Datasets:

AIRI-NLP

/

quality_counter_new_3584

like 0

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

surrounded

How many times the word 'surrounded' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

sat

How many times the word 'sat' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

displeased

How many times the word 'displeased' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

seen

How many times the word 'seen' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

cry

How many times the word 'cry' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

breather

How many times the word 'breather' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

embracing

How many times the word 'embracing' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

window

How many times the word 'window' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

why

How many times the word 'why' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

surprisingly

How many times the word 'surprisingly' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

resort

How many times the word 'resort' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

talked

How many times the word 'talked' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

repeated

How many times the word 'repeated' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

jump

How many times the word 'jump' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

familiarity

How many times the word 'familiarity' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

impassable

How many times the word 'impassable' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

offend

How many times the word 'offend' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

slowly

How many times the word 'slowly' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

heard

How many times the word 'heard' appears in the text?

want of means," said Mr. Wentworth, after a period of severe reticence. "Now it's delightful of you to say that! Only don't say it's my want of character. Because I have a character--I assure you I have; a small one, a little slip of a thing, but still something tangible." "Ought you not to tell Felix that it is Mr. Brand, father?" Charlotte asked, with infinite mildness. "It is not only Mr. Brand," Mr. Wentworth solemnly declared. And he looked at his knee for a long time. "It is difficult to explain," he said. He wished, evidently, to be very just. "It rests on moral grounds, as Mr. Brand says. It is the question whether it is the best thing for Gertrude." "What is better--what is better, dear uncle?" Felix rejoined urgently, rising in his urgency and standing before Mr. Wentworth. His uncle had been looking at his knee; but when Felix moved he transferred his gaze to the handle of the door which faced him. "It is usually a fairly good thing for a girl to marry the man she loves!" cried Felix. While he spoke, Mr. Wentworth saw the handle of the door begin to turn; the door opened and remained slightly ajar, until Felix had delivered himself of the cheerful axiom just quoted. Then it opened altogether and Gertrude stood there. She looked excited; there was a spark in her sweet, dull eyes. She came in slowly, but with an air of resolution, and, closing the door softly, looked round at the three persons present. Felix went to her with tender gallantry, holding out his hand, and Charlotte made a place for her on the sofa. But Gertrude put her hands behind her and made no motion to sit down. "We are talking of you!" said Felix. "I know it," she answered. "That's why I came." And she fastened her eyes on her father, who returned her gaze very fixedly. In his own cold blue eyes there was a kind of pleading, reasoning light. "It is better you should be present," said Mr. Wentworth. "We are discussing your future." "Why discuss it?" asked Gertrude. "Leave it to me." "That is, to me!" cried Felix. "I leave it, in the last resort, to a greater wisdom than ours," said the old man. Felix rubbed his forehead gently. "But _en attendant_ the last resort, your father lacks confidence," he said to Gertrude. "Haven't you confidence in Felix?" Gertrude was frowning; there was something about her that her father and Charlotte had never seen. Charlotte got up and came to her, as if to put her arm round her; but suddenly, she seemed afraid to touch her. Mr. Wentworth, however, was not afraid. "I have had more confidence in Felix than in you," he said. "Yes, you have never had confidence in me--never, never! I don't know why." "Oh sister, sister!" murmured Charlotte. "You have always needed advice," Mr. Wentworth declared. "You have had a difficult temperament." "Why do you call it difficult? It might have been easy, if you had allowed it. You wouldn't let me be natural. I don't know what you wanted to make of me. Mr. Brand was the worst." Charlotte at last took hold of her sister. She laid her two hands upon Gertrude's arm. "He cares so much for you," she almost whispered. Gertrude looked at her intently an instant; then kissed her. "No, he does not," she said. "I have never seen you so passionate," observed Mr. Wentworth, with an air of indignation mitigated by high principles. "I am sorry if I offend you," said Gertrude. "You offend me, but I don't think you are sorry." "Yes, father, she is sorry," said Charlotte. "I would even go further, dear uncle," Felix interposed. "I would question whether she really offends you. How can she offend you?" To this Mr. Wentworth made no immediate answer. Then, in a moment, "She has not profited as we hoped." "Profited? _Ah voil !_" Felix exclaimed. Gertrude was very pale; she stood looking down. "I have told Felix I would go away with him," she presently said. "Ah, you have said some admirable things!" cried the young man. "Go away, sister?" asked Charlotte. "Away--away; to some strange country." "That is to frighten you," said Felix, smiling at Charlotte. "To--what do you call it?" asked Gertrude, turning an instant to Felix. "To Bohemia." "Do you propose to dispense with preliminaries?" asked Mr. Wentworth, getting up. "Dear uncle, _vous plaisantez!_" cried Felix. "It seems to me that these are preliminaries." Gertrude turned to her father. "I _have_ profited," she said. "You wanted to form my character. Well, my character is formed--for my age. I know what I want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this gentleman." "You had better consent, sir," said Felix very gently. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," added a very different voice. Charlotte gave a little jump, and the others turned to the direction from which it had come. It was the voice of Mr. Brand, who had stepped through the long window which stood open to the piazza. He stood patting his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief; he was very much flushed; his face wore a singular expression. "Yes, sir, you had better consent," Mr. Brand repeated, coming forward. "I know what Miss Gertrude means." "My dear friend!" murmured Felix, laying his hand caressingly on the young minister's arm. Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright, excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness--the air of a man who has taken a resolve, in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man. "Come in, sir," said Mr. Wentworth, with an angular wave of his hand. "It is very proper that you should be present." "I know what you are talking about," Mr. Brand rejoined. "I heard what your nephew said." "And he heard what you said!" exclaimed Felix, patting him again on the arm. "I am not sure that I understood," said Mr. Wentworth, who had angularity in his voice as well as in his gestures. Gertrude had been looking hard at her former suitor. She had been puzzled, like her sister; but her imagination moved more quickly than Charlotte's. "Mr. Brand asked you to let Felix take me away," she said to her father. The young minister gave her a strange look. "It is not because I don't want to see you any more," he declared, in a tone intended as it were for publicity. "I shouldn't think you would want to see me any more," Gertrude answered, gently. Mr. Wentworth stood staring. "Isn't this rather a change, sir?" he inquired. "Yes, sir." And Mr. Brand looked anywhere; only still not at Charlotte. "Yes, sir," he repeated. And he held his handkerchief a few moments to his lips. "Where are our moral grounds?" demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament. "It is sometimes very moral to change, you know," suggested Felix. Charlotte had softly left her sister's side. She had edged gently toward her father, and now her hand found its way into his arm. Mr. Wentworth had folded up the _Advertiser_ into a surprisingly small compass, and, holding the roll with one hand, he earnestly clasped it with the other. Mr. Brand was looking at him; and yet, though Charlotte was so near, his eyes failed to meet her own. Gertrude watched her sister. "It is better not to speak of change," said Mr. Brand. "In one sense there is no change. There was something I desired--something I asked of you; I desire something still--I ask it of you." And he paused a moment; Mr. Wentworth looked bewildered. "I should like, in my ministerial capacity, to unite this young couple." Gertrude, watching her sister, saw Charlotte flushing intensely, and Mr. Wentworth felt her pressing upon his arm. "Heavenly Powers!" murmured Mr. Wentworth. And it was the nearest approach to profanity he had ever made. "That is very nice; that is very handsome!" Felix exclaimed. "I don't understand," said Mr. Wentworth; though it was plain that everyone else did. "That is very beautiful, Mr. Brand," said Gertrude, emulating Felix. "I should like to marry you. It will give me great pleasure." "As Gertrude says, it's a beautiful idea," said Felix. Felix was smiling, but Mr. Brand was not even trying to. He himself treated his proposition very seriously. "I have thought of it, and I should like to do it," he affirmed. Charlotte, meanwhile, was staring with expanded eyes. Her imagination, as I have said, was not so rapid as her sister's, but now it had taken several little jumps. "Father," she murmured, "consent!" Mr. Brand heard her; he looked away. Mr. Wentworth, evidently, had no imagination at all. "I have always thought," he began, slowly, "that Gertrude's character required a special line of development." "Father," repeated Charlotte, _"consent."