The Infidel

Chapter I.

GRUB-STREET SCRIBBLERS.

FATHER and daughter worked together at the trade of letters, in the days when George II. was king and Grub Street was a reality. For them literature was indeed a trade, since William Thornton wrote only what the booksellers wanted, and adjusted the supply to the demand. No sudden inspirations, no freaks of a vagabond fancy ever distracted him from the question of bread and cheese; so many sides of letter-paper to produce so many pounds. He wrote everything. He contributed verse as well as prose to the Gentleman’s Magazine, and had been the winner of one of those prizes which the liberal Mr. Cave offered for the best poem sent to him. Nothing came amiss to his facile pen. In politics he was strong—on either side. He could write for or against any measure, and had condemned and applauded the same politicians in fiery letters above different aliases, anticipating by the vehemence of his praises the coming guineas. He wrote history or natural history for the instruction of youth, not so well as Goldsmith, but with a glib directness that served. He wrote philosophy for the sick-bed of old age, and romance to feed the dreams of the lovers. He stole from the French, the Spaniards, the Italians, and turned Latin epigrams into English jests. He burned incense before any altar, and had written much that was base and unworthy when the fancy of the town set that way, and a ribald pen was at a premium. He had written for the theatres with fair success, and his manuscript sermons at a crown apiece found a ready market.

Yes, Mr. Thornton wrote sermons—he, the unfrocked priest, the audacious infidel, who believed in nothing better than this earth upon which he and his kindred worms were crawling; nothing to come after the tolling bell, no recompense for sorrows here, no reunion with the beloved dead—only the sexton and the spade and the forgotten grave.

It was eighteen years since his young wife had died and left him with an infant daughter—this very Antonia, his stay and comfort now, his indefatigable helper, his Mercury, tripping with light foot between his lodgings and the booksellers’ or the newspaper offices, to carry his copy or to sue for a guinea or two in advance for work to be done.

When his wife died he was curate-in-charge of a remote Lincolnshire parish, not twenty miles from that watery region at the mouth of the Humber, that Epworth which John Wesley’s renown had glorified. Here in this lonely place, after two years of widowerhood, a great trouble had fallen upon him. He always recurred to it with the air of a martyr, and pitied himself profoundly, as one more sinned against than sinning.

A farmer’s daughter, a strapping wench of eighteen, had induced him to elope with her. This Adam ever described Eve as the initiator of his fall.

They went to London together, meaning to sail for Jersey in a trading smack, which left the docks for that fertile island twice in a month. The damsel was of years of discretion, and the elopement was no felony; but it happened awkwardly for the parson that she carried her father’s cash box with her, containing some £200, upon which Mr. Thornton was to start a dairy farm. They were hotly pursued by the infuriated father, and were arrested in London as they were stepping on board the Jersey smack, and Thornton was caught with the cash on his person.

He swore he believed it to be the girl’s money; and she swore she had earned it in her father’s dairy—that, for saving, ’twas she had saved every penny of it. This plea lightened the sentence, but did not acquit either prisoner. The girl was sent to Bridewell for a year, and the parson was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; but by the advocacy of powerful friends, and by the help of a fine manner, an unctuous piety, and general good conduct, he was restored to the world at the end of the second year—a happy escape in an age when the gifted Dr. Dodd died for a single slip of the pen and when the pettiest petty larceny meant hanging.

Having bored himself to death by an assumed sanctimony for two years, Thornton came out of the house of bondage a rank atheist, a scoffer at all things holy, a scorner of all men who called themselves Christians. To him they seemed as contemptible as he had felt himself in his hypocrisy. Did any of them believe? Yes, the imbeciles and hysterical women, the ignorant masses of fifty years ago had believed in witchcraft and the ubiquitous devil as implicity as they now believed in justification by faith and the new birth. But that men of brains—an intellectual giant like Sam Johnson, for instance—could kneel in dusty city churches Sunday after Sunday and search the Scriptures for the promise of life immortal! Pah! What could Voltaire, the enlightened, think of such a time-serving hypocrisy, except that the thing paid?

