depart, to carry out the original proposition. The sergeant lost no time and made straight for the door, but his comrades, whom he had ordered to occupy the ground floor, not knowing him in his disguise, knocked him down with their truncheons as he tried to slip down-stairs. In Ship-yard, close to Shire-lane, once stood a block of houses, one of which was used by coiners, and was called in their slang "the smashing Lumber." Every room had a secret trap, and from the upper story, where the smashers worked, there was a shaft reaching to the cellars, into which, by means of a basket and pulley, the whole apparatus could in a moment be conveyed. The proprietor made his fortune, but soon after the establishment of the new police, the manufactory was rummaged out and destroyed. The Trumpet stood midway on the left side of Shire-lane as you ascended from Temple Bar. It was a substantial red brick house, with four windows abreast in the two first stories. The sign of the Trumpet used to be below and between the windows of the first floor. Elias Ashmole, the great antiquary, from whom the Ashmolean Museum derives its name, lived in Shire-lane in 1670. Old Anthony Wood dined there with him on May the 1st of that year, and after dinner the two old virtuosi went over to Wood's lodgings in the Middle Temple, and spent nearly two cosey hours over Ashmole's coins, medals, pictures, and astrological manuscripts. In a sordid sponging-house in Shirelane, witty, worthless Theodore Hook, when he returned to England after those careless and unsatisfactory defalcations at the Mauritius, fraternised with poor, clever, sunken, hopeless Maginn. Here Hook joked and woke up the old echoes of the Kit-Cat Club merrily over his claret as he and his worthy companions roared out his own song: Hang him, and curse that perfidious pernicious So much has local history recorded of the sunshine and the darkness, the glory and the shame of the degraded alley that has just been swallowed up by ever-hungry Time. "A scratch, I fancy. It isn't easy always keeping those dangerous cases from hurting themselves; he's very strong, and always slipping away if he can. But they have him fast enough this time; and the road's clear of them now; so I suppose I had best tell our post-boys, miss, to get on ?" "Please do; it is growing late. How long will it take to reach Carsbrook ?" "About an hour, miss." Maud leaned back in the carriage, the unpleasant excitement of their recent adventure still tingling in her nerves. Could it be that Captain Vivian had got into a scrape, and was really in the hands of bailiffs? A sad hearing for poor Ethel Tintern; rather a shock even to Maud. 66 Do you know anything of that officer those people were taking away in the carriage ?" inquired the young lady, suddenly, of her attendant, so soon as they were again in motion. “I may, miss, or I mayn't. I could not say for certain, unless I was to see him," answered the servant. "Have you ever seen an officer named Vivian, who is tall, and has light hair; a young man, rather good-looking?" persisted Maud. "Well, I-I think I did," she replied, watching Maud's face. "I have seen some one like that. Veevian? Yes. He used to call hisself Veevian." "The person who passed us by, who said they were murdering him-how horrible his voice was!-- said his name was Vivian. You heard him, of course ?" "Well, I made shift to hear; but there was a noise, you know," answered Mercy Creswell, evasively. "Oh, you must have heard him call out that his name was Vivian; you are not at all deaf," said the young lady, irritated. "I did hear something like it, for certain," she replied. Miss Mercy would have been very glad to know, while under these examinations, what the extent of Miss Vernon's information actually was, for however willing she might be to tell stories, she was especially averse to being found out at this particular juncture. The sense of this inconvenience a good deal embarrassed her accustomed liberty of speech. All this time Maud was possessed by the suspicion that, for some reason or other, Mercy Creswell was deliberately deceiving her, and that she knew just as much as Darkdale did about this Mr. Vivian. More than ever she disliked being assigned this particular attendant, and more and more puzzled she became in her search for her mother's motive. For awhile she looked from the window. The wood had gradually thinned, and now but a few scattered and decayed firs stretched their bleached boughs under the moonbeams, and stooped over the peat. Why, then, did you not tell me, at once, that you knew something about that gentleman, Mr. Vivian? You know as "How far are we now from Carsbrook ?" she asked. "Well, miss, I'd say little more than three mile. Here's the finger-post, and down there, among the trees, is the Red Lion, and there we'll get into the right road, without another turn, right on to the house." "I'm not sorry," said Maud, looking from the windows with more interest than before. "It has been a long journey. You were at Carsbrook this morning?" "Yes, miss," said the maid, who had gradually grown to look careworn and pallid, as they neared their destination. "Was Lady Mardykes there?" "No, miss," answered Mercy. "She was expected there, wasn't she?" Expected there?" repeated Miss Creswell. Let me think. Oh, la! yes, to be sure, she was expected." "How soon?" "How soon?" "Twill be to-morrow morning. Oh, yes, to-morrow morning. To-morrow's Tuesday? Yes, to-morrow morning, for certain." They were now driving through a pretty wooded country. On the left was a great park wall, grey and moss-streaked, mantled here and there with ivy, and overlapped by grand old trees. On the right were hedge-rows, and many a sloping field; and, a little in advance, the chimneys and