_ Then, at last, Mr. Brand looked at her. Her father felt her leaning more heavily upon his folded arm than she had ever done before; and this, with a certain sweet faintness in her voice, made him wonder what was the matter. He looked down at her and saw the encounter of her gaze with the young theologian's; but even this told him nothing, and he continued to be bewildered. Nevertheless, "I consent," he said at last, "since Mr. Brand recommends it." "I should like to perform the ceremony very soon," observed Mr. Brand, with a sort of solemn simplicity. "Come, come, that's charming!" cried Felix, profanely. Mr. Wentworth sank into his chair. "Doubtless, when you understand it," he said, with a certain judicial asperity. Gertrude went to her sister and led her away, and Felix having passed his arm into Mr. Brand's and stepped out of the long window with him, the old man was left sitting there in unillumined perplexity. Felix did no work that day. In the afternoon, with Gertrude, he got into one of the boats and floated about with idly-dipping oars. They talked a good deal of Mr. Brand--though not exclusively. "That was a fine stroke," said Felix. "It was really heroic." Gertrude sat musing, with her eyes upon the ripples. "That was what he wanted to be; he wanted to do something fine." "He won't be comfortable till he has married us," said Felix. "So much the better." "He wanted to be magnanimous; he wanted to have a fine moral pleasure. I know him so well," Gertrude went on. Felix looked at her; she spoke slowly, gazing at the clear water. "He thought of it a great deal, night and day. He thought it would be beautiful. At last he made up his mind that it was his duty, his duty to do just that--nothing less than that. He felt exalted; he felt sublime. That's how he likes to feel. It is better for him than if I had listened to him." "It's better for me," smiled Felix. "But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don't believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?" "He never admired me. He admires Charlotte; he pitied me. I know him so well." "Well, then, he didn't pity you so much." Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling. "You shouldn't permit yourself," she said, "to diminish the splendor of his action. He admires Charlotte," she repeated. "That's capital!" said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars. I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude's phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about. Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth's at the evening repast. The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact. Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of. Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason." "It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed." But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law. They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as everyone stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude. Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation. "I shall be so glad to know you better," she said; "I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked. Naturally; now I see the reason why! You will love me a little, won't you? I think I may say I gain on being known." And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude's forehead. Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude's imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia's personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony. Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame M nster's wit. They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column. Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter's engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness. It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated. "Felix will make her a good husband," said Eugenia. "He will be a charming companion; he has a great quality--indestructible gaiety." "You think that's a great quality?" asked the old man. Eugenia meditated, with her eyes upon his. "You think one gets tired of it, eh?" "I don't know that I am prepared to say that," said Mr. Wentworth. "Well, we will say, then, that it is tiresome for others but delightful for one's self. A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; so that, for Felix and Gertrude, gaiety will be a common property." "Gertrude was always very gay," said Mr. Wentworth. He was trying to follow this argument. Robert Acton took his hands out of his pockets and came a little nearer to the Baroness. "You say you gain by being known," he said. "One certainly gains by knowing you." "What have _you_ gained?" asked Eugenia. "An immense amount of wisdom." "That's a questionable advantage for a man who was already so wise!" Acton shook his head. "No, I was a great fool before I knew you!" "And being a fool you made my acquaintance? You are very complimentary." "Let me keep it up," said Acton, laughing. "I hope, for our pleasure, that your brother's marriage will detain you." "Why should I stop for my brother's marriage when I would not stop for my own?" asked the Baroness. "Why shouldn't you stop in either case, now that, as you say, you have dissolved that mechanical tie that bound you to Europe?" The Baroness looked at him a moment. "As I say? You look as if you doubted it." "Ah," said Acton, returning her glance, "that is a remnant of my old folly! We have other attractions," he added. "We are to have another marriage." But she seemed not to hear him; she was looking at him still. "My word was never doubted before," she said. "We are to have another marriage," Acton repeated, smiling. Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it doesn't look like it." "There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant." "Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can't guess other people's." Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr. Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle." "I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed. "Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia. Mr. Wentworth's jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton." The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked. "They are spending the evening with my mother." "Is not the thing very sudden?" Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair." "The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister." "But my sister's charms were an old story; he had always known her." Acton had begun to experiment again. Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can't say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy." "He's a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton's last experiment. Madame M nster turned away. She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "Tomorrow my maid shall pack up." "My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately! Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable." But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "_Bont divine_, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my 'properties.'" "Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix. She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part." "With great applause!" said her brother. "Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don't see how I can have endured it!" she said. "Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding." "Thank you; that's your affair. My affairs are elsewhere." "Where are you going?" "To Germany--by the first ship." "You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?" "I have refused him," said Eugenia. Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last. "But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing." "Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia. Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued. "Please to make no observations upon it." "I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered." "You are mistaken." "But I thought you had signed----" "I have not signed!" said the Baroness. Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately assist her to embark. Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia's impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarrassed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She passed her last evening at her uncle's, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth's affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie's brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark. "For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake." "I don't make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going." "That's a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!" Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said. "I don't know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America." Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father's house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter's influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix's gaiety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gaiety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother's death, married a particularly nice young girl. The End End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Europeans, by Henry James *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS *** ***** This file should be named 179-8.txt or 179-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/179/ Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution. *** START: FULL LICENSE *** THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at http://gutenberg.org/license). Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works 1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. 1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below. 1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. 1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States. 1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: 1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently whenever

