LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 64, 14 August 1874, Page 3

LITERATURE.

IN DANGER. IN FOUR CHAPTERS. [From " Chamber's Journal 1 "] (Continued.) As for myself, my history had up to this time been as uneventfnl as that of most young Englishmen of my age, bred up in a country vicarage, and, after three years of reading and rowing at Oxford, going into forensic training as a law-student at one of the Inns of Court. Of course, having no money worth speaking of, and no prospect of any, I had fallen in love, and almost equally, as a matter ot course, the object of my affections was as poor as myself. Pretty, darling Kate Carrington! Our engagement had alrea.iy endurexl for fourteen months, and she and I seemed likely to add another couple to the long list of betrothed pairs that wait and wait through the long vista of hopes deferred. I was sometimes sanguine of success, and had a young man's confidence in the future ; and I daresay Kate would have consented, for my sake, to try the experiment of love in a cottage, with an insufficiency of butcher-meat and groceries, had it not been for her great tenderne-s towards her widow id mother. It was not to be thought of that Mrs Carrington, who was elderly, and but badly off, since some imprudent venture, at ever so much per cent had sorely pinched and clipped her modest income, should be deprived of her remaining comforts that Kate and I might marry somewhat earlier. The old lady, who had the tender-hearted loveof match-making which supplies an element of romance in the seniors of her sex, would, to do her justice, have smilingly confronted the perils of semistarvation ; but Kate stood firm on that point.

'No, no,' she Raid to mo. more than once, as on summer evenings we stood together in her mother's tiny garden at Clapham ; 'I must not be selfish, dear John. T would work for you, want with you, if need were, and we are young, and might struggle through : but poor mamma has never kr.own what hardship really is, and at her time of life it is too late to begin. So we must be very brave, aud good, and patient—must we not?' But if we were to wait till I should make a livelihood at the bar, how long might our probation bo ! I had not the luck to be connected by ties of Hood or friendship with a single attorney. I had taken stock of my own qualifications as a barrister, and knew that I should never climb the slippery rungs of the ladder leading to the few great prizes of the profession. Leaving attorney-generalships and judicial wigs to other aspirants, I saw no speedy prospect of a decent maintenance to V>c earned at the bar. I saw men, older and more brilliant than myself, glad to pay their way by law-reporting, or perhaps diverging into literary by-paths that had no more to do with the Themis of England than with the Pandects of the Koran. The Bteady old special pleader in whose chambers I had been, for a heavy fee. allowed to read, shook his experienced head at the notion of my earning my bread, for some years at least, by legitimate profefsional business, and yet I was a pet pupil, as being less idle than the others whom he instructed.

' Small profits, Mr Masterton,' he would say, ' and slow returns, as respects the junior, are the rules in our calling. I really almost wish you had selected a walk in life, ray dear young friend, more new-fashioned than this of wearing horse-hair, and waiting til! the stuff-gown be changed to silk, and the clerk be familiar with briefs and retainers. I think you could do better elsewhere.' I thought so too. and having some theoretical knowledge, and some slight practice as a surveyor and civil engineer, I decided on asking Mr Grubstock to use his good offices on my behalf.

It was with a boating heart that on the appointed day I returned to the • Meg.' to dine with my godfather, and to hear the result of my late petition for his powerful aid. I found Mr Grubstock in high spirits and bluff good-humour. ' I've not forgotten you, my boy,' he said, rilling my glass with a rare vintage of strawcoloured sherry ; ' and indeed I have done better for you than I expected to do. Have you heard anything of the Caspia.n Navigation Company, eh ? The shares are at a premium, and quite right they should be, for it's a bond fide concern, sure to pay a tidy dividend to those who can afford to wait. I'm a director, and got hold of Jowley, and Barrett, and Hicks, and one or two more of the old set, who are on the Board too ; and the long and short of it is, that you are to be offered the appointment of acting engineer in-chief, at one of the branch ports, at a salary of five hundred a year.

Five hundred a year 1 The announcement thus abruptly made almost took my breath away. Why, I could marry Kate, now, with such an ineome to rely on, and the sudden shock of joy almost incapacitated me from thanking my patron for his good deed on my behalf. It was indeed great promotion. ' You'll have to go rather far afield, my boy,' remarked my godfather, holding up his wine-glass for a moment between his eye and the light, before sipping its amber-tinted contents ; ' and to rough it too, for a time, very likely ; but what of that, when one is young, healthy, and a bachelor; and KizilGatch is it not a place for luxuries, I suspect.'

' Kizil-Gatch ;' The queer sound of the name recalled to my remembrance the fact, that my future residence must be, not in England, but in a wild and distant country, where civilization was slowly and gradually gaining the mastery overy moral and physical obstacles. Well, I had no reason to complain. Mine would be a well-remunerated exile, and I anticipated little difficulty in inducing Kate and. her mother to share my new home far away. Five hundred a year I And this to be attained at once bv one who could not in fairness be accounted as anything but a mere tryo, and who would cheerfully have accepted an assistant-surveyor's post at less than half the rate of salary which would now be mine.