gables of a village, and the slender spire of a rural church, white in the moonlight. "We're near home now, miss," said Mercy. "Oh," said Maud, looking out more curiously. "What wall is that ?" "The park wall, miss." "It would not be easy to climb that; higher, I think, than Roydon wall." "It is very high, miss." "And how soon is Miss Max expected to arrive ?" "Miss Medwyn ?" exclaimed the maid, laughing, all at once, in spite of herself. "Why do you laugh? Miss Medwyn is coming here, and I thought she would have been here to-day," said Maud, a little haughtily. "Like enough, miss," said Mercy, drying her eyes. "La, ha, ha, ha! it is funny-I much about him as Mr. Darkdale does." beg your pardon, miss. I suppose she will "Well now, indeed, I do not, miss, no-time enough. But she was not here sich thing. I may 'a seen him, and I think when I left this morning." I did at Lady Mardykes; he's a cousin, or something, to her." "Oh, really? A relation of Lady Mardykes." “We'll hear all about it when we reach the house. I suppose there is nothing like a dance, or anything of that kind, while Lady Mardykes is away?" Oh, la! yes, miss. No end of dancing and music and everything that way," an swered Mercy, with a great sigh, and a haggard look, after her brief merriment. There's a-what do you call it?—of singing and music to-night. 66 64 A concert ?" Mr. Darkdale was already on the steps ringing the bell. CHAPTER LXI. IN THE HOUSE. MAUD was looking at the house-a huge structure of the cagework sort, which stood out in the light broad and high, its black V's and X's and I's traced in black oak beams, contrasting like gigantic sym "Yes, that's it, miss, a concert. A concert of music. La! they does it so beautiful, you wouldn't believe. I wish Miss Medwyn was here to try her pipe at it. Hoo, hoo, hoo-la! I beg your pardon-bols with the smooth white plaster they she's so staid and wise, miss!” Mercy was stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her laughter. But this time it was over quickly. At this moment the postilions wheeled their horses to the left, and pulled them up, calling lustily, "Gate, gate !” 66 So we have arrived," said Maud, letting down the window, and looking out with the curiosity of long-deferred expectation. The leaders' heads seemed almost touching the bars of a great iron gate, over which burned a solitary lamp, acting, lighthouse fashion, rather as a warning than as an effectual light. They were under the shadow of gigantic elms, that threw their branches from side to side; the carriage-lamps dimly lighted a few clusters of their dark foliage, and the light over the gate showed, for a few feet round and above it, the same moveless leafage. "We shan't be long reaching the house?" she inquired of Mr. Darkdale, who was walking by the window toward the gate, for she remembered "approaches" three miles long after you enter the gate, deceiving you with a second journey before you reach the hall-door. "Not five minutes, miss," said the man, hardly turning his head as he passed. Was he growing a little gruffer, she thought, as they approached their destina tion? Darkdale was talking earnestly in a low tone with the man who had come to the gate at their summons; and then he called: "Be alive, now- open the gate." In a minute more they were driving up the approach at a rapid pace under rows of trees. Suddenly the shadowy road they followed turned to the right, and took a direction parallel to the high road; about a hundred yards on, they drove up to the front of the house, along which this road, expanding before it into a court-yard, passes. And now they pull up before the steps of the hall-door. And the horses stand drooping their heads, and snorting, and sending up each a thin white vapour, through which the metal buckles of their harness glimmer faintly in the moonlight. spanned and intersected, and which showed dazzlingly in the moon's intense splendour, under which also many broad windows were sparkling and glimmering. A footman in livery stood before the open door, in the shadow of a deep porch, and Maud observed that Mr. Darkdale seemed to speak to him as one in authority, and by no means as one servant to another. Maud was looking from the carriage window; and the hall was full of light, which came out with a pleasant glow, showing the gilt buttons and gold lace on the servant's livery, flushing the white powder on his head, and making Mr. Darkdale look blacker against its warm light. Some figures, gentlemen in evening dress, and ladies in brilliant costume, passed and repassed a little in perspective. There came from the interior, as the hall-door stood partly open, the sounds of violins and other instruments, and the more powerful swell of human voices. Mr. Darkdale turned and ran down the steps, and at the carriage window said: There's a concert going on, and a great many of the people moving about in the hall. Perhaps you had better come in by a different way ?" "That is just what I wished," said Miss Vernon. But Darkdale did not seem to care very much for her sanction, and in fact had not waited for it. He was now talking to the drivers, and the hall-door had been shut. He returned, and said, at the window : "Your boxes shall be taken up to your room, Miss Vernon, and as the night is so fine, you will have no objection, I dare say, to walk round to the entrance to which I will conduct you and Mercy Creswell." He opened the carriage-door, and the young lady got out and found herself in the court-yard. Looking along the face of the great house to the right, a mass of stables and other offices closed the view, behind a broken screen of fine old elms; and to the left it was blocked by dark and thicker masses of towering trees. In this latter direction, along the front |