"I thought your lordship might desire to have some letter or message conveyed for you, and as I knew Master Tombs would neither do your will, nor allow it to be done, I have come thus privily to offer myself as your messenger."

"I am much beholden to thee," said Seymour. "I have not the means of writing a letter, or I would confide one to thee. My tablets are left me, but I have neither pen nor pencil."

"That is most unlucky," said Xit. "But I will come again— and better provided!"

"Stay!" cried Seymour; "a plan occurs to me.

shall answer my purpose."

This point

And plucking a sharp aglet from his dress, he punctured his arm with it, and proceeded to trace a few passionate words with his blood on a leaf of the tablets.

This done, he closed the book, tied it with a ribbon, and gave it to Xit.

"Deliver this, I pray thee, to the Princess Elizabeth," he said. "Guard it as thy life. Hast thou any knowledge where her highness now is?"

"I have heard that she is at Shene," replied Xit. "If so, I will engage that your lordship's missive shall be delivered into her own hands to-morrow morning."

"Thou wilt do me the greatest possible service," cried the Admiral. "Whatever betide, let me see thee again on the morning of my execution. I may have another letter or message for thee. "I will not fail," replied Xit.

Seymour was about to tear some ornament from his attire in order to reward his little envoy, when Xit stopped him, saying he would accept nothing till he had executed his mission.

"I must now entreat your lordship's aid to reach the loophole," he said.

On this, Seymour lifted him from the ground, and the ascent was quickly and safely accomplished.

This done, Xit pressed his hand to his heart in token of devotion, and disappeared.

LA CHATELAINE SANS CHATEAU;

OR

A DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN'S LIFE.

BY OUIDA.
I.

THE CRAYON HEAD IN CAVENDISH'S PORTFOLIO.

LAST week I was dining with Cavendish, in his house on the Lung' Arno, as I passed through Florence, where he fills never mind what post in the British Legation. The night was oppressively hot; a still, sultry sky brooded over the city, and the stars shining out from a purple mist on to the Campanile near, and the slopes of Bellosguardo in the distance. It was intensely hot; not all the iced wines on his table could remove the oppressive warmth of the evening air, which made both him and me think of evenings we had spent together in the voluptuous lassitude of the East, in days gone by, when we had travelled there, boys of twenty or twenty-two, fresh to life, to new impressions, to all that gives "greenness to the grass, and glory to the flower." The Arno ran on under its bridge, and we leaned out of the balcony where we were sitting and smoking, while I tossed over, without thinking much of what I was doing, a portfolio of his sketches. Position has lost for art many good artists since Sir George Beaumont: Cavendish is one of them; his sketches are masterly; and, had he been a vagrant Bohemian instead of an English peer, there might have been pictures on the walls of the R. A. to console one for the meretricious daubs and pet vulgarities of "Parting Cheers," hideous babies, and third-class carriage interiors, which make one's accustomed annual visit to the rooms that once saw the beauties of Reynolds, and Wilson, and Lawrence, a peine forte et dure to anybody of decent refinement and educated taste. The portfolio stood near me, and I took out a sketch or two now and then between the pauses of our conversation, smoking a narghilé of Cavendish's, and looking lazily up the river, while the moonlight shone on Dante's city, that so long forgot, and has, so late, remembered him.

"By Jove! what a pretty face this is! Who's the original ?" I asked him, drawing out a female head, done with great finish in pastel, under which was written, in his own hand, "Florelle," and, in a woman's," La Châtelaine sans Château!" It was a face of great beauty, with a low Greek brow and fair hair, and those large, soft, liquid eyes that you only see in a Southern, and that looked at you from the sketch with an earnest, wistful regard, half childlike, half melancholy. He looked up, glanced at the sketch, and stretched out his hand hastily, but I held it away from him. "I want to look at it; it is a beautiful head; I wish we had the original here now. 'La Châtelaine sans Château !' -what an unsatisfactory and original title!-her dot, I should suppose, consisted of châteaux en Espagne! Who is the original?"

As I spoke, holding the sketch up where the light from the room

VOL. L.

