LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 810, 26 January 1877, Page 3

LITERATURE.

HER LAST APPEARANCE. ( Continued .) ‘My life is so lonely I’ she said, self-ex - cusiugly, after having accorded this permission ; ‘it will be a comfort to me to see you now and then, for a brief half hour, and to know that there is some one in this great busy world who pities and cares for me. ’ She had one reason for granting Sir Phillip’s prayer, which would have wellnigh broken his heart could he have guessed it. This was her inward conviction that her life was near its close. There was hardly time for temptation between the present hour and the grave. And every day seemed to carry her further from the things and thoughts of earth. Her husband’s cruelties stung less keenly than of old—his own degradation, which had been the heaviest part of her burden, seemed further away from her—as if he and she lived in different worlds. Her stage triumphs, which had once intoxicated her, now seemed unreal as the pageant of a dream. Yes, the ties that bind this weak flesh to earthly joys and sufferings were gradually loosening. The fetters were slipping off this weary clay. Chapter ll.— Her Avenger. Sir Philip showed himself not undeserving Barbara’s confidence. He came to the sordid London lodging—a caravansera which had housed Avandering tribes of shabbygenteel adventurers for the last twenty years, and whose dingy panelling seemed to exhale an odour of poverty. He brought his idol hothouse flowers and fruits—the AVeekly papers—those thin little leaflets which amused our ancestors—a new book uoav and then, and the latest news of the town - that floating gossip of the clubs, which Walpole was writing to Sir Horace Mann. He came and sat beside her, as she worked at her tambour frame, and cheered her by a tenderness too reverent to alarm. In a Avord, he made her happy. If she Avere slowly fading out of life, he did not see the change or guess that this fair floAver Avas soon to Avither. He saAV her too frequently to perceive the gradual progress of decay. Her beauty Avas of an ethereal type, to which disease lent new charms. One day he found her Avith an ugly bruise' upon her forehead; she had tried to conceal it with the loose ringlets of her dark hair, but his quick eye suav the mark. When pressed hard by his solicitous questioning, she gave a sorncAvhat lame account of the matter. She had been .passing from the sitting-room to her bcd-chamber last night, when a gust of Avind extinguished her candle, and she had fallen and wounded herself against the edge of the chest of draAvers. She crimsoned and faltered as she tried to explain this accident. ‘ Barbara, you are deceiving me 1 ’ cried Sir Philip. ‘lt was a man’s clenched fist left that mark. You shall not live with him another day.’ And then came impassioned pleading Avhich shook her soul-- fond offers of a sweet glad life in a foreign land—a divorce —a new marriage—honor—station. ‘ But dishonour first, ’ said Barbara. ‘ Can the path of shame ever lead to honour ? No, Sir Philip, I will not do evil that good may come of it.’

No eloquence of her lover’s could move her from this resolve. She was firm as the Bass Rock, he passionate as the Avaves that beat against it. He left her at last, burning indignation against her tyrant. ‘ God keep and comfort you,’ he cried at parting. ‘ 1 will not see you again till you are free.’

These Avords startled her, and she pondered them, full of alarm. Did he mean any threat against her husband ? Ought she to warn Jack Stowell of his danger ? «■. * * * *