eh

How many times the word 'eh' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

learning

How many times the word 'learning' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

ran

How many times the word 'ran' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

low

How many times the word 'low' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

sneer

How many times the word 'sneer' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

thigh

How many times the word 'thigh' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

unable

How many times the word 'unable' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

patching

How many times the word 'patching' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

visualised

How many times the word 'visualised' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

sobbed

How many times the word 'sobbed' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

desk

How many times the word 'desk' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

cruel

How many times the word 'cruel' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

rumors

How many times the word 'rumors' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

twice

How many times the word 'twice' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

meet

How many times the word 'meet' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

started

How many times the word 'started' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

clearly

How many times the word 'clearly' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

him

How many times the word 'him' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

forgive

How many times the word 'forgive' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

hand

How many times the word 'hand' appears in the text?

want to remain here, if you will permit me, and talk to you for a little time--till you see Doll Vernon." "Doll Vernon, fellow? How dare you so speak of her?" demanded John, hotly. "Your pardon and her pardon, I beg; Mistress Vernon, soon to be Countess of Derbyshire. By the way, I wager you a gold pound sterling that by the time you see Doll Vernon--Mistress Vernon, I pray your pardon--you will have grown so fond of me that you will not permit me to leave you." She thought after that speech he could not help but know her; but John's skull was like an oaken board that night. Nothing could penetrate it. He began to fancy that his companion was a simple witless person who had escaped from his keepers. "Will you take the wager?" asked Dorothy. "Nonsense!" was the only reply John deigned to give to so foolish a proposition. "Then will you agree that I shall remain at the gate till Doll--Mistress Vernon comes?" "I suppose I shall have to make the best terms possible with you," he returned. "You are an amusing fellow and as perverse as a woman." "I knew you would soon learn to like me," she responded. "The first step toward a man's affection is to amuse him. That old saw which says the road to a man's heart is through his stomach, is a sad mistake. Amusement is the highway to a man's affections." "It is better that one laugh with us than at us. There is a vast difference in the two methods," answered John, contemptuously. "You dare to laugh at me," cried Dorothy, grasping the hilt of her sword, and pretending to be angry. John waved her off with his hand, and laughingly said, "Little you know concerning the way to a man's heart, and no doubt less of the way to a woman's." "I, perhaps, know more about it than you would believe," returned Malcolm No. 2. "If you know aught of the latter subject, it is more than I would suppose," said John. "It is absurd to say that a woman can love a man who is unable to defend himself." "A vain man thinks that women care only for men of his own pattern," retorted Dorothy. "Women love a strong arm, it is true, but they also love a strong heart, and you see I am not at all afraid of you, even though you have twice my strength. There are as many sorts of bravery, Sir John, as--as there are hairs in my beard." "That is not many," interrupted John. "And," continued the girl, "I believe, John,--Sir John,--you possess all the kinds of bravery that are good." "You flatter me," said John. "Yes," returned Dorothy, "that was my intent." After that unflattering remark there came a pause. Then the girl continued somewhat hesitatingly: "Doubtless many women, Sir John, have seen your virtues more clearly than even I see them. Women have a keener perception of masculine virtues than--than we have." Dorothy paused, and her heart beat with a quickened throb while she awaited his reply. A new field of discovery was opening up to her and a new use for her disguise. John made no reply, but the persistent girl pursued her new line of attack. [Illustration] "Surely Sir John Manners has had many sweethearts," said Dorothy, in flattering tones. There were rocks and shoals ahead for John's love barge. "Many, many, I am sure," the girl persisted. "Ah, a few, a few, I admit," John like a fool replied. Dorothy was accumulating disagreeable information rapidly. "While you were at London court," said she, "the fine ladies must have sought you in great numbers--I am sure they did." "Perhaps, oh, perhaps," returned John. "One cannot always remember such affairs." His craft was headed for the rocks. Had he observed Dorothy's face, he would have seen the storm a-brewing. "To how many women, Sir John, have you lost your heart, and at various times how many have lost their hearts to you?" asked the persistent girl.--"What a senseless question," returned John. "A dozen times or more; perhaps a score or two score times. I cannot tell the exact number. I did not keep an account." Dorothy did not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task--much easier than it would be for me--to convince those confiding ones of your affection?" "Yes," replied John, plunging full sail upon the breakers, "I admit that usually they have been quite easy to convince. I am naturally bold, and I suppose that perhaps--that is, I may possibly have a persuasive trick about me." Shades of good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. "And you have been false to all of these women? she said. "Ah, well, you know--the devil take it! A man can't be true to a score of women," replied John. "I am sure none of them wished you to be true," the girl answered, restraining her tears with great difficulty. At that point in the conversation John began to suspect from the manner and shapeliness of his companion that a woman had disguised herself in man's attire. Yet it did not once occur to him that Dorothy's fair form was concealed within the disguise. He attempted to lift my soft beaver hat, the broad rim of which hid Dorothy's face, but to that she made a decided objection, and John continued: "By my soul I believe you are a woman. Your walk"--Dorothy thought she had been swaggering like a veritable swash-buckler--"your voice, the curves of your form, all betray