The Queen of Hearts

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"The sooner I write, the sooner it will be over," she said, and
hurriedly turned away to the paper-case on the side-table.

How was the change in her manner to be rightly interpreted? Was
she hurt by what I had said, or was she secretly so much affected
by it, in the impressionable state of her mind at that moment, as
to be incapable of exerting a young girl's customary
self-control? Her looks, actions, and language might bear either
interpretation. One striking omission had marked her conduct when
I had referred to George's return. She had not inquired when I
expected him back. Was this indifference? Surely not. Surely
indifference would have led her to ask the conventionally civil
question which ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have
addressed to me as a matter of course. Was she, on her side,
afraid to trust herself to speak of George at a time when an
unusual tenderness was aroused in her by the near prospect of
saying farewell? It might be--it might not be--it might be. My
feeble reason took the side of my inclination; and, after
vibrating between Yes and No, I stopped where I had begun--at
Yes.

She finished the letter in a few minutes, and dropped it into the
post-bag the moment it was done.

"Not a word more," she said, returning to me with a sigh of
relief--"not a word about my aunt or my going away till the time
comes. We have two more days; let us make the most of them."

Two more days! Eight-and-forty hours still to pass; sixty minutes
in each of those hours; and every minute long enough to bring
with it an event fatal to George's future! The bare thought kept
my mind in a fever. For the remainder of the day I was as
desultory and as restless as our Queen of Hearts herself. Owen
affectionately did his best to quiet me, but in vain. Even
Morgan, who whiled away the time by smoking incessantly, was
struck by the wretched spectacle of nervous anxiety that I
presented to him, and pitied me openly for being unable to
compose myself with a pipe. Wearily and uselessly the hours wore
on till the sun set. The clouds in the western heaven wore wild
and tortured shapes when I looked out at them; and, as the
gathering darkness fell on us, the fatal fearful wind rose once
more.

When we assembled at eight, the drawing of the lots had no longer
any interest or suspense, so far as I was concerned. I had read
my last story, and it now only remained for chance to decide the
question of precedency between Owen and Morgan. Of the two
numbers left in the bowl, the one drawn was Nine. This made it
Morgan's turn to read, and left it appropriately to Owen, as our
eldest brother, to close the proceedings on the next night.

Morgan looked round the table when he had spread out his
manuscript, and seemed half inclined to open fire, as usual, with
a little preliminary sarcasm; but his eyes met mine; he saw the
anxiety I was suffering; and his natural kindness, perversely as
he might strive to hide it, got the better of him. He looked down
on his paper; growled out briefly, "No need for a preface; my
little bit of writing explains itself; let's go on and have don e
with it," and so began to read without another word from himself
or from any of us.

BROTHER MORGAN'S STORY

of

FAUNTLEROY.

IT was certainly a dull little dinner-party. Of the four guests,
two of us were men between fifty and sixty, and two of us were
youths between eighteen and twenty, and we had no subjects in
common. We were all intimate with our host, but were only
slightly acquainted with each other. Perhaps we should have got
on better if there had been some ladies among us; but the master
of the house was a bachelor, and, except the parlor-maids who
assisted in waiting on us at dinner, no daughter of Eve was
present to brighten the dreary scene.

We tried all sorts of subjects, but they dropped one after the
other. The elder gentlemen seemed to be afraid of committing
themselves by talking too freely within hearing of us juniors,
and we, on our side, restrained our youthful flow of spirits and
youthful freedom of conversation out of deference to our host,
who seemed once or twice to be feeling a little nervous about the
continued propriety of our behavior in the presence of his
respectable guests. To make matters worse, we had dined at a
sensible hour. When the bottles made their first round at
dessert, the clock on the mantel-piece only struck eight. I
counted the strokes, and felt certain, from the expression of his
face, that the other junior guest, who sat on one side of me at
the round table, was counting them also. When we came to the
final eight, we exchanged looks of despair. "Two hours more of
this! What on earth is to become of us?" In the language of the
eyes, that was exactly what we said to each other.

The wine was excellent, and I think we all came separately and
secretly to the same conclusion--that our chance of getting
through the evening was intimately connected with our resolution
in getting through the bottles.