૨

within fell on what I had no doubt was a likeness of some fair face that had beguiled his time in days gone by, a souvenir of one of his loves more lasting than souvenirs of such episodes in one's life often are, if merely trusted to that inconstant capricieuse, Memory; I might have hit him with a bullet rather than asked him about a mere etude à deux crayons, for he shuddered, that sultry night! and drank off some white Hermitage quickly.

"I had forgotten that was in the portfolio," he said, hurriedly, as he took it from me and put it behind him, with its face against the wall, as though it had been the sketch of a Medusa.

"What do take it away you

Who is the original ?"

for? I had not half done looking at it.

"One I don't care to mention."

"Because ?"

"Because the sight of that picture gives me a twinge of what you and I ought to be hardened against-regret."

"Regret! Is any woman worth that?"

"She was."

"I don't believe it; and I fancied you and I thought alike on such points. Of all the women for whom we feel twinges of conscience or self-reproach in melancholy moments, how many loved us? Moralists and poets sentimentalise over it, and make it a stalking-horse whereby to magnify our sins and consign us more utterly to perdition, while they do for themselves a little bit of poetic morality cheaply; but in reality there are uncommonly few women who can love, to begin with, and in the second, vanity, avarice, jealousy, desires for pretty toilettes, one or other, or all combined, have quite as much to do with their sacrifice' for us as anything."

"Quite true; but il y a femmes et femmes, perhaps, and it was not of that sort of regret that I spoke."

"Of what sort, then ?"

Cavendish didn't answer: he broke the ash off his Manilla, and smoked silently some moments, leaning over the balcony and watching the monotonous flow of the Arno, with deeper gloom on his face than I remembered to have seen there any time before. I was sorry I had chanced to light upon a sketch that had brought him back such painful recollections of whatever kind they might be, and I smoked too, sending the perfumed tobacco out into the still sultry night that was brooding over Florence.

"Of what sort ?" said he, abruptly, after some minutes' pause." Shall I tell you? Then you cau tell me whether I was a fool who made one grand mistake, or a sensible man of the world who kept himself from a grand folly. I have been often in doubt myself."

He leaned back, his face in shadow, so that I could not see it, and with the Arno's ebb and flow making mournful river-music under our windows, while the purple glories of the summer night deepened round Giotto's Tower, where, in centuries past, the Immortal of Florence had sat dreaming of the Paradiso, the mortals passing by whispering him as "the man who had seen hell,"-and the light within the room shone on the olives and grapes, the cut glass and silver claret-jugs, the crimson Montepulciano and the white Hermitage, on the table, he told me the story of "La Châtelaine sans Château."

II.

THE FLOWER OF THE VALLEY OF LUZ.

"Two years ago I went into the South of France. I was attaché at Constantinople then, you remember, and the climate had told upon me. I was not over well, and somebody recommended me the waters of Eaux Bonnes. The waters I put little faith in, but in the air of the Pyrenees, in the change from diplomacy to a life en rase campagne, I put much, and I went to Eaux Bonnes accordingly, for July and August, with a vow to forswear any society I might find at the baths-I had had only too much of society as it was-and to spend my days in the mountains with my sketching-block and my gun. But I did not like Eaux Bonnes; it was intensely warm. There were several people who knew me really; no end of others who got hold of my name, and wanted me to join their riding parties, and balls, and pic-nics. That was not what I wanted, so I left the place and went on to Luz, hoping to find solitude there. That valley of Luz—you know it ?-is it not as lovely as any artist's dream of Arcadia in the evening, when the sunset light has passed off the meadows and corn-lands of the lower valley, and just lingers golden and rosy on the crests of the mountains, while the glow-worms are coming out among the grasses, and the lights are being lit in the little homesteads nestling among their orchards one above another on the hill-sides, and its hundred streams are rushing down the mountains and under the trees, foaming, and tumbling, and rejoicing on their way! When I have had my fill of ambition and of pleasure, I shall go and live at Luz, I think. When! Well! you are quite right to repeat it ironically; that time will never come, I dare say, and why should it? I am not the stuff to cogitate away my years in country solitudes. If prizes are worth winning, they are worth working for till one's death; a man should never give up the field while he has life left in him. Well! I went to Luz, and spent a pleasant week or so there, knocking over a few chamois or izards, or sketching on the sides of the Pic du Midi, or Tourmalet, but chiefly lying about under the great beech-trees in the shade, listening to the tinkle of the sheep-bells, like an idle fellow, as I meant to be for the time I had allotted myself. One day— He stopped and blew some whiffs from his Manilla into the air. He seemed to linger over the prelude to his story, and shrink from going on with the story itself, I thought; and he smothered a sigh as he raised himself. "How warm the night is; we shall have a tempest. Reach me that wine, there's a good fellow. No, not the Amontillado, the Château Margaux, please; one can't drink hot, dry wines such a night as this. How well I remember that splendid Madeira of your father's; is there much of it left at Longleaf now? We used to have pleasant vacations in those college days at your governor's, Hervey; some few years have gone since then -ten, twelve, fifteen-how many? More than that, by Jove! But to satisfy your curiosity about this crayon study.-One day I thought I would go to Gavarnie. I had heard a good deal, of course, about the great marble wall, and the mighty waterfalls, the rocks of Marboré, and the Brêche de Roland, but, as it chanced, I had never been up to