you." Dorothy gathered the cloak closely about her. "I would know more of you," said John, and he stepped toward the now interesting stranger. But she drew away from him, and told him to keep hands off. "Oh, I am right. You are a woman," said John. Dorothy had maintained the disguise longer than she wished, and was willing that John should discover her identity. At first it had been rare sport to dupe him; but the latter part of her conversation had given her no pleasure. She was angry, jealous, and hurt by what she had learned. "Yes," she answered, "I admit that I am a--a woman. Now I must go." "Stay but one moment," pleaded John, whose curiosity and gallantry were aroused. "I will watch for Mistress Vernon, and when she appears, then you may go." "I told you that you would want me to remain," said the girl with a sigh. She was almost ready to weep. Then she thought: "I little dreamed I was coming here for this. I will carry the disguise a little farther, and will, perhaps, learn enough to--to break my heart." She was soon to learn all she wanted to know and a great deal more. "Come sit by me on this stone," said John, coaxingly. The girl complied, and drew the cloak over her knees. "Tell me why you are here," he asked. "To meet a gentleman," she replied, with low-bent face. "Tell me your name," John asked, as he drew my glove from her passive hand. John held the hand in his, and after examining it in the dim light saw that it was a great deal more than good to look upon. Then he lifted it to his lips and said: "Since our sweethearts have disappointed us, may we not console ourselves with each other?" He placed his arm around the girl's waist and drew her yielding form toward him. Dorothy, unobserved by John, removed the false beard and moustachio, and when John put his arm about her waist and leaned forward to kiss the fair accommodating neighbor she could restrain her tears no longer and said:-- "That would be no consolation for me, John; that would be no consolation for me. How can you? How can you?" She rose to her feet and covered her face with her hands in a paroxysm of weeping. John, too, sprang to his feet, you may be sure. "Dorothy! God help me! I am the king of fools. Curse this hour in which I have thrown away my heaven. You must hate and despise me, fool, fool that I am." John knew that it were worse than useless for him to attempt an explanation. The first thought that flashed through his mind was, to tell the girl that he had only pretended not to know her. He thought he would try to make her believe that he had been turning her trick upon herself; but he was wise in his day and generation, and did not seek refuge in that falsehood. The girl would never have forgiven him for that. "The only amends I can make," he said, in very dolefulness, "is that I may never let you see my face again." "That will not help matters," sobbed Dorothy. "I know it will not," returned John. "Nothing can help me. I can remain here no longer. I must leave you. I cannot even ask you to say farewell. Mistress Vernon, you do not despise me half so bitterly as I despise myself." Dorothy was one of those rare natures to whom love comes but once. It had come to her and had engulfed her whole being. To part with it would be like parting with life itself. It was her tyrant, her master. It was her ego. She could no more throw it off than she could expel herself from her own existence. All this she knew full well, for she had analyzed her conditions, and her reason had joined with all her other faculties in giving her a clear concept of the truth. She knew she belonged to John Manners for life and for eternity. She also knew that the chance of seeing him soon again was very slight, and to part from him now in aught but kindness would almost kill her. Before John had recognized Dorothy he certainly had acted like a fool, but with the shock of recognition came wisdom. All the learning of the ancients and all the cunning of the prince of darkness could not have taught him a wiser word with which to make his peace, "I may never let you see my face again." That was more to be feared by Dorothy than even John's inconstancy. Her heart was full of trouble. "I do not know what I wish," she said simply. "Give me a little time to think." John's heart leaped with joy, but he remained silent. Dorothy continued: "Oh, that I had remained at home. I would to God I had never seen Derby-town nor you." John in the fulness of his wisdom did not interrupt her. "To think that I have thus made a fool of myself about a man who has given his heart to a score of women." "This is torture," moaned John, in real pain. "But," continued Dorothy, "I could not remain away from this place when I had the opportunity to come to you. I felt that I must come. I felt that I should die if I did not. And you are so false. I wish I were dead. A moment ago, had I been another woman, you would have kissed her. You thought I was another woman." John's wisdom stood by him nobly. He knew he could neither explain successfully nor beg forgiveness. He simply said: "I cannot remain and look you in the face. If I dare make any request, it is that despite all you have heard from my lips you will still believe that I love you, and that in all my life I have never loved any one so dearly. There is no other woman for me." "You doubtless spoke the same false words to the other two score women," said Dorothy. Tears and sobs were playing sad havoc with her powers of speech. "Farewell, Mistress Vernon," replied John. "I should be shameless if I dared ask you to believe any word I can utter. Forget, if possible, that I ever existed; forget me that you may not despise me. I am unworthy to dwell even in the smallest of your thoughts. I am altogether base and contemptible." "N-o-o," sighed Dorothy, poutingly, while she bent low her head and toyed with the gold lace of my cloak. "Farewell," said John. He took a step or two backward from her. "You are over-eager to leave, it seems to me," said the girl in an injured tone. "I wonder that you came at all." John's heart was singing hosanna. He, however, maintained his voice at a mournful pitch and said: "I must go. I can no longer endure to remain." While he spoke he moved toward his horse, and his head was bowed with real shame as he thought of the pitiable fool he had made of himself. Dorothy saw him going from her, and she called to him softly and reluctantly, "John." He did not hear her, or perhaps he thought best to pretend that he did not hear, and as he moved from her the girl became desperate. Modesty, resentment, insulted womanhood and injured pride were all swept away by the stream of her mighty love, and she cried again, this time without hesitancy or reluctance, "John, John." She started to run toward him, but my cloak was in her way, and the sword tripped her feet. In her fear lest John might leave her, she unclasped the sword-belt from her waist and snatched the cloak from her shoulders. Freed from these hindrances, she ran toward John. "John, do not leave me. Do not leave