It pays, sir, said Thornton, when he and his little knot of friends discussed the great dictionary-maker in a tavern parlor which they called The Portico, and which they fondly hoped to make as famous as the Scribblers’ Club, which Swift founded, and where he and Oxford and Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot talked grandly of abstract things. The talk in The Portico was ever of persons, and mostly scandalous, the gangrene of envy devouring the minds of men whose lives had been failures.

The wife of Thornton’s advocate, who was well off and childless, had taken compassion on the sinner’s three-year-old daughter, and had carried the little Antonia to her cottage at Windsor, where the child was well cared for by the old housekeeper who had charge of the barrister’s rural retreat. It was a cottage orne in a spacious garden adjoining Windsor Forest, and to-day, in her twentieth year, Antonia looked back upon that lost paradise with a fond longing. She had often urged her father to take her to see the kind friend whose bright young face she sometimes saw in her dreams, the very color of whose gowns she remembered, but he always put her off with an excuse. The advocate had risen to distinction, he and his wife were fine people now, and Mr. Thornton would not exhibit his shabby gentility in any such company. He had been grateful for so beneficent a service at the time of his captivity, and had expatiated upon his thankfulness on three sides of letter paper, blotted with real tears; but his virtues were impulses rather than qualities of mind, and he had soon forgotten how much he owed the K. C.’s tender-hearted wife. Providence had been good to her, as to the mother of Samuel, and she had sons and daughters of her own now.

Antonia knew that her father had been in prison. He was too self-compassionate to refrain from bewailing past sufferings and too lazy-brained to originate and sustain any plausible fiction to account for those two years in which his child had not seen his face. But he had been consistently reticent as to the offence which he had expiated, and Antonia supposed it to be of a political nature—some Jacobite plot in which he had got himself entangled.

From her sixth year to her seventeenth she had been her father’s companion, at first his charge—and rather an onerous one, as it seemed to the hack scribbler—a charge to be shared with, and finally shunted on to the shoulders of, any good-natured landlady who, in her own parlance, took to the child.

Thornton was so far considerate of parental duty that, having found an honest and kindly matron in Rupert’s Buildings, St. Martin’s Lane, he left off shifting his tent and established himself for life, as he told her, on her second floor, and confided the little girl almost wholly to her charge. She had one daughter five years older than Antonia, who was at school all day, leaving the basement of the house silent and empty of youthful company, and Mrs. Potter welcomed the lovely little face as a sunny presence in her dull parlor. She taught Antonia—shortened to Tonia—her letters, and taught her to dust the poor little cups and ornaments of willow pattern Worcester china, and to keep the hearth trimly swept and rub the brass fer der—taught her all manner of little services which the child loved to perform. She was what people called an old-fashioned child; for having never lived with other children, she had no loud, boisterous ways, and her voice was never shrill and ear-piercing. All she had learned or observed had been the ways of grown-up people. From the time she was ten years old she was able to be of use to her father. She had gone on errands in the immediate neighborhood for Mrs. Potter. Thornton sent her further afield to carry copy to a printer, or a letter to a bookseller, with many instructions as to how to ask her way at every turn, and to be careful in crossing the street. Mrs. Potter shuddered at these journeys to Fleet Street or St. Paul’s churchyard, and it seemed a wonder to her that the child came back alive, but she stood in too much awe of her lodger’s learning and importance to question his conduct; and when Antonia entered her teens she had all the discretion of a woman, and was able to take care of her father, and to copy his hurried scrawl in her own neat penmanship, when he had written against time in a kind of shorthand of his own, with contractions which Antonia soon mastered. The education of his daughter was the one duty that Thornton had never shirked. Hack scribbler as he was, he loved books for their own sake, and he loved imparting knowledge to a child whose quick appreciation lightened the task and made it a relaxation. He gave her of his best, thinking that he did her a service in teaching her to despise the beliefs that so many of her fellow-creatures cherished, ranking the Christian religion with every hideous superstition of the dark ages, as only a little better than the delusions of man-eating savages in un unexplored Africa, or those sunlit isles where Cook was slaughtered.

