LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2223, 12 April 1881, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE MYSTERY OF LORD BRACKENBURY: A NOVEL. BY AMELIA. B. EOWAHDO, Author of “ Barbara’s History,” ’‘Debenbam’s Vow,” &o. (Continued.) The advice was good ; but. like good advice in general, it was hard to follow. How could La Giulietta [write these things to her lover? How could she tell him that long story about ’Tonio Moretti 'Tonio the beaten, the battered, the rejected, of whom Cesare Donato knew not even so much as his name ? It would bo ungenerous, and she could not do it. But she nevertheless wrote a letter that evening, when her uncle was gone to bed. In this letter, with such insistence as her love and her fervent native tongne inspired, she entreated Donato to let her know exactly how he came by the accident; above all, to tell her It it was a ‘cut-wound’—for of a ‘ cut-wound' in the hand she entertained the deadliest terror. Then, lest he should deem her anxiety baseless, she recounted the history of the lad Gaetano Alberi, telling how he had maimed his hand witk an adze, and how, although the injury was at first so slight that he scarcely even thought to bind the hand np, he at last died In agony. ‘He was the only son of a widow,’ she wrote, * and the widow lives still. She is very poor and solitary, and she shares one small attic with another old woman as poor and solitary as herself. If I lost yon. Cesare, my wellbeloved, I should pray to the Madonna to take me to you at once—as I pray to her now to give yon back to me In safety,’ It was a long letter—the longest the girl had ever written; aud she sat np writing it till an honr oast midnight, by the great clock In the Piazz del Signori. She heard its iron tongne above all the church clocks at Verona.

Bat Cesare Donato’s answer, written with almost all his accustomed freedom of pen, completely reassared her. Be was in harbor at Ancona, where he found her letter awaiting him. His hand was much better. The accident had been very slight; so slight that he should not even have mentioned it to her except as it was necessary to account for the short ness of his letters and the imperfections of the writing.

As for “ cut wounds ” and “ lockjaws ” he laughed the idea to acorn. She must banish such nervous fancies ; for, in truth, nothing could be farther from the facts. A little local inflammation, a little swelling, a little stiffness, and all was summed up. These symptoms had now so far abated that by the time she should receive this letter, he would have recovered the full use of his band. ‘ There I’ said Stefano Beni. * Did I not tell you so! If you want a downright answer, you must ask a downright question. There’s nothing like plain dealing. And now, my little girl, I suppose your heart is set at rest ?’