me." As she spoke, she reached an open space among the trees and John turned toward her. Her hat had fallen off, and the red golden threads of her hair, freed from their fastenings, streamed behind her. Never before had a vision of such exquisite loveliness sped through the moonbeams. So entrancing was her beauty to John that he stood motionless in admiration. He did not go to meet her as he should have done, and perhaps as he would have done had his senses not been wrapped in benumbing wonderment. His eyes were unable to interpret to his brain all her marvellous beauty, and his other senses abandoning their proper functions had hastened to the assistance of his sight He saw, he heard, he felt her loveliness. Thus occupied he did not move, so Dorothy ran to him and fell upon his breast. "You did not come to meet me," she sobbed. "You made me come all the way, to forgive you. Cruel, cruel!" John held the girl in his arms, but he did not dare to kiss her, and his self-denial soon brought its reward. He had not expected that she would come a beggar to him. The most he had dared to hope was that she would listen to his prayer for forgiveness. With all his worldly wisdom John had not learned the fact that inconstancy does not destroy love in the one who suffers by reason of it; nor did he know of the exquisite pain-touched happiness which comes to a gentle, passionate heart such as Dorothy's from the mere act of forgiving. "Is it possible you can forgive me for the miserable lies I have uttered?" asked John, almost unconscious of the words he was speaking. "Is it possible you can forgive me for uttering those lies, Dorothy?" he repeated. She laid her head upon his breast, and softly passing her hand over the lace of his doublet, whispered:-- "If I could believe they were lies, I could easily forgive you," she answered between low sobs and soft sighs. Though she was a woman, the sweet essence of childhood was in her heart. "But you cannot believe me, even when I tell you that I spoke not the truth," answered John, with growing faith in his system of passive repentance. Again came the sighs, and a few struggling, childish sobs. "It is easy for us to believe that which we long to believe," she said. Then she turned her face upward to him, and John's reward was altogether disproportioned to the self-denial he had exercised a few minutes before. She rewarded him far beyond his deserts; and after a pause she said mischievously:-- "You told me that you were a bold man with women, and I know that at least that part of what you said was untrue, for you are a bashful man, John, you are downright bashful. It is I who have been bold. You were too timid to woo me, and I so longed for you that I--I--was not timid." "For God's sake, Dorothy, I beg you to have pity and to make no jest of me. Your kindness almost kills me, and your ridicule--" "There, there, John," whispered the girl, "I will never again make a jest of you if it gives you pain. Tell me, John, tell me truly, was it all false--that which you told me about the other women?" There had been more truth in John's bragging than he cared to confess. He feared and loathed a lie; so he said evasively, but with perfect truth:-- "You must know, my goddess. If you do not know without the telling that I love you with all my being; if you do not know that there is for me and ever will be no woman but you in all the world; if you do not know that you have stolen my soul and that I live only in your presence, all that I can say will avail nothing toward convincing you. I am almost crazed with love for you, and with pain and torture. For the love of God let me leave you that I may hide my face." "Never," cried the girl, clasping her hands about his neck and pressing her lips gently upon his. "Never. There, that will soothe you, won't it, John?" It did soothe him, and in the next moment, John, almost frenzied with joy, hurt the girl by the violence of his embraces; but she, woman-like, found her heaven in the pain. They went back to the stone bench beside the gate, and after a little time Dorothy said:-- "But tell me, John, would you have kissed the other woman? Would you really have done it?" John's honesty certainly was good policy in that instance. The adroit girl had set a trap for him. "I suppose I would," answered John, with a groan. "It hurts me to hear the fact," said Dorothy, sighing; "but it pleases me to hear the truth. I know all else you tell me is true. I was trying you when I asked the question, for I certainly knew what you intended to do. A woman instinctively knows when a man is going to--to--when anything of that sort is about to happen." "How does she know?" asked John. Rocks and breakers ahead for Dorothy. "I cannot tell you," replied the girl, na vely, "but she knows." "Perhaps it is the awakened desire in her own heart which forewarns her," said John, stealthily seeking from Dorothy a truth that would pain him should he learn it. "I suppose that is partly the source of her knowledge," replied the knowing one, with a great show of innocence in her manner. John was in no position to ask impertinent questions, nor had he any right to grow angry at unpleasant discoveries; but he did both, although for a time he suppressed the latter. "You believe she is sure to know, do you?" he asked. "Usually," she replied. "Of course there are times when--when it happens so suddenly that--" John angrily sprang to his feet, took a few hurried steps in front of Dorothy, who remained demurely seated with her eyes cast down, and then again he took his place beside her on the stone bench. He was trembling with anger and jealousy. The devil was in the girl that night for mischief. "I suppose you speak from the fulness of your experience," demanded John, in tones that would have been insulting had they not been pleasing to the girl. She had seen the drift of John's questions at an early stage of the conversation, and his easily aroused jealousy was good proof to her of his affection. After all, she was in no danger from rocks and breakers. She well knew the currents, eddies, rocks, and shoals of the sea she was navigating, although she had never before sailed it. Her fore-mothers, all the way back to Eve, had been making charts of those particular waters for her especial benefit. Why do we, a slow-moving, cumbersome army of men, continue to do battle with the foe at whose hands defeat is always our portion? "Experience?" queried Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we learn anything." John again sprang to his feet, and again he sat down beside the girl. He had so recently received forgiveness for his own sins that he dared not be unforgiving toward Dorothy. He did not speak, and she remained silent, willing to allow time for the situation to take its full effect. The wisdom of the serpent is black ignorance compared with the cunning of a girl in Dorothy's situation. God gives her wit for the occasion as He gives the cat soft paws, sharp claws, and nimbleness. She was teaching John a lesson he would never forget. She