As a matter of course, we talked wine. No company of Englishmen
can assemble together for an evening without doing that. Every
man in this country who is rich enough to pay income-tax has at
one time or other in his life effected a very remarkable
transaction in wine. Sometimes he has made such a bargain as he
never expects to make again. Sometimes he is the only man in
England, not a peer of the realm, who has got a single drop of a
certain famous vintage which has perished from the face of the
earth. Sometimes he has purchased, with a friend, a few last left
dozens from the cellar of a deceased potentate, at a price so
exorbitant that he can only wag his head and decline mentioning
it; and, if you ask his friend, that friend will wag his head,
and decline mentioning it also. Sometimes he has been at an
out-of-the-way country inn; has found the sherry not drinkable;
has asked if there is no other wine in the house; has been
informed that there is some "sourish foreign stuff that nobody
ever drinks"; has called for a bottle of it; has found it
Burgundy, such as all France cannot now produce, has cunningly
kept his own counsel with the widowed landlady, and has bought
the whole stock for "an old song." Sometimes he knows the
proprietor of a famous tavern in London, and he recommends his
one or two particular friends, the next time they are passing
that way, to go in and dine, and give his compliments to the
landlord, and ask for a bottle of the brown sherry, with the
light blue--as distinguished from the dark blue--seal. Thousands
of people dine there every year, and think they have got the
famous sherry when they get the dark blue seal; but the real
wine, the famous wine, is the light blue seal, and nobody in
England knows it but the landlord and his friends. In all these
wine-conversations, whatever variety there may be in the various
experiences related, one of two great first principles is
invariably assumed by each speaker in succession. Either he knows
more about it than any one else, or he has got better wine of his
own even than the excellent wine he is now drinking. Men can get
together sometimes without talking of women, without talking of
horses, without talking of politics, but they cannot assemble to
eat a meal together without talking of wine, and they cannot talk
of wine without assuming to each one of themselves an absolute
infallibility in connection with that single subject which they
would shrink from asserting in relation to any other topic under
the sun.

How long the inevitable wine-talk lasted on the particular social
occasion of which I am now writing is more than I can undertake
to say. I had heard so many other conversations of the same sort
at so many other tables that my attention wandered away wearily,
and I began to forget all about the dull little dinner-party and
the badly-assorted company of guests of whom I formed one. How
long I remained in this not over-courteous condition of mental
oblivion is more than I can tell; but when my attention was
recalled, in due course of time, to the little world around me, I
found that the good wine had begun to do its good office.

The stream of talk on either side of the host's chair was now
beginning to flow cheerfully and continuously; the
wine-conversation had worn itself out; and one of the elder
guests--Mr. Wendell--was occupied in telling the other guest--Mr.
Trowbridge--of a small fraud which had lately been committed on
him by a clerk in his employment. The first part of the story I
missed altogether. The last part, which alone caught my
attention, followed the career of the clerk to the dock of the
Old Bailey.

"So, as I was telling you," continued Mr. Wendell, "I made up my
mind to prosecute, and I did prosecute. Thoughtless people blamed
me for sending the young man to prison, and said I might just as
well have forgiven him, seeing that the trifling sum of money I
had lost by his breach of trust was barely as much as ten pounds.
Of course, personally speaking, I would much rather not have gone
into court; but I considered that my duty to society in general,
and to my brother merchants in particular, absolutely compelled
me to prosecute for the sake of example. I acted on that
principle, and I don't regret that I did so. The circumstances
under which the man robbed me were particularly disgraceful. He
was a hardened reprobate, sir, if ever there was one yet; and I
believe, in my conscience, that he wanted nothing but the
opportunity to be as great a villain as Fauntleroy himself."

At the moment when Mr. Wendell personified his idea of consummate
villainy by quoting the example of Fauntleroy, I saw the other
middle-aged gentleman--Mr. Trowbridge--color up on a sudden, and
begin to fidget in his chair.

"The next time you want to produce an instance of a villain,
sir," said Mr. Trowbridge, "I wish you could contrive to quote
some other example than Fauntleroy."

Mr. Wendell naturally enough looked excessively astonished when
he heard these words, which were very firmly and, at the same
time, very politely addressed to him.

"May I inquire why you object to my example?" he asked.