This man was, perhaps, a natural product of that dark age which went before the great revival—the age when not to be a deist and a scoffer was to be out of the fashion. He had been an ordained clergyman of the Church of England, taking up that trade as he took up the trade of letters, for bread and cheese. The younger son of a well-born Yorkshire squire, he had been a profligate and a spendthrift at Oxford, but was clever enough to get a degree, and to scrape through his ordination. As he had never troubled himself about spiritual questions, and knew no more theology than sufficed to satisfy an indulgent bishop, he had hardly considered the depth of his hypocrisy when he tendered himself as a shepherd of souls. He had a fluent pen, and could write a telling sermon, when it was worth his while; but original eloquence was wasted upon his bovine flock in Lincolnshire, and he generally read them any old printed sermon that came to hand among the rubbish heap of his book-shelves. He migrated from one curacy to another, and from one farm-house to another, drinking with the farmers, hunting with the squires; diversified this dull round with a year or two on the Continent as bear leader to a wealthy merchant’s son and heir; brought home an Italian wife, and while she lived was tolerably constant and tolerably sober. That brief span of wedded life, with a woman he fondly loved, made the one stage in his life journey to which he might have looked back without self-reproach.

He was delighted with his daughter’s quick intellect and growing love for books. She began to help him almost as soon as she could write, and now in her twentieth year father and daughter seemed upon an intellectual level.

Nature has been generous to her, he told his chums at The Portico. She has her mother’s beauty and my brains.

Let’s hope she’ll never have your swallow for gin punch, Bill, was the retort, that being the favorite form of refreshment in The Portico room at the Red Lion.

Nay, she inherits sobriety also from her mother, whose diet was as temperate as a wood nymph’s.

His eyes grew dim as he thought of the wife long dead—the confiding girl he had carried from her home among the vineyards and gardens of the sunny hillside above Bellagio to the dismal Lincolnshire parsonage, between gray marsh and sluggish river. He had brought her to dreariness and penury, and to a climate that killed her. Nothing but gin punch could ever drown those sorrowful memories; so ’twas no wonder Thornton took more than his share of the bowl. His companions were his juniors for the most part, and his inferiors in education. He was the Socrates of this vulgar academy, and his disciples looked up to him.

The shabby second floor in Rupert’s Buildings was Antonia’s only idea of home. Her own eerie was on the floor above—a roomy garret, with a casement window in the sloping roof, a window that seemed to command all London, for she could see Westminster Abbey and the houses of Parliament, and across the river to the more rustic-looking streets and lanes on the southern shore. She loved her garret for the sake of that window, which had a broad stone sill where she kept her garden of stocks and pansies, pinks and cowslips, maintained with the help of an occasional shilling from her father.

The sitting-room was furnished with things that had once been good, for Mrs. Potter was one of those many hermits in the great city who had seen better days. She was above the common order of landladies, and kept her house as clean as a house in Rupert’s Buildings could be kept. Tidiness was out of the question in any room inhabited by William Thornton, whose books and papers accumulated upon every available table or ledge, and were never to be moved on pain of his severe displeasure. It was only by much coaxing that his daughter could secure the privilege of a writing-table to herself. He declared that the removal of a single printer’s proof might be his ruin, or even the ruin of the newspaper for which it was intended.

Such as her home was, Antonia was content with it. Such as her life was, she bore it patiently, unsustained by any hope of a happier life in a world to come—unsustained by the conviction that by her industry and cheerfulness she was pleasing God.

She knew that there were homes in which life looked brighter than it could in Rupert’s Buildings. She walked with her father in the evening streets sometimes when his empty pockets and his score at the Red Lion forbade the pleasures of The Portico. She knew the aspect of houses in Pall Mall and St. James Square, in Arlington Street and Piccadilly; heard the sound of fiddles and French horns through open windows, light music and light laughter; caught glimpses of inner splendors through hall doors; saw coaches and chairs setting down gay company, a street crowded with link-boys and running footmen. She knew that in this London, within a quarter of a mile of her garret, there was a life to which she must ever remain a stranger—a life of luxury and pleasure, led by the high born and the wealthy.

Sometimes when her father was in a sentimental mood he would tell her of his grandfather’s magnificence at the family-seat near York; would paint the glories of a country house with an acre and a half of roof, the stacks of silver plate, and a perpetual flow of visitors, Gargantuan hunt breakfasts, hunters and coach horses without number. He exceeded the limits of actual fact, perhaps, in these reminiscences. The magnificence had all vanished away, the land was sold, the plate was melted, not one of the immemorial oaks was left to show where the park had been; but Tonia was never tired of hearing of those prosperous years, and was glad to think she came of people who were magnates in the land.

