Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/701

 13, 1863.] She looked at him with a strange expression in her face.

“Think of me as you please,” she said; “think that I was in love with you, if you like.”

It was as if she had said to him, “Fall into a trap of your own setting, if you please. I am not base enough to lay such a snare for you.”

“Yes, Eleanor, you were false and mercenary. You were foolish, perhaps, as well; for I may be a rich man before very long. I may be master of the Woodlands property.property.” [sic]

“I don’t think you ever will inherit that fortune,” Eleanor said, slowly. “You talk of my being base and mercenary; you are at liberty to think so if you please. But have you never done base things for the sake of money, Launcelot Darrell?”

The young man’s face darkened.

“Nobody is immaculate, I dare say,” he answered. “I have been very poor, and have been obliged to do what the rest of the world does when its purse is empty.”

As Eleanor watched his moody face she suddenly remembered that this was not the way her cards must be played. The task which she had set herself to perform was not to be accomplished by candour and openness. This man had betrayed her father, and she must betray him.

She held out her hand to Launcelot Darrell.

“Let us be friends,” she said; “I wish to be friends with you.”

There were two witnesses looking on at this gesture. Laura Mason was standing by her guardian, watching the group beside the sundial. Gilbert Monckton had returned from town, and had come into the garden in search of his wife.

“They sent me away from them,” Laura said, as her guardian looked at Launcelot and Eleanor. “He had something particular to say to her; so I wasn’t to hear it, and they sent me away. You’ll ask him to dinner, I suppose?”

“No,” answered the lawyer, sharply.

Launcelot Darrell held Eleanor’s hand some moments before he released it.

“I wish to be friends with you, Mr. Darrell,” she said; “I’ll come to Hazlewood to-morrow to see your pictures, if you please. I want to see how the Rosalind and Celia goes on.”

She hated herself for her hypocrisy. Every generous impulse of her soul revolted against her falsehood. But these things were only a natural part of the unnatural task which she had set herself to perform.

Whitsuntide holidays, and the news which has distinguished them, have brought to my mind the changes which have occurred since the short holidays—Easter and Whitsuntide—of my school days. In the early years of the century these were the seasons for enjoying favourite books; and in households where there was a bookish boy, he might be seen (unless he vanished to an attic, or into the orchard) lying on his stomach on a sofa, or on three chairs, devouring volume after volume, at a rate never attained in after life. In poetry the book was probably “Thalaba,”—the natural introduction then to the poetry reading of one’s life. If not poetry, it was pretty sure to be Mungo Park’s Travels. Most old people say that they have known nothing since comparable to the interest of that man’s life and exploits; and there can never again be the same kind of interest felt and recorded; for there is not left on our globe any vast region overhung with mystery, like the Africa of half a century ago. When the reading boy could rouse himself to get upon his feet, and fetch the atlas, to see where Park went, he found in the map of Africa only a great blank in the middle, with river mouths, and names of tribes and settlements round the coasts,—except when, here and there, dotted lines, very straight and unnatural-looking, showed where the great rivers were conjectured to tend. Our fathers’ map-sellers did not, like the ancient geographers, adorn these blank spaces with pictures of wild beasts and men, or horrible monsters; but there was not the less guesswork. , in large letters, covered a good deal of paper: and on the strength of that insertion, our parents taught us that the interior of Africa was a place of hot sand and burning rocks, where only lions and their prey could live. But there was the rumour of the great city of Timbuctoo; and this roused an insatiable curiosity. Boys went back to Park’s Travels again and again, in a sort of hope of making out something more,—only to find that the point he reached was like the end of the world, where a wall of thick darkness rose to the very sky. Then ensued that state of mind which caused so much trouble to so many parents,—the longing of boys to go to sea. If some little lads hoped to be cast away on a desert island, to play Robinson Crusoe, others thought they could make their way to the Niger, if they once got away from England. The little girls were not far behind in enthusiasm. They all knew the story of the little moss on the stone which gave such comfort to Park; and they felt that of all mankind they should admire most the man who should learn Park’s fate and carry out his work.

The change since that time is prodigious; but it has been gradual. Schoolboys learned to attack the same mystery from another side, and experienced another set of feelings when they came to read about the conferences that Herodotus held with the old Egyptian priests about the Nile inundations, and the source of that most mysterious of rivers. They have taken for granted that a mighty range of Mountains of the Moon stretches across the continent somewhere not far from the equator; and this has stimulated further their longing to know what lies between Park’s furthest and those mountains.

Every few years some explorer went to try after the solution of the mystery and successive discoveries only revived the old feelings, if I may judge by myself. When each one was, sooner or later, compelled to turn back, the yearning was renewed. When a traveller, setting out from the north, made straight for Timbuctoo, the reader followed him from well to well in the desert, from village to village among the oases; and when it was impossible for the traveller to