"I object to it, sir," said Mr. Trowbridge, "because it makes me
very uncomfortable to hear Fauntleroy called a villain."

"Good heavens above!" exclaimed Mr. Wendell, utterly bewildered.
"Uncomfortable!--you, a mercantile man like myself--you, whose
character stands so high everywhere--you uncomfortable when you
hear a man who was hanged for forgery called a villain! In the
name of wonder, why?"

"Because," answered Mr. Trowbridge, with perfect composure,
"Fauntleroy was a friend of mine."

"Excuse me, my dear sir," retorted Mr. Wendell, in as polished a
tone of sarcasm as he could command; "but of all the friends whom
you have made in the course of your useful and honorable career,
I should have thought the friend you have just mentioned would
have been the very last to whom you were likely to refer in
respectable society, at least by name."

"Fauntleroy committed an unpardonable crime, and died a
disgraceful death," said Mr. Trowbridge. "But, for all that,
Fauntleroy was a friend of mine, and in that character I shall
always acknowledge him boldly to my dying day. I have a
tenderness for his memory, though he violated a sacred trust, and
die d for it on the gallows. Don't look shocked, Mr. Wendell. I
will tell you, and our other friends here, if they will let me,
why I feel that tenderness, which looks so strange and so
discreditable in your eyes. It is rather a curious anecdote, sir,
and has an interest, I think, for all observers of human nature
quite apart from its connection with the unhappy man of whom we
have been talking. You young gentlemen," continued Mr.
Trowbridge, addressing himself to us juniors, "have heard of
Fauntleroy, though he sinned and suffered, and shocked all
England long before your time?"

We answered that we had certainly heard of him as one of the
famous criminals of his day. We knew that he had been a partner
in a great London banking-house; that he had not led a very
virtuous life; that he had possessed himself, by forgery, of
trust-moneys which he was doubly bound to respect; and that he
had been hanged for his offense, in the year eighteen hundred and
twenty-four, when the gallows was still set up for other crimes
than murder, and when Jack Ketch was in fashion as one of the
hard-working reformers of the age.

"Very good," said Mr. Trowbridge. "You both of you know quite
enough of Fauntleroy to be interested in what I am going to tell
you. When the bottles have been round the table, I will start
with my story."

The bottles went round--claret for the degenerate youngsters;
port for the sterling, steady-headed, middle-aged gentlemen. Mr.
Trowbridge sipped his wine--meditated a little--sipped again--and
started with the promised anecdote in these terms:

CHAPTER II.

WHAT I am going to tell you, gentlemen, happened when I was a
very young man, and when I was just setting up in business on my
own account.

My father had been well acquainted for many years with Mr.
Fauntleroy, of the famous London banking firm of Marsh, Stracey,
Fauntleroy & Graham. Thinking it might be of some future service
to me to make my position known to a great man in the commercial
world, my father mentioned to his highly-respected friend that I
was about to start in business for myself in a very small way,
and with very little money. Mr. Fauntleroy received the
intimation with a kind appearance of interest, and said that he
would have his eye on me. I expected from this that he would wait
to see if I could keep on my legs at starting, and that, if he
found I succeeded pretty well, he would then help me forward if
it lay in his power. As events turned out, he proved to be a far
better friend than that, and he soon showed me that I had very
much underrated the hearty and generous interest which he had
felt in my welfare from the first.

While I was still fighting with the difficulties of setting up my
office, and recommending myself to my connection, and so forth, I
got a message from Mr. Fauntleroy telling me to call on him, at
the banking-house, the first time I was passing that way. As you
may easily imagine, I contrived to be passing that way on a
particularly early occasion, and, on presenting myself at the
bank, I was shown at once into Mr. Fauntleroy's private room.

He was as pleasant a man to speak to as ever I met with--bright,
and gay, and companionable in his manner--with a sort of easy,
hearty, jovial bluntness about him that attracted everybody. The
clerks all liked him--and that is something to say of a partner
in a banking-house, I can tell you!

"Well, young Trowbridge," says he, giving his papers on the table
a brisk push away from him, "so you are going to set up in
business for yourself, are you? I have a great regard for your
father, and a great wish to see you succeed. Have you started
yet? No? Just on the point of beginning, eh? Very good. You will
have your difficulties, my friend, and I mean to smooth one of
them away for you at the outset. A word of advice for your
private ear--Bank with us."