Sir Philip Hazlcmere and Jack Stowell; had never yet crossed each other’s path, i The surest place in which not to find the | husband was at home. But now Sir Philip j was seized with a sudden fancy for making 1 Mr Stowell’s acquaintance—or at any rate | for coming face to face with him in some of I his favourite haunts. These were not difficult to discover. He played deep and he drank hard, and his chosen resort was a dis- j reputable tavern in a narrow street out of j Long Acre, where play and drink were the j order of the night, and many a friendly j festivity had ended in a bloody brawl. j Here on a December midnight, when the ' pavements about Covcnt Garden were greasy with a thaw, and the link boys were reaping their harvest in a thick brown fog, Sir Philip resorted directly the play was over, taking one Captain Montagu, a friend and confidant with him. A useful man this Montagu, who knew the theatres and most of the actors -among them, Jack Stowell. * The best of fellows,’ he assured Sir Philip; ‘capital company,’ ‘ That may be,’replied Sir Philip, ‘ but he beats his wife, and 1 mean to beat him.’ ‘ What, Phil, are you going to turn Don Quixote and fight with windmills ? ’ ‘Never mind my business,’ answered Philip ; * yours is to bring me and this Stowell together.’ They found Mr Stowell engaged at faro with his own particular friends, in a private room—a small room at the back of the house opening on to the leads, which offered a handy exit if the night’s enjoyment turned to peril. The mohawks of that day were almost as clever as cats at climbing a steep roof or hanging on to a gutter. Captain Montagu sent in his card to Mr Stowell, asking permission to join him with a friend, a gentleman from the country. Jack know that Montagu belonged to the havk tribe, but scented a pigeon in the rural stranger, and received the pair with effusiveness. Sir Philip had disguised himself in a heavy fur-bordered coat and a flaxen periwig, but Mr Stowell scanned him somewhat suspiciously notwithstanding. His constant attendance in the stage box had made his face very familiar to the Covent Garden actors, and it was only the fumes of brandy punch w'hich prevented Stowcll’s recognition of him. The play was fast and furious. Sir Philip in his character of country squire ordered punch with profuse liberality, and lost his money with a noisy recklessness, vowing that lie would have bis revenge before the night was out. Montagu watched him curiously, wondering what it all meant. So the night wore on, Sir Philip showing unmistakable signs of intoxication, under which inliucnce his uproariousness degenerated by-aud by into a maudlin stupidity He went on losing money with a sleep} placidity that threw Jack Stowell off hh guard and tempted that adventurer into a free indulgence in certain manoeuvres which under other circumstances he would have considered to the last degree dangerous,

What was his astonishment when the country squire suddenly sprang to his feet and flung half a tumbler of punch in his face! * Gentlemen,’ he cried, wiping the liquor from his disconcerted countenance, ‘ the man is drunk, as you must perceive. I have been grossly insulted, but am too much of a gentleman to take advantage of the situation. You had better get your friend away, Captain Montagu, while his legs can carry him, if they are still capable of the exertion. We have had enough play for tonight. ’ ‘Cheat, swindler!’ cried Sir Philip. ‘I call my friend to witness that you have been playing with marked cards for the last hour. I saw you change the pack.’ ‘ It’s a lie !’ roared Jack. ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Montagu, ‘l’ve had my eye on you.’ ‘By God i gentlemen, I’ll have satisfaction for this,’ cried Jack, drawing his sword a very little way out of its scabbard. ‘ You shall,’ answered Sir Philip, and this instant. I shall be glad to see whether you are as good at defending your own cur’s life as you are at beating your wife.’ ‘By heaven, I know you now!’ cried Jack. ‘You are the fellow that sits in the stage box night after night and hangs on my wife’s looks.’

Sir Philip Avent to the door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket, then came back Avith his rapier drawn. Montagu and the other men tried to prevent a fight, but Sir Philip was inexorably bent on settling all scores on the spot, and s toAvell Avas savage in his cups and ready for anything. Preliminaries wore hurried through —a table knocked over and a lot of glasses broken; but noise Avas a natural concomitant of pleasure in this tavern, and the riot aAvakened no curiosity in the sleepy draAver Avaiting beloAV. A space Avas cleared, [and the two men stood opposite each other ghastly Avith passion ; Sir Philip’s assumed intoxication throAvn off Avith has fur-bordered coat, John Stowell considerably the worse for liquor. The actor was a skilled swordsman, but his first thursts Avere too blindly savage to be dangerous. Sir Philip parried them easily, and stood looking at his antagonist with a scornful smile Avhich goaded Stowell to madness.