'You don't exactly know where you are going to,' said Mr Grubstock, at a later stage of the dinner; 'and small blame to you, since I never heard of the place myself until they showed it to me on the board-room map. You'll have to hunt it out yourself, and you'll find it to be one of the southernmost places in the Russian territory, on the west shore of the Caspian, not very far from the Persian frontier. Great natural capabilities, I'm told, but everything to be done, from dock-digging to building warehouses. If only you will work, as I pledged myself you would, and keep yourself wide awake to the company's interests, your acting appointment will be confirmed in a few months ; and in that cheap country you will find your pay go very far. A dab at languages, are you not?*

I replied with becoming diffidence that I had always been considered as a quick learner, but had no right to call myself more of a linguist than the majority of my educated countrymen.

' Yon talk good French, and are glib in German, I believe, said the civil engineer, refilling his glass with claret. ' Don't you speak, or write, anything else, beyond that precious Latin and Greek on which, to my thinking, you wasted your best years.' ' Scarcely,' I answered. 'As for Italian, I can read Dante and Tasso, and perhaps converse with a waiter or an organ-grinder ; but that exhausts the list of my attainments, unless you count a very little Arabic, and the merest smattering of one or two Eastern tongues. My father, you may remember, was fond of such studies.'

' Ay, ay ! What they called a learned Orientalist, grumbled Mr Grubstock ; 'although I can't conceive what a country parson wants with the lingo of a parcel of barbarians who write the Wrong way, and cover the paper with ugly spattering characters like so many orcoked nails, with dots over them. But that's neither here nor there. Why, I never could shape my mouth to speak anything but the tongue my mother taught me. and vet I have laid out railroads, and enlarged harbors in half-a-dozen foreign countrics,and have paid and managed hundreds of navvies that could not have understood me if I had asked for a mug of water or a screw of tobacco. I am plain John Bull of the old breed, and not young enough to alter. But to chatter and parleyvous is a valuable accomplishment to a lad with the ladder to climb, and be sure that T made the most of your fine education when T canvassed for your appointment ! Oorae up to the Board on Monday, in Abchurch Lane, City, and

we'll give you your credentials.—No more wine? Well, then, good-night!' On leaving the J\iegalosaurus, I made my way as quickly as I could to Clapham, and electrified Kate and Mrs Carrington by the startling announcement of my unexpected good fortune. There was exultation around the little tea-table in Acacia Cottage on that night ; for had not Pactolus, so to speak.overflowed for our joint benefit, and might not the wedded happiness of two faithful lovers be reckoned as secured ! Five hundred a year I The sum seemed to us as round a one as the salary of the bishop or a judgj appears to doctors of divinity and Queen's Counsel. Money, liketime iselastic, and capable of being meted by very different measures. For what, to some of us, are five hundred sovereigns ! a flea-bite, a trifle to swell the comfortable balance at the banker's, a lucky windfall on the Stock Exchange or the racecourse, the result of a risa in Turkish, or of the ' dark ' horse's victory, when a ' fiver ' had been laid on him; a mere morsel that sharpens the goldhunger. What do the three figures represent to others ? an unattainable pile of wealth, or the possible savings of long toil and penurious thrift! But we ourselves had been poor long enough to know the value of such an income as that which had at once been placed within my reach, and we did not philosophise much as to its relative proportion to the earnings or the outlay of the remainder of the human race race. I do believe that Mrs Carrington would have been foremost in promoting an immediate marriage between Kate and myself, and wonld have accompanied the newly married pair on what would have perhaps been the strangest honeymoon trip ever yet taken ; but I felt myself in duty bound to be prudent. After all, there are proverbially many slips between the cup and the lip, and something might be untoward enough to come between me and the realisation of my not unselfish hopes of peaceful joy. The Company might drift upon the rocks of insolvency, not that there seemed to be much fear of that with ' safe John Grubstock' at the helm; while I knew Messrs Jowley and Hicks, whom my godfather had mentioned as his fellowdirectors, to be men of large means and unblemished integrity. Or, more probably, I might be weighed and found wanting. After all, I was not vain enough to regard myself as even a second-rate engineer, being only too conscious that I was ignorant of much theoretical lore that it would have been good for me to know, while my actual experiences had been on a very small scale. My appointment might not, on trial, be confirmed. And yet I did not feel very dispirited, as I recalled to memory Mr Clewett's words, spoken two years before, at the termination of my three months' engagement in laying out the Pontypool Extension : • I'm sorry, Masterton, to part with you. You are worth your salt, old chap ; and if you like to get a living by the chains and the dumpy level, come tome.' Then there was another consideration —the rough rawness of the barbaric country whither I was bound, and which hardly rendered it as yet a fitting place for the residence of ladies. I must feather my neat, far away, before I tempted so dainty a mate as Kate Carrington to share it. We were, however, very happy and very hopeful—l am speaking of Kate and myself —as befitted our years ; while Mrs Carrington, whose interest in the matter was necessarily vicarious, was as elated and as sanguine as we were, and made no more, in fancy, of the long route to Asiatic Russia, and of the prospect of passing the evening of her days among outlandish beards, turbans,, caftans, and lamb's-wool caps, than if I had simply proposed a run up the Rhine, or a tour in Switzerland. It is the privelege of old women, when innocent and soft of heart, to retain much of their girlish freshness of imagination, mellowed, rather than dimned, by the lapse of years ; and that is why a kindly matron can often afford to take indulgent and genial views of life, at an age when Paterfamilias scents peril or fraud in every breeze that blows, and regards each stranger askance, as a possible burglar, begging* letter impostor, or collector of income-tax. To be continued,