Parisian or the foreigner in general. Can any of my readers recall having seen a Frenchman at any time drinking a glass of pure water? Not altogether slight is my own experience of the Gaul, yet I cannot remember once seeing a glass of water unmixed with wine drunk anywhere except at the taps which are placed in the railway stations, and I have seldom seen it there. I have myself, meanwhile, both in France and Italy, been warned of the risk I ran in drinking water wholly unqualified with wine or spirit, and once or twice, notably in the Pyrenees, I have suffered for my neglect of friendly counsel. It is useless to mock us with water that is only fit to drink after boiling has rendered it unpalatable. At the present time the Londoner is worse off than Mynheer Van Dunck himself. That bibulous worthy confined himself, as regards water, it is stated, to what Roses will no longer grow in our suburban garden, and the famous imprecation of Caliban, As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed scarcely suggests a liquid To life less friendly or less cool to thirst than the dew which falls through the inky pall of London. "Heaven bless the man who first invented pure water!" Sancho Panza might have said, had he not preferred to bless the inventor of sleep. "Heaven bless the man who first secures us pure water!" thousands of thirsty Londoners are ready to cry. SYLVANUS URBAN. THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE. AUGUST 1880. QUEEN COPHETUA. BY R. E. FRANCILLON. M CHAPTER XX. For Thou, quoth he, shall be my Wife, Our Wedding shall appointed be, Come on, quoth he, and follow me She was in great Amaze : At last she spoke with trembling Voyce, And my Degree's so base. King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. RS. REID had lost no time in moving with her daughter into other and cheaper quarters, sending notice of their removal to the office in Fleet Street, with a letter for Alan to be forwarded thence at the first opportunity. It was at last becoming a little strange that no letter for home had come from Alan. But no mother was ever cleverer at making excuses for her son than Mrs. Reid. Helen's faults had always been sins, and Alan's, virtues. If Helen had been away from home and had not written to her for a month, she would have made up for her real indifference by irritating herself into anger. But if Alan had been silent for a whole year, she would have somehow managed to make it perfectly clear that VOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1796. K nothing could be more natural in a young man than to be heedless; and that if her heart wore itself out with anxious waiting, it would be no fault of Alan's. It had not always been with her quite like this. But Helen's secret walk with Gideon, and her lie to cover it, had brought about an atmosphere of watchful mistrust and suspicion between the mother and daughter; while the deep-lying consciousness, which would now and again rise up to trouble her, of the desperately well-meant wrong she was doing her son, forbade her any longer to be less than exaggeratedly over-just to him in all other things. She refused to complain of, or even to see, his silence. She never spoke of it to Helen; and if Helen ever mentioned it, she defended him eagerly. No doubt there were difficulties in the way of private correspondence which they at home could not divine. Very likely he was not allowed to make use of Field-posts except for public correspondence. Even if he were, it was not likely he would have time for writing more than he was obliged. No doubt, considering all things, his official letter-writing would take up every spare minute he could find out of the saddle. No news must always be good news. If anything happened, they would be sure to hear. At any rate, whatever was the cause, Alan might be unambitious, but nobody could charge him with so much as the barest capacity for being unkind—and to his own mother! Why, except in taking this wretched newspaper work at all, he had been only too tendernatured. A little more hardness-short of absolute selfishness—was what she wished to give him. And so, in short, his silence must be right, because he was he; and if he was ceasing to be quite the same he, then his silence must be even more right still. Her having to put all this before Helen obliged her, for conscious consistency's sake, to tell herself the same things when alone. But were her arguments likely to satisfy Helen, who certainly did not yield to her mother in fancying that she was the only person on earth who really knew Alan? Probably not-if she, like Gideon Skull, had not found means to know more of her brother's doings and movements than her mother might share with her, it was a fortunate thing that Mrs. Reid was so determined to be satisfied on merely general grounds. Gideon, we know, had arranged with Mr. Crowder to receive Alan's home letters. And Mrs. Reid, while shifting her quarters to escape from Gideon, had not forgotten to send her new address to the office where he now called almost daily. She could hardly have done better than send it to the Argus had she wished the very man to know it on whose account she had made the change. But still, how should that affect Helen? Whatever letters there might be from