Yes; her heart was set at rest. Once again she rejoiced in the blessed assurance of her lover’s safety; once again, too, she formally acquitted ’Tonio Moretti. And yet. . . —And yet, even now, Cesare Donato had not told her how he came by his accident ! Chapter lv. ‘ -FRIEND PETER.’ We have seen how the winter months were spent by Lancelot Brackenbury ; how, living a hermit-life among the ruins of Old Court, he drudged manfully through his multitudinous duties, and became, in very act and deed, his brother’s successor. For Winifred Savage, the time went by more monotonously, but, on the whole, more happily. The woman’s patience, the woman’s adaptability to circumstances, were hers. She found herself, as it were, landed for awhile upon a qniet plateau whence she could look back upon the years that were gone, and forward to the years that were to come. And though her burden hitherto had not been ezceptially heavy, nor her path very thickly set with thorns ; yet some there had been, and some weight of burden ; and at all events she was weary. So, being, weary, she found it good and pleasant thus to rest awhile half-way between the old life and the new. And in what a peaceful round the days and weeks slipped by, repeating themselves like the refrain of an old-fashioned melody J There "were |the morning hours cf art-study in Herr Kruger's ‘ atelier' ; the afternoon walks with Eatchen and Brenda, varied now and then, when the snow was hard, by a sleighing excursion to Schleissfaeim or Schwaneck; the quiet evenings given up to reading, working, and music ; the cheerful meals; the simple worship at morn and even, when with a prayer was begun, and with a hymn was ended, the labor of the day. But Winifred’s happiest hours were those which she spent In her own pretty room — that boudoir-studio, with its window looking to the Alps, which 1 anoelot had furnished with all things fair and fitting for her use. Here she loved to sit, reading the books he had given to her ; thinking of him; writing to him ; dreaming dreams of the huppy future; and enjoying a solitude that was never lonely. In that room, whichever way she turned, her eyes rested upon something either beautiful in itself, or beautiful in its association with beauty. On the walls, in plain black frames picked out with gold, hung a few good prints and etchings—the ‘ Belle Jardiniere’ of Raffaelle, Michael Angelo’s ‘ Vision of Ezekiel, ’ Titian’s ‘ Sacred and profane Love,’ a ‘ Coronation of the Virgin’ by Fra Angelico. Albert Dnrer’s ‘faint Jerome in his Study,’ Turner’s ‘Little Devil’s Bridge,’ and ‘ Norham Castle’ from the ‘Liber Studiorum.’ For sculpture, there was a cast of the Venus of Melos, in half life size ; a reduction of the * Torso of the Belvedere,’ colossal even in miniature, the well-known bust of Augustus in the bloom of his beautiful and serious boyhood ; the pathetic head of G-ermanicus, a mask of the Jupiter of Otricofi, and a cast of the terrible right hand of Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses.’ So much for the art that ennobled that homely upstairs room. For music, there was a little white wood cottage piano of Zurich make, and a pile of small volumes lettered Mozart, Badyn, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert. For read ing, a tiny bookcase stocked with such books as Lancelot was sure she either loved already, or would love when she knew them —Shakespeare first, then Milton, Spencer, Wordsworth, Homer and Plato in translation, Bacon’s and Macaulay’s Essays, some of Hazlitt, some of De Quincey, some of Leigh Bunt, Schlegel’s ‘ Dramatic Litora tuie,’ Sir Joshua Reynold’s ‘Discourses,’ Flaxman’s ‘Lectures on Sculpture,’ find the first two volumes (being all yet published) of a work called ‘ Modern Painters,’ about which thers was beginning to be much talk just now in the literary and artistic world. When to this catalogne are added the names those old friends whom Winifred had brought ■with her from The Grange—Dante, Aristo, White’s ‘Selborne,’Longfellow’s ‘Hyperion,’ Tennyson’s ‘ln Memoriam,’ and Lane's translation of ‘ The Arabian Nights’—it will be seen that she was sufficiently independent of Pastor Krentzmann’s learned shelves downstairs. Then, besides, her prints, and her casts, and her books, there was an ea iel for her use, when she should be disposed to work at home ; a writing table, a readingdesk, a lamp, chairs and a conch covered with shining chintz ; the inevitable German stova np in one corner ; and on a bracket between the windows, an elaborately carved Swiss clock, like an Oberland chalet, inhabited by the liveliest and most punctual of wooden cuckoos.

There are few pleasanter tasks than that o! guiding the footsteps'of one whom we dearly love; and Lancelot, while surrounding her with beautiful things, was in fact forming Winifred's taste in many matters of which till now she had known little or nothing. Her scanty education, and tho profound retirement in which her three and-twenty years of life had been spent, excluded her of necessity from the world of Art. r he heard no music at Langtrey Ora ge ; she saw no pictures j ihe had access to only a few books. And yet she was not ignorant. The books were few; bntit was surprising how much she had got out of them. It has often been said that to know one good book, and to know it thoroughly, is worth all the slight acquaintance with all the light literature in the world. Now Winifred Savage’s tow books wore of tho beat. She knew some of

them—Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton—pr* ttv nearly by heart; and to be fast friends with any of these three is in itself a liberal education.

She owed her intimacy with Milton to the classic taste of old Lord Brackenbury, in whose estimation, • the poet blind yet bold' stood second to none but Homer. He wae wont to say that he regarded the appreciation or non-appreciation of ‘Lycidas’ as the crucial test of a man’s ability to enjoy poetiy of the highest order; and he made it his espeoisl care so to educate Miss Savage’s taste that she should not only feel the majesty of Milton’s * mighty line’ in ‘Paradise Lost,’ but that she should also be sensible of the learned pathos of his Doric elegy Her copy of Milton was one of his many gifts, and it bore her name in his handwriting on the fly leaf. For her knowledge of Dante, on the other hand, she was indebted to Cuthberc Kraokenbnry’s rare Italian scholarship. At one time, while as yec their engagement was tacitly understood rather than formally ratified, Winifred used quite regularly to read and analyse, with the young man’s help, a page or two of the 1 Divina Comm dia’ every Wednesday afternoon; that being the day on which he was wont to pay his weekly visit at 'Che Grange. These analytical readings led to the loan of many books from the library at Brackenbury Court ; and Winifred, before she was seventeen, had read, or at all events skimmed, the majority of Guicciardini’s twenty, and Sismocdi's sixteen volumes ; to say nothing of Hallam and other writers on medioeval literature.