‘ I’ll wager my wife and you have got up this play between you,’he said. ‘ I ought to have known there was mischief on foot. She’s too meek and pretty-spoken not to be The word he meant to say never passed his lips, for a sudden thrust in tierce from Philip Hazlemere’s sword pierced his left lung and silenced him for ever. ‘ When I saw the mark of your fist on your wife’s forehead this morning, I swore to make her a widow to-night,’ said Sir Philip, as the actor fell face downward on the sanded floor.

The tavern servants were knocking at the door presently. Jack Stowell’s fall had startled even their equanimity. Tables and glasses might be smashed without remark—they only served to swell the reckoning—but the fall of a human body invited attention, Captain Montagu opened the window and hustled his friend out upon the slippery leads below it, and. after some peril to life and limb in the brief descent, Sir Philip [fazlemcre found himself in Long Acre, where the watchman was calling * Past four o’clock and a snowy morning.’ Chapter lll.—Her Farewell Sigh. Before next evening the town knew that Jack Stowell had been killed in a tavern brawl. Captain Montagu had bribed Mr Stowell’s friends to keep a judicious silence. The man had been killed in fair fight, and no good could come of letting the police know the details of his end. So, when the Dow street magistrate came to hold his interrogatory, he could only extort a confused account of the fatal event. There had been a row at faro, and Stowell and another man, whose name nobody present knew, had drawn their swords and fought. Stowell had fallen, and the stranger had escaped by a window before the tavern people came to the rescue. The tavern people had seen the stranger enter the house, a man with flaxen air and a dark green riding coat trimmed with grey fur, but they had not seen him leave. The magistrate drew the general conclusion that everybody had been drunk, and the examination concluded in a futile manner, which in these days would have offered a fine opening for indignation leaders in the daily papers, and letters signed “ Fiat Jnstitia,” or “Peckham Rye”; but which at that easy-going period provoked nobody’s notice, or served at most to provide Walpole with a paragraph for one of his immortal epistles. Sir Philip called at Mrs Stowell’s, and was told that she was ill, and keeping her room. There was a change of pieces announced at Covent Garden, and the favorite was not to appear “until to-morrow se’nnight, in consequence of a domestic affliction.” Sir Philip sent his customary offerings of hothouse fruits and flowers to Mrs Stowell's address, but a restraining delicacy made him keep aloof while the actor’s corpse lay at his lodgings and the young widow was still oppressed with the horror of her husband’s death. She might suspect his hand, perhaps, in that untimely end. Would she pity and pardon him, and understand that it was to redress her wrongs his sword had been drawn? Upon this point Sir Philip was hopeful. The future was full of failpromises. There was only a dreary interval of doubt and severance to be endured in the present. The thought that Barbara was confined to her room by illness did not alarm him. It was natural that her husband’s death should have agitated and overwhelmed her. The sense of her release from his tyranny would soon give her hope and comfort. In the meanwhile Sir Philip counted the nights that must pass before her reappearance. The night came, and the play announced for representation was Webster’s ‘Duchess of Malll, concluding with the fourth Act ‘ The Duchess by Mrs Stowell.’ They were fond of tragedies in those, days, the gloomier the better. Covent Garden was a spacious charnel-house for the exhibition of suicide and murder.

Sir Philp was in his box before the tiddlers began the overture. The house was more than half empty, despite the favourite’s reappearance after her temporary retirement, despite the factitious, interest attached to her as the widow of a, man, who had met his death under somewhat mysterious circum stances a week ago. There was dire weather out of doors —a dense brown fog. Some of the fog had crept in at the doors of Covent [Garden Theatre, and hung like an ugly ' black pall over pit and boxes. f To be continued .]

Causes fob Confidence ln these days of humbug and imposture the public are naturally disgustful of assertion unaccorapanied by proof. This is particularly the case in regard to advertised remedies, many of which are devoid of the slightest merit; But a medicinal stimulant, professionally indorsed and need for twency-five years as a curative of debility, nervous disorders, kidney and bladder ailments, dyspepsia, and rheumatism, deserves and receive” public con* fidence. Witness Udolpho Wolfe’s 'iCHiEdam Abomatic Schnapps.— [adyt.]