was binding him to her with hoops of steel. "I know that I have not the right to ask," said John, suppressing his emotions, "but may I know merely as a matter of trivial information--may I know the name of--of the person--this fellow with whom you have had so full an experience? God curse him! Tell me his name." He caught the girl violently by both arms as if he would shake the truth out of her. He was unconsciously making full amends for the faults he had committed earlier in the evening. The girl made no answer. John's powers of self-restraint, which were not of the strongest order, were exhausted, and he again sprang to his feet and stood towering before her in a passion. "Tell me his name," he said hoarsely. "I demand it. I will not rest till I kill him." "If you would kill him, I surely will not tell you his name. In truth, I admit I am very fond of him." "Speak not another word to me till you tell me his name," stormed John. I feel sorry for John when I think of the part he played in this interview; but every man knows well his condition. "I care not," continued John, "in what manner I have offended you, nor does my debt of gratitude to you for your generosity in forgiving my sins weigh one scruple against this you have told me. No man, unless he were a poor clown, would endure it; and I tell you now, with all my love for you, I will not--I will not!" Dorothy was beginning to fear him. She of course did not fear personal violence; but after all, while he was slower than she, he was much stronger every way, and when aroused, his strength imposed itself upon her and she feared to play him any farther. "Sit beside me, John, and I will tell you his name," said the girl, looking up to him, and then casting down her eyes. A dimpling smile was playing about her lips. "No, I will not sit by you," replied John, angrily. She partly rose, and taking him by the arm drew him to her side. "Tell me his name," again demanded John, sitting rigidly by Dorothy. "Tell me his name." "Will you kill him?" she asked. "That I will," he answered. "Of that you may rest assured." "If you kill him, John, it will break my heart; for to do so, you must commit suicide. There is no other man but you, John. With you I had my first, last, and only experience." John, of course, was speechless. He had received only what he deserved. I freely admit he played the part of a fool during this entire interview with Dorothy, and he was more fully convinced of the fact than either you or I can be. I do not like to have a fool for the hero of my history; but this being a history and not a romance, I must tell you of events just as they happened, and of persons exactly as they were, else my conscience will smite me for untruthfulness. Dorothy's last assault was too much for John. He could neither parry nor thrust. Her heart was full of mirth and gladness. "None other but you, John," she repeated, leaning forward in front of him, and looking up into his eyes. A ray of moonlight stealing its way between the forest boughs fell upon her upturned face and caused it to glow with a goddess-like radiance. "None but you, John. There never has been and there never shall be another." When John's consciousness returned he said, "Dorothy, can you love such a fool as I?" "That I can and that I do with all my heart," she returned. "And can you forgive me for this last fault--for doubting you?" "That is easily done," she answered softly, "because doubt is the child of love." "But you do not doubt me?" he replied. "N-o-o," she answered somewhat haltingly; "but I--I am a woman." "And a woman's heart is the home of faith," said John, reverentially. "Y-e-s," she responded, still not quite sure of her ground. "Sometimes it is the home of too much faith, but faith, like virtue, is its own reward. Few persons are false to one who gives a blind, unquestioning faith. Even a poor degree of honor responds to it in kind." "Dorothy, I am so unworthy of you that I stand abashed in your presence," replied John. "No, you are not unworthy of me. We don't look for unmixed good in men," said the girl with a mischievous little laugh. Then seriously: "Those virtues you have are so great and so strong, John, that my poor little virtues, while they perhaps are more numerous than yours, are but weak things by comparison. In truth, there are some faults in men which we women do not--do not altogether dislike. They cause us--they make us--oh, I cannot express exactly what I mean. They make us more eager perhaps. A too constant man is like an overstrong sweet: he cloys us. The faults I speak of hurt us; but we thrive on them. Women enjoy pain now and then. Malcolm was telling me the other day that the wise people of the East have a saying: 'Without shadow there can be no light; without death there can be no life; without suffering there can be no joy.' Surely is that saying true of women. She who suffers naught enjoys naught. When a woman becomes passive, John, she is but a clod. Pain gives us a vent--a vent for something, I know not what it is; but this I know, we are happier for it." "I fear, Dorothy, that I have given you too much 'vent,' as you call it," said John. "No, no," she replied. "That was nothing. My great vent is that I can pour out my love upon you, John, without stint. Now that I know you are mine, I have some one whom I can deluge with it. Do you know, John, I believe that when God made me He collected together the requisite portions of reason, imagination, and will,--there was a great plenty of will, John,--and all the other ingredients that go to make a human being. But after He had gotten them all together there was still a great space left to be filled, and He just threw in an immensity of love with which to complete me. Therefore, John, am I not in true proportion. There is too much love in me, and it wells up at times and overflows my heart. How thankful I should be that I may pour it upon you and that it will not be wasted. How good you are to give me the sweet privilege." "How thankful should I be, Dorothy. I have never known you till this night. I am unworthy--" "Not another word of that sort, John," she interrupted, covering his mouth with her hand. They stood for a long time talking a deal of celestial nonsense which I shall not give you. I fear I have already given you too much of what John and Dorothy did and said in this very sentimental interview. But in no other way can I so well make you to know the persons of whom I write. I might have said Dorothy was so and so, and John was such and such. I might have analyzed them in long, dull pages of minute description; but it is that which persons do and say that gives us true concept of their characters; what others say about them is little else than a mere statement that black is black and white is white. But to my story again. Dorothy by her beauty had won John's admiration when first he beheld her. When he met her afterward, her charms of mind and her thousand winsome ways moved him deeply. But upon the evening of which I am now telling you he beheld