Alan, she had received none of them. It was certainly time for her to take matters into her own hands. Justice and Copleston might have drifted away into dreamland. But it was no dream that her mother was drifting and sinking into that worst slough of poverty which pride makes hopeless, and that, if she herself did nothing, Alan must be dragged down and kept down by the weight of two women in addition to his proper burdens. She had not more than half thought of all this while dreaming of winning back Copleston for Alan, for one cannot think while one is dreaming. And, unless she took her own life into her own hands, fully and once for all, she must make up her mind to surrender herself to the shame of helplessness all her days. Twenty times, at least, she had tried to bring round her mother to her views. Every time her answer had been the same—" You must not disgrace Alan by making him the brother of a servant or a shop-girl." To Helen, who did not know that, in the natural course of things, everything was to be made right again in little more than six years, and that nothing was really required but the exercise of patience and content-for Alan's sake-her mother's eternal answer began at last to look like the very insanity of pride. One afternoon, she did what I suppose not more than one girl in a hundred would have waited half so long to do. She wrote to her brother's best friend—a man who could help her if he would, considering his place in the world, and who would if he could, she felt sure. He who had found a crust for Alan, might find a crumb for her. It was not his fault that her mother objected to him on the score of his being some sort of a tradesman, nor was it hers that she was driven once more to deceive and to disobey. As for her own pride, she had parted with that at Temple Bar. And there is nothing to be ashamed of in disobeying and deceiving for their good the sick, the insane, the unreasonable, the obstinate, the proud, and all other weak creatures to whom only worse weakness allows their own way. It was not much of a letter. It made no mention of Copleston, and merely spoke of her pressing need to be put in the way of doing something to relieve Alan by supporting herself and, if possible, her mother also. Any girl might have written it to any man whom she had no reason for mistrusting-and everybody always trusted Gideon. After all, as she said to herself as she wrote it, if there was anything in the matter unlike the lady that Alan's sister ought to be, it was natural enough, seeing that she was not a lady. Ladies have surnames, and she had none. She would not allow herself the right to blush when she added, in a postscript, that she was obliged to act without her mother's knowledge, and that he must direct his answer to a post-office. In spite of the postscript, there are men enough. who know the world too well to have been taken in by such a letter. But Gideon knew but a quarter of the world. It was just what he had expected-nay, was it not just what he had been planning for? So his rather reckless bid of ten thousand a year in the bush for Helen Reid, and possibly for Copleston, had not been made in vain. She had spread out her net for him a little sooner than he had looked for-that was all. All the better. The golden bird desired nothing better than to be caught in any net she might choose to spread for him. He was pleased with himself; and he let himself enjoy the sensation of feeling his heart beat almost like a boy's at the prospect of a secret rendezvous with Helen. It was certainly first love in its way. He had not always looked forward to marriage as a condition of his purchasing a lady to add to his collection. But his actual knowledge, not only of the existence, but of the very place, of her father's will, had now made a regular and indisputable marriage a matter of business which justified his readiness to go even to such a length for the sake of Helen. Some people try to cover interest with romance, and make believe that they are marrying for true love when it is really for money. Gideon, on the contrary, tried to defend his first romance by good financial reasons, and made believe that he was going to marry for money's sake, when it was in truth for just as much love as he could feel. And, for that matter, his sort of love will go a great deal further than love of the sentimental sort ever dreams of going. Naturally, when Helen called at the post-office two days afterwards in hopes of finding an answer, she found none. But Gideon knew that women live very much in grooves, and that her hour for calling one day would be her hour for calling on the next day also. And so it happened that, when she called at the post-office on the next day, she again found no answer. But, when she had left the counter, she met Gideon himself at the door. He had not, thanks to Patience, seen her since their walk along Thames Bank, and he was not ill pleased to see her looking rather thin and worn. Victor Waldron, who had, after all, seen her but twice in his life, would have found it difficult to recognise in her either the girl overrunning with health, youth, and high spirits with whom he had been shut up in Hillswick church, or the scornful enemy who had declared war upon him in the churchyard. She |