And then, at last, for the Esmeralda. Lord Lisburn was not able so readily as Harold Vaughan-for to the latter the tender twilight between forgetting and remembering was made easy—to thrust from his heart the gipsy beggar girl whom he had loved more dearly than she ever knew or cared to know. It was he who, while he lived, kept her memory fresh and green. To have loved her strange caprices and mysterious ways as he had loved them meant to find no consolation thenceforth in common-place Janes or Lauras. I forget, though -the Esmeralda was the Esmeralda no longer. He must be the husband of no other than Pauline, in spite of all. He went back to his old craze, and sailed at last in the Pauline on that long-talked-of voyage, to find the North Pole. The sea is the home for sorry hearts, and Lord Lisburn felt the salt air sweep through him with a rush of rough welcome. It is there that Zelda's Fortune began, and there it shall end. After all, this has been but the story of a box of gold, like ninety-nine life-stories out of every hundred. It is from the metal which is at once the noblest and the ignoblest of all metals from which the romance of the future must compile its largest volume, unless it wishes to lose the higher fidelity to human nature which belongs to the free air of romance alone, and of which the polished mirror of realism reflects only the outer and unessential accidents. Avarice is as real a passion as love itself, and has not every human passion its ideal and poetical side? Do crimes, virtues, heroisms, self-sacrifices, all the paraphernalia of romance as it is not sentiments, but passions-spring from a forcing-house of rhyming words, or from a soil of gold? The money-box is no mere target for satire; it is an altar, round which the passions move in their discordant chorus. But the most awful part of the matter is, that while gold is a poetic reality it is no natural reality. There is a world in which it is false as well as a world in which it is true. Nor is this a mere truism. Zelda belonged to the ungolden world-her element was the golden age which was not of gold. Sylvia had been a natural woman—-a savage, if you please-suddenly thrown into the midst of the gold-wired cage in which we dwell. was the same last dying protest of the old romance against the new. What becomes of the lark when imprisoned in a golden cage, and made to feed on unchosen food? He mostly breaks his heart, I believe. He is bewildered with his wires, and will not understand they are gold, even if the neighbouring parrots, content with their captivity, prate to him that they are pure gold all day long. Zelda For the present, Mrs. Goldrick's money-chest, from which the soul was missing, and which had given so many people such a long and barren chase in such divergent directions and to such unconnected ends, was, so far as concerns all these things and more, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Lord Lisburn did not nail the Union Jack to the top of the North Pole. He did not meet Egin. He did not discover the earthly Paradise. But one morning he, or rather the mate of the Pauline for him, found a bottle, which contained a letter to a dead man. Lord Lisburn, at the first opportunity, sent it to Claudia Vaughan, the daughter of him to whom it was directed. "Honoured Sir," it began, "this is to acquaint you, if it comes to hand, that the Gustavus of Stockholm, in which I am a passenger, cannot live till morning in this weather. Meant to write from New York, but mayn't have a chance after now. Only chance left is to make a clean breast of it may stop the squall. If it does, I'll tear up this and write from New York when I have time." After telling, in unconnected and hurried sentences, how he had managed to get Mr. Brandt into serious complications while at Rotterdam, the writer went on: "Please tell mother I've got her gold and notes-all safe-only borrowed it out of her box to get here. If I get to New York, send back by degrees. Tell her to put in bank next time. Called off to the pumps. Really meant to write from New York and make, all square, and will-on my honour. Must go. Yours, Sir, obediently, Luke Goldrick. "For A. Brandt, Esq., St. Bavons, England." Thus there is an unseen player in every human game. If it had not been for a man whom we have never seen and of whom scarcely one of the rest had ever heard, all these lives would have differed as widely as if Marietta Romani herself had never been born. It is useless even to overlook our neighbours' hands. The game we have to play includes a FIFTY-THIRD CARD that needs must set all our most skilful reckoning wrong. Poor Zelda! She would never have died and have been buried among the unseen weeds, without so much as a word of thanks for dying to make others happy or a tear of real love, had they whom it concerned known what alone the spirits of the depths of ocean knew-that Zelda's Fortune had from the very beginning been at the bottom of the sea. Yet which of all these, from Claudia to Harold, from Harold to Zelda, from Zelda to the Cornflower, from the Cornflower to Aaron himself, had been faithless to the light that was his or hers? As the doggrel goes Praise no man till he dies? Nay, even so Blame no man while he lives, in aught. For lo, THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE. FEBRUARY, 1874. Far from the Madding Crowd. CHAPTER VI. THE FAIR: THE JOURNEY: THE FIRE. WO months passed away. We are brought on to a day in February, on which was held the yearly statute or hiring fair in the town of Casterbridge. At one end of the street stood from two to three hundred blithe and hearty labourers waiting upon Chance-all men of the stamp to whom labour suggests nothing worse than a wrestle with gravitation, and pleasure nothing better han a renunciation of the same. Among these, carters and waggoners were istinguished by having a piece of whip-cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance. In the crowd was an athletic young fellow of somewhat superior VOL. XXIX.-No. 170. 7. |