Chapter II.

MISS LESTER, OF THE PATENT THEATRES.

BESIDES Mrs. Potter, to whom she was warmly attached, Antonia had one friend, an actress at Drury Lane, who had acted in her father’s comedy of How to Please Her, and who had made his daughter’s acquaintance at the wings while his play was in progress. Patty Lester was, perhaps, hardly the kind of person a careful father would have chosen for his youthful daughter’s bosom friend, for Patty was of the world worldly, and had somewhat lax notions of morality, though there was nothing to be said against her personally. No nobleman’s name had ever been bracketed with hers in the newspapers, nor had her character suffered from any intrigue with a brother actor. But she gave herself no airs of superiority over her less virtuous sisters, nor was she averse to the frivolous attentions and the trifling gifts of those ancient beaux and juvenile macaronis who fluttered at the side-scenes and got in the way of the stage carpenters.

Thornton had not reared his daughter in Arcadian ignorance of evil, and he had no fear of her being influenced by Miss Lester’s easy views of conduct.

The girl is as honest as any woman in England, but she is not a lady, he told Antonia, and I don’t want you to imitate her. But she has a warm heart, and is always good company, so I see no objection to your taking a dish of tea with her at her lodgings once in a way.

This once in a way came to be once or twice a week, for Miss Lester’s parlor was all that Antonia knew of gayety, and was a relief from the monotony of literary toil. Dearly as she loved to assist her father’s labors, there came an hour in the day when the aching hand dropped on the manuscript or the tired eyes swam above the closely printed page, and then it was pleasant to put on her hat and run to the Piazza, where Patty was mostly to be found at home between the morning’s rehearsal and the night performance. Her lodgings were on a second floor overlooking the movement and gayety of Covent Garden, where the noise of the wagons bringing asparagus from Mortlake and strawberries from Isleworth used to sound in her dreams hours before the indolent actress opened her eyes upon the world of reality.

She was at home this windy March afternoon, squatting on the hearth-rug toasting muffins, when Miss Thornton knocked at her door.

Come in, if you’re Tonia, she cried. Stay out if you’re an odious man.

I doubt you expect some odious man, said Tonia, as she entered, or you wouldn’t say that.

I never know when not to expect ’em, child. There are three or four of my devoted admirers audacious enough to think themselves always welcome to drop in for a dish of tea; indeed, one of ’em has a claim for my civility, for he is in the India trade, and keeps me in gunpowder and bohea. But ’tis only General Henderson I expect this afternoon—him that gave me my silver canister, added Patty, who never troubled about grammar.

I would rather be without the canister than plagued by that old man’s company, said Tonia.

"Oh, you are hard to please—unless ’tis some scholar with his mouth full of book talk! I find the general vastly entertaining. Sure he knows everybody in London, and everything that is doing or going to be done. He keeps me aw courrong," concluded Patty, whose French was on a par with her English.

She rose from the hearth, with her muffin smoking at the end of a long tin toasting fork. Her parlor was full of incongruities—silver, tea-canister, china cups and saucers glorified by sprawling red and blue dragons, an old mahogany tea-board and pewter spoons, a blue satin negligee hanging over the back of a chair, and open powder-box on the side-table. The furniture was fine but shabby—the sort of fine shabbiness that satisfied the landlady’s clients, who were mostly from the two patent theatres. The house had a renown for being comfortable and easy to live in—no nonsense about early hours or quiet habits.

Prythee make the tea while I butter the muffins, said Patty. The kettle is on the boil. But take your hat off before you settle about it. Ah, what glorious hair! she said, as Antonia threw off the poor little gypsy hat; and to think that mine is fiery red!

Nay, ’tis but a bright auburn. I heard your old general call it a trap for sunbeams. ’Tis far prettier than this inky black stuff of mine.

Antonia wore no powder, and the wavy masses of her hair were bound into a scarlet snood that set off their raven gloss. He complexion was of a marble whiteness, with no more carnation than served to show she was a woman and not a statue. Her eyes, by some freak of heredity, were not black, like her mother’s—whom she resembled in every other feature—but of a sapphire blue, the blue of Irish eyes, luminous yet soft, changeful, capricious, capable of dazzling joyousness, of profoundest melancholy. Brown-eyed, auburn-headed Patty looked at her young friend with an admiration which would have been envious had she been capable of ill-nature.