"You are very kind, sir," I answered, "and I should ask nothing
better than to profit by your suggestion, if I could. But my
expenses are heavy at starting, and when they are all paid I am
afraid I shall have very little left to put by for the first
year. I doubt if I shall be able to muster much more than three
hundred pounds of surplus cash in the world after paying what I
must pay before I set up my office, and I should be ashamed to
trouble your house, sir, to open an account for such a trifle as
that."

"Stuff and nonsense!" says Mr. Fauntleroy. "Are _you_ a banker?
What business have you to offer an opinion on the matter? Do as I
tell you--leave it to me--bank with us--and draw for what you
like. Stop! I haven't done yet. When you open the account, speak
to the head cashier. Perhaps you may find he has got something to
tell you. There! there! go away--don't interrupt me--good-by--God
bless you!"

That was his way--ah! poor fellow, that was his way.

I went to the head cashier the next morning when I opened my
little modicum of an account. He had received orders to pay my
drafts without reference to my balance. My checks, when I had
overdrawn, were to be privately shown to Mr. Fauntleroy. Do many
young men who start in business find their prosperous superiors
ready to help them in that way?

Well, I got on--got on very fairly and steadily, being careful
not to venture out of my depth, and not to forget that small
beginnings may lead in time to great ends. A prospect of one of
those great ends--great, I mean, to such a small trader as I was
at that period--showed itself to me when I had been some little
time in business. In plain terms, I had a chance of joining in a
first-rate transaction, which would give me profit, and position,
and everything I wanted, provided I could qualify myself for
engaging in it by getting good security beforehand for a very
large amount.

In this emergency, I thought of my kind friend, Mr. Fauntleroy,
and went to the bank, and saw him once more in his private room.

There he was at the same table, with the same heaps of papers
about him, and the same hearty, easy way of speaking his mind to
you at once, in the fewest possible words. I explained the
business I came upon with some little hesitation and nervousness,
for I was afraid he might think I was taking an unfair advantage
of his former kindness to me. When I had done, he just nodded his
head, snatched up a blank sheet of paper, scribbled a few lines
on it in his rapid way, handed the writing to me, and pushed me
out of the room by the two shoulders before I could say a single
word. I looked at the paper in the outer office. It was my
security from the great banking-house for the whole amount, and
for more, if more was wanted.

I could not express my gratitude then, and I don't know that I
can describe it now. I can only say that it has outlived the
crime, the disgrace, and the awful death on the scaffold. I am
grieved to speak of that death at all; but I have no other
alternative. The course of my story must now lead me straight on
to the later time, and to the terrible discovery which exposed my
benefactor and my friend to all England as the forger Fauntleroy.

I must ask you to suppose a lapse of some time after the
occurrence of the events that I have just been relating. During
this interval, thanks to the kind assistance I had received at
the outset, my position as a man of business had greatly
improved. Imagine me now, if you please, on the high road to
prosperity, with good large offices and a respectable staff of
clerks, and picture me to yourselves sitting alone in my private
room between four and five o'clock on a certain Saturday
afternoon.

All my letters had been written, all the people who had
appointments with me had been received. I was looking carelessly
over the newspaper, and thinking about going home, when one of my
clerks came in, and said that a stranger wished to see me
immediately on very important business.

"Did he mention his name?" I inquired.

"No, sir."

"Did you not ask him for it?"

"Yes, sir. And he said you would be none the wiser if he told me
what it was."

"Does he look like a begging-letter writer?"

"He looks a little shabby, sir, but he doesn't talk at all like a
begging-letter writer. He spoke sharp and decided, sir, and said
it was
in your interests that he came, and that you would deeply regret
it afterward if you refused to see him."

"He said that, did he? Show him in at once, then."

He was shown in immediately: a middling-sized man, with a sharp,
unwholesome-looking face, and with a flippant, reckless manner,
dressed in a style of shabby smartness, eying me with a bold
look, and not so overburdened with politeness as to trouble
himself about taking off his hat when he came in. I had never
seen him before in my life, and I could not form the slightest
conjecture from his appearance to guide me toward guessing his
position in the world. He was not a gentleman, evidently; but as
to fixing his whereabouts in the infinite downward gradations of
vagabond existence in London, that was a mystery which I was
totally incompetent to solve.