convince

How many times the word 'convince' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

modest

How many times the word 'modest' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

few

How many times the word 'few' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

seemed

How many times the word 'seemed' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

narrating

How many times the word 'narrating' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

teeth

How many times the word 'teeth' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

back

How many times the word 'back' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

heaps

How many times the word 'heaps' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

trailing

How many times the word 'trailing' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

u.s.

How many times the word 'u.s.' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

weakness

How many times the word 'weakness' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

smouldering

How many times the word 'smouldering' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

moved

How many times the word 'moved' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

wounded

How many times the word 'wounded' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

stand

How many times the word 'stand' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

opener

How many times the word 'opener' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

solitary

How many times the word 'solitary' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

friends

How many times the word 'friends' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

remarked

How many times the word 'remarked' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

vexedly

How many times the word 'vexedly' appears in the text?

wanted the white man's ship to come up the river, and this news, he feared, would be discouraging. He was very pressing with Brown to send the "order," offering at the same time a trusty messenger, who for greater secrecy (as he explained) would make his way by land to the mouth of the river and deliver the "order" on board. After some reflection Brown judged it expedient to tear a page out of his pocket-book, on which he simply wrote, "We are getting on. Big job. Detain the man." The stolid youth selected by Kassim for that service performed it faithfully, and was rewarded by being suddenly tipped, head first, into the schooner's empty hold by the ex-beachcomber and the Chinaman, who thereupon hastened to put on the hatches. What became of him afterwards Brown did not say.' CHAPTER 40 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy. For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He, Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions. Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him. 'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure, ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine. The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert. Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish, with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small, strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him, and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks. He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away, turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more." The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before. That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes hanging out of his head." 'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ." His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after that fit. There are sights one never forgets. 'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed, and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men. It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed, and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly. Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in the flying rumours. 'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me, while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall. Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men, huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily. 'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown. "What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear? Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated, and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear." Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald, and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land, proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled; a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up! take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank. 'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark. Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die. 'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud, now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never for a moment did he cease. '"What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting. "There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter, cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water. Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly. "Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing." 'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain, and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius, who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur. "He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?" Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him, because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone. Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha! ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness; and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in rags.' CHAPTER 41 'To the very last moment, till the full day came upon them with a spring, the fires on the west bank blazed bright and clear; and then Brown saw in a knot of coloured figures motionless between the advanced houses a man in European clothes, in a helmet, all white. "That's him; look! look!" Cornelius said excitedly. All Brown's men had sprung up and crowded at his back with lustreless eyes. The group of vivid colours and dark faces with the white figure in their midst were observing the knoll. Brown could see naked arms being raised to shade the eyes and other brown arms pointing. What should he do? He looked around, and the forests that faced him on all sides walled the cock-pit of an unequal contest. He looked once more at his men. A contempt, a weariness, the desire of life, the wish to try for one more chance--for some other grave--struggled in his breast. From the outline the figure presented it seemed to him that the white man there, backed up by all the power of the land, was examining his position through binoculars. Brown jumped up on the log, throwing his arms up, the palms outwards. The coloured group closed round the white man, and fell back twice before he got clear of them, walking slowly alone. Brown remained standing on the log till Jim, appearing and disappearing between the patches of thorny scrub, had nearly reached the creek; then Brown jumped off and went down to meet him on his side. 'They met, I should think, not very far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life--the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances; I know that Brown hated Jim at first sight. Whatever hopes he might have had vanished at once. This was not the man he had expected to see. He hated him for this--and in a checked flannel shirt with sleeves cut off at the elbows, grey bearded, with a sunken, sun-blackened face--he cursed in his heart the other's youth and assurance, his clear eyes and his untroubled bearing. That fellow had got in a long way before him! He did not look like a man who would be willing to give anything for assistance. He had all the advantages on his side--possession, security, power; he was on the side of an overwhelming force! He was not hungry and desperate, and he did not seem in the least afraid. And there was something in the very neatness of Jim's clothes, from the white helmet to the canvas leggings and the pipeclayed shoes, which in Brown's sombre irritated eyes seemed to belong to things he had in the very shaping of his life condemned and flouted. '"Who are you?" asked Jim at last, speaking in his usual voice. "My name's Brown," answered the other loudly; "Captain Brown. What's yours?" and Jim after a little pause went on quietly, as If he had not heard: "What made you come here?" "You want to know," said Brown bitterly. "It's easy to tell. Hunger. And what made you?" '"The fellow started at this," said Brown, relating to me the opening of this strange conversation between those two men, separated only by the muddy bed of a creek, but standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind--"The fellow started at this and got very red in the face. Too big to be questioned, I suppose. I told him that if he looked upon me as a dead man with whom you may take liberties, he himself was not a whit better off really. I had a fellow up there who had a bead drawn on him all the time, and only waited for a sign from me. There was nothing to be shocked at in this. He had come down of his own free will. 'Let us agree,' said I, 'that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that basis, as equals. We are all equal before death,' I said. I admitted I was there like a rat in a trap, but we had been driven to it, and even a trapped rat can give a bite. He caught me up in a moment. 'Not if you don't go near the trap till the rat is dead.' I told him that sort of game was good enough for these native friends of his, but I would have thought him too white to serve even a rat so. Yes, I had wanted to talk with him. Not to beg for my life, though. My fellows were--well--what they were--men like himself, anyhow. All we wanted from him was to come on in the devil's name and have it out. 'God d--n it,' said I, while he stood there as still as a wooden post, 'you don't want to come out here every day with your glasses to count how many of us are left on our feet. Come. Either bring your infernal crowd along or let us go out and starve in the open sea, by God! You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them. Are you? And what the devil do you get for it; what is it you've found here that is so d--d precious? Hey? You don't want us to come down here perhaps--do you? You are two hundred to one. You don't want us to come down into the open. Ah! I promise you we shall give you some sport before you've done. You talk about me making a cowardly set upon unoffending people. What's that to me that they are unoffending, when I am starving for next to no offence? But I am not a coward. Don't you be one. Bring them along or, by all the fiends, we shall yet manage to send half your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke!'" 'He was terrible--relating this to me--this tortured skeleton of a man drawn up together with his face over his knees, upon a miserable bed in that wretched hovel, and lifting his head to look at me with malignant triumph. '"That's what I told him--I knew what to say," he began again, feebly at first, but working himself up with incredible speed into a fiery utterance of his scorn. "We aren't going into the forest to wander like a string of living skeletons dropping one after another for ants to go to work upon us before we are fairly dead. Oh no! . . . 'You don't deserve a better fate,' he said. 'And what do you deserve,' I shouted at him, 'you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D'ye hear?--food to fill our bellies. And what did _you_ come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don't ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .' 'I would fight with you now,' says he, pulling at his little moustache. 'And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,' I said. 'This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat--and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d--d lurch,' I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done ('out there' he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so. 'Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?' I asked him. 'Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don't want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I've lived--and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well--it is dirty. I haven't got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it--if it's any good to you. I won't ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That's your luck and this is mine--the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.' . . ." 'His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world's face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all--men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries--and Jim--"that beefy-faced beggar." I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning "Captain Brown to a better way of life." .

rapidly

How many times the word 'rapidly' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

hit

How many times the word 'hit' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

hanging

How many times the word 'hanging' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

keep

How many times the word 'keep' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

nod

How many times the word 'nod' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

veut

How many times the word 'veut' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

reasons

How many times the word 'reasons' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

talkin

How many times the word 'talkin' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

lisbeth

How many times the word 'lisbeth' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

yeomen

How many times the word 'yeomen' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

again

How many times the word 'again' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

esteem

How many times the word 'esteem' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

delay

How many times the word 'delay' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

virtue

How many times the word 'virtue' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

fusty

How many times the word 'fusty' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

own

How many times the word 'own' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

heat

How many times the word 'heat' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

boy

How many times the word 'boy' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

besides

How many times the word 'besides' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

come

How many times the word 'come' appears in the text?

