Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/392

28, 1860.] He stopped in his walk.

“You spoke of riding to Fallowfield. Is it possible you don’t want me to bring my friend here? There’s time to prevent it. One intrusion is enough.”

Judged by the Countess de Saldar, the behaviour of this well-born English maid was anything but well-bred. She absolutely shrugged her shoulders and marched a-head of him into the conservatory, where she began smelling at flowers and plucking off sere leaves.

In such cases a young man always follows; as her womanly instinct must have told her, for she expressed no surprise when she heard his voice two minutes afterwards.

“Rose! what have I done?”

“Nothing at all,” she said, sweeping her eyes over his a moment, and resting them on the plants.

“I must have uttered something that has displeased you?”

“No.”

Brief negatives are not reassuring to a lover’s uneasy mind.

“I beg you—be frank with me, Rose!”

A flame of the vanished fire shone in her face, but subsided, and she shook her head darkly.

“Have you any objection to my friend?”

Her fingers grew petulant with an orange-leaf. Eyeing a spot on it, she said, hesitatingly:

“Any friend of yours I am sure I should like to help. But—but I wish you wouldn’t associate with that—that kind of friend. It gives people all sorts of suspicions.”

Evan drew a sharp breath.

The voices of Master Alec and Miss Dorothy were heard shouting on the lawn. Alec gave Dorothy the slip and approached the conservatory on tip-toe, holding his hand out behind him to enjoin silence and secrecy. The pair could witness the scene through the glass before Evan spoke.

“What suspicions?” he asked, sternly.

Rose looked up, as if the harshness of his tone pleased her.

“Do you like red roses best, or white?” was her answer, moving to a couple of trees in pots.

“Can’t make up your mind?” she continued, and plucked both a white and red rose, saying:

“There! choose your colour by-and-by, and ask Juley to sew the one you choose in your button hole.”

She laid the roses in his hand, and walked away. She must have known that there was a burden of speech on his tongue. She saw him move to follow her, but this time she did not linger, and it may be inferred that she wished to hear no more.

defines a Congress to be “an appointed meeting for settlement of affairs between different nations;” and this description—like most of those given by our great lexicographer—is no less simple than true. Accordingly, to the superficial observer of human affairs, a Congress must appear the most artless thing in the world. What more natural indeed than that two races of people who quarrel, or are inclined to do so, should try to come to an agreement by naming arbitrators on either side, and leaving to them the settling of their dispute? There is nothing apparently more simple; and yet, unfortunately, history does not inform us of its having been acted on generally. The word Congress does not occur in the annals of Europe till about the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the ambassadors of the Pope, the Kaiser, the kings of France and of Arragonia, and other princes, assembled at Cambray to devise the best scheme for despoiling the flourishing republic of Venice. To make war, therefore, was the first object for which the plenipotentiaries of various States met together in council; and it did not seem to occur till long after to the rulers of Europe, that the same instruments might be employed for making peace. It was left to the most awful war which desolated the modern world to bring in its train this novel method for the settlement of international affairs. That great historical event commonly known as the Thirty Years’ War, may be said to have originated the idea of a Congress in the sense in which the word is now generally used.

The Thirty Years’ war was only eighteen years old, but nearly three millions of lives had already been sacrificed, and the whole of Central Europe, from the Vistula to the Rhine, and from the Alps to the Baltic Sea, was devastated by armies, when the first overtures of peace were made at the same time by three of the belligerent parties, the Pope, the Kaiser, and the King of Spain. The ambassadors of these three powers, for this purpose, assembled at Cologne in 1636, under the presidency of the Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Ginetti, and issued to the other participants in the struggle invitations to meet at the same place. But nobody came; the idea of a peace-congress being entirely new to the political mind of the rulers of Europe, and even suspected by some as a snare to entangle them into fresh aggressive alliances. France, above all, held the proposed Congress at Cologne to be, as her prime minister expressed it, “un piège pour la séparer de ses alliés;” and to prevent any possible evil effects, the same statesman invited Sweden to a counter meeting at Hamburg, where, after some delay, the representatives of those two powers met in 1638. Seeing this, the Kaiser, and King of Spain gave up their meeting at Cologne, and began treating separately with France, Sweden, and the Princes of the Empire; but as this did not lead to any result, fresh negotiations for a general European peace-meeting were attempted through the medium of a small and independent northern power, Denmark. Thus passed on several years, marked, like all the preceding ones, by uninterrupted carnage; and it was owing more to sheer exhaustion than to diplomatic reasoning, that at last nearly all the belligerent sovereigns consented to have their affairs settled by diplomatic interference. To this effect a preliminary treaty was signed at Hamburg, on December 25th, 1641, under the mediation of the King of Denmark, in which it was fixed that the long hoped-for Congress should