"Is your name Trowbridge?" he began.

"Yes," I answered, dryly enough.

"Do you bank with Marsh, Stracey, Fauntleroy & Graham?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Answer my question, and you will know."

"Very well, I _do_ bank with Marsh, Stracey, Fauntleroy &
Graham--and what then?"

"Draw out every farthing of balance you have got before the bank
closes at five to-day."

I stared at him in speechless amazement. The words, for an
instant, absolutely petrified me.

"Stare as much as you like," he proceeded, coolly, "I mean what I
say. Look at your clock there. In twenty minutes it will strike
five, and the bank will be shut. Draw out every farthing, I tell
you again, and look sharp about it."

"Draw out my money!" I exclaimed, partially recovering myself.
"Are you in your right senses? Do you know that the firm I bank
with represents one of the first houses in the world? What do you
mean--you, who are a total stranger to me--by taking this
extraordinary interest in my affairs? If you want me to act on
your advice, why don't you explain yourself?"

"I have explained myself. Act on my advice or not, just as you
like. It doesn't matter to me. I have done what I promised, and
there's an end of it."

He turned to the door. The minute-hand of the clock was getting
on from the twenty minutes to the quarter.

"Done what you promised?" I repeated, getting up to stop him.

"Yes," he said, with his hand on the lock. "I have given my
message. Whatever happens, remember that. Good-afternoon."

He was gone before I could speak again.

I tried to call after him, but my speech suddenly failed me. It
was very foolish, it was very unaccountable, but there was
something in the man's last words which had more than half
frightened me.

I looked at the clock. The minute-hand was on the quarter.

My office was just far enough from the bank to make it necessary
for me to decide on the instant. If I had had time to think, I am
perfectly certain that I should not have profited by the
extraordinary warning that had just been addressed to me. The
suspicious appearance and manners of the stranger; the outrageous
improbability of the inference against the credit of the bank
toward which his words pointed; the chance that some underhand
attempt was being made, by some enemy of mine, to frighten me
into embroiling myself with one of my best friends, through
showing an ignorant distrust of the firm with which he was
associated as partner--all these considerations would
unquestionably have occurred to me if I could have found time for
reflection; and, as a necessary consequence, not one farthing of
my balance would have been taken from the keeping of the bank on
that memorable day.

As it was, I had just time enough to act, and not a spare moment
for thinking. Some heavy payments made at the beginning of the
week had so far decreased my balance that the sum to my credit in
the banking-book barely reached fifteen hundred pounds. I
snatched up my check-book, wrote a draft for the whole amount,
and ordered one of my clerks to run to the bank and get it cashed
before the doors closed. What impulse urged me on, except the
blind impulse of hurry and bewilderment, I can't say. I acted
mechanically, under the influence of the vague inexplicable fear
which the man's extraordinary parting words had aroused in me,
without stopping to analyze my own sensations--almost without
knowing what I was about. In three minutes from the time when the
stranger had closed my door the clerk had started for the bank,
and I was alone again in my room, with my hands as cold as ice
and my head all in a whirl.

I did not recover my control over myself until the clerk came
back with the notes in his hand. He had just got to the bank in
the nick of time. As the cash for my draft was handed to him over
the counter, the clock struck five, and he heard the order given
to close the doors.

When I had counted the bank-notes and had locked them up in the
safe, my better sense seemed to come back to me on a sudden.
Never have I reproached myself before or since as I reproached
myself at that moment. What sort of return had I made for Mr.
Fauntleroy's fatherly kindness to me? I had insulted him by the
meanest, the grossest distrust of the honor and the credit of his
house, and that on the word of an absolute stranger, of a
vagabond, if ever there was one yet. It was madness--downright
madness in any man to have acted as I had done. I could not
account for my own inconceivably thoughtless proceeding. I could
hardly believe in it myself. I opened the safe and looked at the
bank-notes again. I locked it once more, and flung the key down
on the table in a fury of vexation against myself. There the
money was, upbraiding me with my own inconceivable folly, telling
me in the plainest terms that I had risked depriving myself of my
best and kindest friend henceforth and forever.

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