So mnoh for her Milton and her Dante. These came to her, as ‘the gifts of fortune,’ from without; but her Shakespeare, like reading and writing seemed to come ‘by nature.’ It .was, at all events, a homefound treasure. In the bottom of a dark and dusty cupboard in a little ground-floor room where the old Squire, Winifred's grandfather, was wont erewhile to keep his accounts, bis fishing-tackle his pipes, tobacco, whips, spur, ammunition, top-boots, and a miscellaneous collection of foxes, brushes, stuffed birds, and the like, she one day found a precious store of long-forgotten books—some odd volumes of the ‘Tatler’ and ‘Spectator,’ Boswell’s ‘life of Johnson,’ a bundle of early numbers of ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine,’ a much-thumbed Walton and Cotton’s ‘ Compleat Angler,’ and a battered copy of the second Folio of Shakespeare, dated 1632. It was such a shabby old book, so worm-eaten, dog-eared and cropped, that it was a wonder it had not long since gone to light the fires, or old Squire Langtrey’a pipes. The margins too were scribbled all over in places with childish pencillings ; while hero and there, laid carefully away between the leaves, were scraps of ancient news-paper-cuttings, and receipts for the making of frumenty, syllabnbs, and such other dainties, written in faint brown ink by the hands of some good housewife of perhaps more than a century ago. The book, however, was veiy nearly perfect. It wanted only a page or two at the end. and half the title, The rare old portrait was there; and Ben Johnson’s verses on the opposite leaf were not mFsing, Lord Brackenbury, when he found his oral, was not richer than Winifred Savage when she nnearthed that dilapidated Shakespeare. It may, Indeed, be doubted If the possession of the coal ever gave to any of its successive owners one tithe of the delight and enjoyment with which the lonely child (then little more than nine years of age). found herself suddenly landed on Proapero’a enchanted isle, threading the green thickets of the Forest of Arden, listening to the hammering of the armourer in the camp at Aglnoourt, and to the melancholy wash of the waves where Timon lay * entomb’d upon the very hem o' the sea.’ For years—that is to say, up to the time when the great fend was made np, and books from Brackenbury Court began to find their way to Langtrey Grange—that volume represented her whole stock of imaginative literature. Story-books, poetry-books, picture-books, she had none. While other girls of her age were reading Miss Edgeworth and Joanna Baillie, Winifred Savage was deep in Macbeth and King Lear.

Thus it came to pass that she was very well-read and very ill educated. She conid analyse Dante, but her ignorance of decimals was appalling ; and she knew nothing of ‘dancing, deportment, and the use of globes. ’ Though not, perhaps, quite duly sensible of the enormity of these shortcomings, the girl worked hard all through that winter in Munich. German she acquired, almost without being aware of it, and although It is not given to oven a heaven-born genius to master the methods of art in three months, she, at all events, learned to express rounded form in outline, and penetrated the myaterial of light, tone, and shadow. Above all, she acquired the invaluable art of seeing correctly ; an art which most people fancy they possess, but which is in truth as rare as that of right thinking. For some weeks Herr Kruger set his new pupil to draw from casts; and it was not till the crocnses lifted their yellow and purple heads above the snow In his neglected garden, that he one day put a lump of clay and some modelling tools before her, and bade her try to copy Michael Angelo’s mask of a satyr. Eor this attempt she got some praise, which on Herr Kruger's lips was not common.

‘Go on as you have begun, ’ he said, ‘ and you may compete at the Knnst-Verein, next autumn.’

Her fellow students marvelled that, being thus encouraged, the young ‘ Englanderinn’ only looked pleased, and was silent. ‘ Had the master said that to me, I should have kissed his hand, and wept for joy I* said one.

‘ She did not utter a word 1' exclaimed another.

‘ Ach Himmel! these English are as cold as ice, and as proud as Lucifer!’ chimed in a third.

'But Winifred knew that long enough before the time for that autumn competition should come round, she would have ceased to occupy an easel in Herr Kruger's studio. And thus the winter and the early spring passed peacefully and pro Stably by. A happy time, barren of incident, rich in culture, fruitful in promise 1 Once, and only once, did. anything happen worthy to bo called an ‘ eventand that was whan a plain open carriage drove up one bleak afternoon in March, and sot dow n two gentlemen at the artist’s door. They came apparently to inspect the class. One of these gentlemen was very deaf and fussy, and had an ear-splitting voice and a big knob on his forehead. The other—(Winifred became crimson when she saw him) —was that same, that very same, little old gentleman who had, on a certain neverto bo-forgotten occasion, emerged so inopportunely from behind a big tree by the riverside in the Englischer Garten, He looked as bright and shrivelled-up as ever, and wore the same scrap of ribbon in his button hole. When the class-room door was thrown open, and Herr Kruger appeared, ushering in the visitors, the students rose as by a common impulse. But the deaf gentleman shook his head, and protested impatiently. fTo be continued on Saturday.)