Then you

the Cercle, nor, indeed, in that part of the Midi at all, so I went. The gods favoured me, I remember: there were no mists, the sun was brilliant, and the great amphitheatre was for once unobscured; the white marble flashing brown and purple, rose and golden, in the light; the cascades tumbling and leaping down into the gigantic basin; the vast plains of snow glittering in the sunshine; the twin rocks standing in the clear air, straight and fluted as any two Corinthian columns hewn and chiselled by man. Good Heaven! before a scene like Gavarnie, what true artist must not fling away his colours and his brushes in despair and disgust with his own puerilty and impotence? What can be transferred to canvas of such a scene as that? What does the best beauty of Claude, the grandest sublimity of Salvator, the greatest power of Poussin, look beside Nature when she reigns as she reigns at Gavarnie? I am an art worshipper, as you know; but there are times in my life, places on earth, that make me ready to renounce art for ever! The day was beautiful, and thinking I knew the country pretty well, I took no guide. I hate them when I can possibly dispense with them. But the mist soon swooped down over the Cercle, and I began to wish I had had one when I turned my horse's head back again. You know the route, of course? Through the Chaos-Heaven knows it is deserving of its name!-down the break-neck little bridle-path, along the Gave, and over the Scia bridge to St. Sauveur. You know it? know that it is much easier to break your neck down it than to find your way by it, though by some hazard I did not break my neck, nor the animal's knees either, but managed to get over the bridge without falling into the torrent, and to pick my way safely down into more level ground; once there, I thought I should easily enough find my way to St. Sauveur, but I was mistaken: the mists had spread over the valley, a heavy storm had come up, and, somehow or other, I lost the way, and could not tell where I was, whether St. Sauveur was to the left or the right, behind me or in front of me. The horse, a miserable little Pyrenean beast, was too frightened by the lightning to take the matter into his hands as he had done on the road through the Chaos, and I saw nothing for it but to surrender and come to grief in any way the elements best pleased; swearing at myself for not having stayed at the inn at Gavarnie or Gedre; wishing myself at the vilest mountain auberge that ever sheltered men and mules pêle-mêle; and calling myself hard names for not having listened to my landlady's dissuasions of that morning as I left her door, from my project of going to Gavarnie without a guide, which seemed to her the acme of all she had ever known or heard of English strangers' fooleries. The storm only increased, the great black rocks echoing the roll of the thunder, and the Gave lashing itself into fury in its narrow bed; happily I was on decently level ground, and the horse being, I suppose, tolerably used to storms like it, I pushed him on at last, by dint of blows and conjurations combined, to where, in the flashes of the lightning, I saw what looked to me like the outline of a homestead: it stood in a cleft between two shelving sides of rock, and a narrow bridle-path led up to it, through high yews and a tangled wilderness of rhododendrons, boxwood, and birch-one of those green slopes, so common in the Pyrenees, that look in full sunlight doubly bright and Arcadian-like, from the contrast of the dark, bare, per