How confoundedly handsome you are today! she exclaimed; and in that gown, too! I think the shabbier your clothes are the lovelier you look. You’ll be cutting me out with my old general.

Your general has seen me a dozen times, and thinks no more of me than if I were a plaster image.

Because you never open your lips before company, except to say yes or no, like a long-headed witness in the box. I wonder you don’t go on the stage, Tonia. If you were ever so stupid at the trade your looks would get you a hearing and a salary.

Am I really handsome? Tonia asked with calm wonder.

She had been somewhat troubled of late by the too florid compliments of booksellers and their assistants, whom she saw on her father’s business; but she concluded it was their way of affecting gallantry with every woman under fifty. She had a temper that repelled disagreeable attentions, and kept the boldest admirer at arm’s length.

Handsome? You are the most beautiful creature I ever saw, and I would chop ten years off my old age to be as handsome, though most folks calls me a pretty woman, added Patty, bridling a little, and pursing up a cherry mouth.

She was a pink-and-white girl, with a complexion like new milk, and cheeks like cabbage-roses. She had a supple waist, plump shoulders, and a neat foot and ankle, and was a capable actress in all secondary characters. She couldn’t carry a great playhouse on her shoulders, or make a dull play seem inspired, as Mrs. Pritchard could; or take the town by storm as Juliet, like Miss Bellamy.

Well, I doubt my looks will ever win me a fortune; but I hope I may earn money from the booksellers before long, as father does.

Sure ’tis a drudging life—and you’d be happier in the theatre.

Not I, Patty. I should be miserable away from my books, and not to be my own mistress. I work hard, and tramp to the city sometimes when my feet are weary of the stones; but father and I are free creatures, and our evenings are our own.

Precious dull evenings, said Patty, with her elbows on the table and her face beaming at her friend. "Have a bit more muffin. I wonder you’re not awnweed to death."

"I do feel a little triste sometimes, when the wind howls in the chimney, and every one in the house but me is in bed, and I have been alone all the evening."

Which you are always.

Father has to go to his club to hear the news. And ’tis his only recreation. But though I love my books, and to sit with my feet on the fender and read Shakespeare, I should love just once in a way to see what people are like; the women I see through their open windows on summer nights—such handsome faces, such flashing jewels, and with snowy feathers nodding over their powdered heads——

You should see them at Ranelagh. Why does not your father take you to Ranelagh? He could get a ticket from one of the fine gentlemen whose speeches he writes. I saw him talking to Lord Kilrush in the wings the other night.

Who is Lord Kilrush?

One of the finest gentlemen in town, and a favorite with all the women, though he is nearer fifty than forty.

An old man?

You would call him so, said Patty, with a sigh, conscious of her nine and twenty years. He’d give your father a ticket for Ranelagh, I’ll warrant.

Tonia looked at her brown stuff gown, and laughed the laugh of scorn.

Ranelagh, in this gown! she said.

You should wear one of mine.

Good dear, ’twould not reach my ankles!

I grant there’s overmuch of you. Little David called you the Anakim Venus when he caught sight of you at the side scenes. ‘Who’s that magnificent giantess?’ he asked.

The people of Lilliput took Captain Gulliver for a giant and the Brobdingnagians thought him a dwarf. ’Tis a question of comparison, replied Tonia, huffed at the manager’s criticism.

Nay, don’t be vexed, child. ’Tis a feather in your cap for Garrick to be conscious you existed. Well, if Ranelagh won’t suit, there is Mrs. Mandalay’s dancing-room. She has a ball twice a week in the season, and a masquerade once a fortnight. You can borrow a domino from the costumer in the Piazza for the outlay of half a dozen shillings.

Do the women of fashion go to Mrs. Mandalay’s?

All the town goes there.

Then I’ll beg my father to take me. I am helping him with his new comedy, and I want to see what modish people are like—off the stage.

Not half so witty as they are on it. Is there a part for me in the new play?

Patty would have asked that question of Shakespeare’s ghost had he returned to earth to write a new Hamlet. It was her only idea in association with the drama.

Indeed, Patty, there is an impudent romp of quality you would act to perfection.

I love a romp, cried Patty, clapping her hands. Give me a pinafore and a pair of scarlet shoes, and I am on fire with genius. I hope David will bring out your dad’s play, and that ’twill run a month.

If it did he would give me a silk gown, and I might see Ranelagh.

He is not a bad father, is he, Tonia?

Bad! There was never a kinder father.

But he lets you work hard.

I love the work next best to him that sets me to it.

And he has been your only schoolmaster, and you are clever enough to frighten a simpleton like me.

Nay, Patty, you are the cleverest, for you can do things—act, sing, dance. Mine is only book-learning; but such as it is, I owe it all to my father.

I hate books. ’Twas as much as I could do to learn to read. But there’s one matter in which your father has been unkind to you.

No, no—in nothing.

Yes, said Patty, shaking her head solemnly, he has brought you up an atheist, never to go to church, not even on Christmas day; and to read Voltaire—with a shudder.

Do you go to church, Patty? ’Tis handy enough to your lodgings.

Oh, I’m too tired of a Sunday morning, after acting six nights in a week; for if Bellamy and Pritchard are out of the bill and going out a-visiting and strutting and grimacing in fine company, there’s always a part for a scrub like me; and if I’m not in the play I’m in the burletta.

And do you think you’re any wickeder for not going to church twice every Sunday?

I always go at Christmas and at Easter, protested Patty, and I feel myself a better woman for going. You’ve been brought up to hate religion.

No, Patty, only to hate the fuss that’s made about it, and the cruelties men have done to each other, ever since the world began, in its name.

I wouldn’t read Voltaire if I were you, said Patty. The general told me it was an impious, indecent book.

Voltaire is the author of more than forty books, Patty.

Oh, is it an author? I thought ’twas the name of a novel like ‘Tom Jones,’ only more impudent.

There came a knock at the door, and this time Patty knew it was her old general.

Stop out, beast! she cried. There’s nobody at home to an old fool! upon which courteous greeting the ancient warrior entered smiling.

Was there ever such a witty puss? he exclaimed. I kiss Mrs. Grimalkin’s velvet paw. Pray, how many mice has Minette crunched since breakfast?

His favorite jest was to attribute feline attributes to Patty, whose appreciation of his humor rose or fell in unison with his generosity. A pair of white gloves worked with silver thread or a handsome ribbon for her hair secured her laughter and applause.

To-day Patty’s keen glance showed her that the general was empty-handed. He had not brought her so much as a violet posy. He saluted Antonia with his stateliest bow, blinking at her curiously, but too short-sighted to be aware of her beauty in the dim twilight of the parlor, where evening shadows were creeping over the panelled walls.

Patty set the kettle on the fire and washed out the little china teapot, while she talked to her ancient admirer. He liked to watch her kitten-like movements, her trim, sprightly ways, to take a cup of weak tea from her hand, and to tell her his news of the town, which was mostly wrong, but which she always believed. She thought him a foolish old person, but the pink of fashion. His talk was a diluted edition of the news we read in Walpole’s letters—talk of St. James’ and Leicester House, of the old king and his grandson, newly created Prince of Wales, of the widowed princess and Lord Bute, of a score of patrician belles whose histories were more or less scandalous, and of those two young women from Dublin, the penniless Gunnings, whose beauty had set the town in a blaze—sisters so equal in perfection that no two people were of a mind as to which was the handsomer.

Tonia had met the general often, and knew his capacity for being interesting. She rose and bade her friend good-by.

Nay, child, ’tis ill manners to leave me directly I have company. The general and I have no secrets.

My Minette is a cautious puss, and will never confess to the singing birds she has killed, said the dodderer.

Tonia protested that her father would be at home and wanting her. She saluted the soldier with her stateliest courtesy, and departed with the resolute aplomb of a duchess.

Your friend’s grand manners go ill with her shabby gown, said the general. With her fine figure she should do well on the stage.

There is too much of her, general. She is too tall by a head for an actress. ’Tis delicate little women look best behind the lamps.

Thornton was fond of his daughter, and had never said an unkind word to her; but he had no scruples about letting her work for him, having a fixed idea that youth has an inexhaustible fund of health and strength upon which age can never overdraw. He was proud of her mental powers, and believed that to help a hack scribbler with his multifarious contributions to magazines and newspapers was the finest education possible for her. If they went to the playhouse together ’twas she who wrote a critique on the players next morning, while her father slept. Dramatic criticism in those days was but scurvily treated by the press, and Tonia was apt to expatiate beyond the limits allowed by an editor, and was mortified to see her opinions reduced to the baldest comment.

She talked to her father of Mrs. Mandalay’s dancing-rooms. She knew there was such a place, but doubted whether ’twas a reputable resort. He promised to make inquiries, and thus delayed matters, without the unkindness of a refusal. Tonia was helping him with a comedy for Drury Lane—indeed, was writing the whole play, his part of the work consisting chiefly in running his pen across Tonia’s scenes, and bidding her write them again in accord with his suggestions, which she did with equal meekness and facility. He grew a little lazier every day as he discovered his daughter’s talent, and encouraged her to labor for him. He praised himself for having taught her Spanish, so that she had the best comedies in the world, as he thought, at her fingers’ ends.

It was for the sake of the comedy Tonia urged her desire to see the beau monde.

’Tis dreadful to write about people of fashion when one has never seen any, she said.

Nay, child, there’s no society in Europe will provide you better models than you’ll find in yonder duodecimos, her father would say, pointing to Congreve and Farquhar. Mrs. Millamant is a finer lady than any duchess in London.

Mrs. Millamant is half a century old, and says things that would make people hate her if she were alive now.

Faith, we are getting vastly genteel; and I suppose by-and-by we shall have plays as decently dull as Sam Richardson’s novels, without a joke or an oath from start to finish, protested Thornton.

It was more than a month after Tonia’s first appeal that her father came home to dinner one afternoon in high spirits and clapped a couple of tickets on the tablecloth by his daughter’s plate.

Look there! he cried. I seized my first chance of obliging you. There is a masked ball at Mrs. Mandalay’s to-night, and I waited upon my old friend, Lord Kilrush, on purpose to ask him for tickets; and now you have only to run to the costumer’s and borrow a domino and a mask, and see that there are no holes in your stockings.

I always mend my stockings before the holes come, Antonia said reproachfully.

You are an indefatigable wench! Come, there’s a guinea for you; perhaps you can squeeze a pair of court shoes out of it, as well as the hire of the domino.

You are a dear, dear, dearest dad! I’ll ask Patty to go to the costumer’s with me. She will get me a good pennyworth.

Chapter III.

AT MRS. MANDALAY’S ROOMS.

MRS. MANDALAY’S rooms were crowded, for Mrs. Mandalay’s patrons included all the varieties of London society—the noble, the rich, the clever, the dull, the openly vicious, the moderately virtuous, the audaciously disreputable, masked and unmasked; the outsiders who came from curiosity; the initiated who came from habit; dissolute youth, frivolous old age, men and boys who came because they thought this, and only this, was life; to rub shoulders with a motley mob, to move in an atmosphere of ribald jokes and foolish laughter, air charged with the electricity of potential bloodshed, since at any moment the ribald jest might lead to the insensate challenge; to drink deep of adulterated wines, fired with the alcohol that inspires evil passions and kills thought. These were the diversions that men and women sought at Mrs. Mandalay’s; and it was into this witch’s cauldron that William Thornton plunged his daughter, reckless of whom she met or what she saw and heard, for it was an axiom in his blighting philosophy that the more a young woman knew of the world she lived in, the more likely she was to steer a safe course through its shoals and quicksands.

Antonia looked with amazement upon the tawdry spectacle—dominos, diamonds, splendor and shabbiness, impudent faces plastered with white and red, beauty still fresh and young, boys still at the university, old men fitter for the hospital than for the drawing-room. Was this the dazzling scene she had longed for sometimes in the toilsome evenings, when her tired hand sank on the foolscap page, and in the pause of the squeaking quill she heard the clock ticking on the stairs and the cinders crumbling in the grate? She had longed for lighted rooms and joyous company, for the concerts, and dances, and dinners and suppers she read about in the Daily Journal, but the scenes her imagination had conjured up were as different from this as paradise from pandemonium.

Dancing was difficult in such a crowd, but there was a country dance going on to the music of an orchestra of