was a fortress to be stormed, a conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest slave. Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes. The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed: "I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly hers." And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself. "And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want proof." "You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which his Valerie committed herself. Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission. "And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue Vanneau." "Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my husband----" "That rag!" "To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh. Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on tablets. So one day when she had begged "_my_ Cousin Betty" to come to take coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to know how she might see him without risk. "My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time he has become famous?" "He famous?" "He is the one subject of conversation." "Pooh!" cried Lisbeth. "He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome." Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting under the Empire. "He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?" "Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger." "How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement. "Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who told you----?" Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle. "Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!" "You loved him then?" "Like a child of my own!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to be happy?" Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's. "He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time." "Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting to her feet. "Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked Valerie. "My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!" "Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie. "No; I meant to be a mother to him." "I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as soon as you go out to dinner." "Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I will make you uglier than I am." "You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----" "Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of all this." "Be calm, my dear child." "Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature, sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me proofs." "Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him, getting everything for him." "Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy." "Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!" Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her self-command. "Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I am thinking of something very different." "She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid. "What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot." "Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in Paris." "Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I counted on living all my days----" There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder. "Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it." She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point of a dagger might have pierced her heart. "And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself. "I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get." "You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----" And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth before revealing her last secrets. "You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod. An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court of justice. "I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid, which is as much as to say that I am a widow! "I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my virtue." "Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever. I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of kindness----" "Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe. "That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth. "In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends." "Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me; the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----" "I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin hands like yours!" "Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet, the curtains----" Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a gift. "You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you will see how by and by." Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two women embraced. "Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune." Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon. The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed. The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself. Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared. For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit. To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with which an idea develops in a virgin nature. Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical strength, or the black magic of the Will. From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo, Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church. Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent on deceit. She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench. As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office. "Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity." "And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland. "Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the Poles do not see, and I hope---- "You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her comprehension. "Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into prison." "Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter. The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round the Louvre. "Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth. "If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ, with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----" "What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor escapes." "He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is the way----" "As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it." "Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?" "Those who give him money." "To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail." A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a tradesman. "Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to live in the Rue Vanneau." "You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which, in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the National Guard----" "When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why you are not made a deputy." "They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope, for his big epaulette." "I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you." Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her daughter. To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, always the foe of the legs. Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by the parapet of the

seemed

How many times the word 'seemed' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

disclosed

How many times the word 'disclosed' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

direct

How many times the word 'direct' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

towards

How many times the word 'towards' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

want

How many times the word 'want' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

nothing

How many times the word 'nothing' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

straits

How many times the word 'straits' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

republican

How many times the word 'republican' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

rochester

How many times the word 'rochester' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

charged

How many times the word 'charged' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

has

How many times the word 'has' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

traveling

How many times the word 'traveling' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

thus

How many times the word 'thus' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

backward

How many times the word 'backward' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

summer

How many times the word 'summer' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

burst

How many times the word 'burst' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

where

How many times the word 'where' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

sickness

How many times the word 'sickness' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

proof

How many times the word 'proof' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

dreadfully

How many times the word 'dreadfully' appears in the text?

was a very fit place for us, pointing to a row of trees adjoining to Monsieur ----'s garden-wall. So we went thither, and fell to work immediately. After some fencing he made a home-thrust at me, and run me into my arm, a long slanting wound, but at the same time received my point into his body, and soon after fell. He spoke some words before he dropped; first he told me I had killed him; then he said he had indeed wronged me, and as he knew it, he ought not to have fought me. He desired I would make my escape immediately, which I did into the city, but no farther, nobody, as I thought, having seen us together. In the afternoon, about six hours after the action, messengers brought news, one on the heels of another, that the marquis was mortally wounded, and carried into a house at Charenton. That account, saying he was not dead, surprised me a little, not doubting but that, concluding I had made my escape, he would own who it was. However, I discovered nothing of my concern, but, going up into my chamber, I took out of a cabinet there what money I had, which indeed was so much as I thought would be sufficient for my expenses. But having an accepted bill for two thousand livres, I walked sedately to a merchant who knew me, and got fifty pistoles of him upon my bill, letting him know my business called me to England, and I would take the rest of him when he had received it. Having furnished myself thus, I provided me a horse for my servant, for I had one very good one of my own, and once more ventured home to my lodging, where I heard again that the marquis was not dead. My wife all this while covered her concern for the marquis so well that she gave me no room to make any remark upon her; but she saw evidently the marks of rage and deep resentment in my behaviour after some little stay, and perceiving me making preparation for a journey, she said to me, "Are you going out of town?" "Yes, madam," says I, "that you may have room to mourn for your friend the marquis;" at which she started, and showed she was indeed in a most terrible fright, and making a thousand crosses about herself, with a great many callings upon the Blessed Virgin and her country saints, she burst out at last, "Is it possible? Are you the man that has killed the marquis? Then you are undone, and I too." "You may, madam, be a loser by the marquis being killed; but I'll take care to be as little a loser by you as I can. 'Tis enough; the marquis has honestly confessed your guilt, and I have done with you." She would have thrown herself into my arms, protesting her innocence, and told me she would fly with me, and would convince me of her fidelity by such testimonies as I could not but be satisfied with, but I thrust her violently from me. "_Allez, infame!_" said I. "Go, infamous creature, and take from me the necessity I should be under, if I stayed, of sending you to keep company with your dear friend the marquis." I thrust her away with such force that she fell backward upon the floor, and cried out most terribly, and indeed she had reason, for she was very much hurt. It grieved me indeed to have thrust her away with such force, but you must consider me now in the circumstances of a man enraged, and, as it were, out of himself, furious and mad. However, I took her up from the floor and laid her on the bed, and calling up her maid, bid her go and take care of her mistress; and, going soon after out of doors, I took horse and made the best of my way, not towards Calais or Dunkirk, or towards Flanders, whither it might be suggested I was fled, and whither they did pursue me the same evening, but I took the direct road for Lorraine, and riding all night and very hard, I passed the Maine the next day at night, at Chalons, and came safe into the Duke of Lorraine's dominions the third day, where I rested one day only to consider what course to take; for it was still a most difficult thing to pass any way, but that I should either be in the king of France's dominions or be taken by the French allies as a subject of France. But getting good advice from a priest at Bar le Duc, who, though I did not tell him the particulars of my case, yet guessed how it was, it being, as he said, very usual for gentlemen in my circumstances to fly that way;--upon this supposition, this kind _padre_ got me a church pass; that is to say, he made me a purveyor for the abbey of ----, and, as such, got me a passport to go to Deux Ponts, which belonged to the king of Sweden. Having such authority there, and the priest's recommendation to an ecclesiastic in the place, I got passports from thence in the king of Sweden's name to Cologne, and then I was thoroughly safe. So, making my way to the Netherlands without any difficulty, I came to the Hague, and from thence, though very privately and by several names, I came to England. And thus I got clear of my Italian wife--whore I should have called her; for, after I had made her so myself, how should I expect any other of her? Being arrived at London, I wrote to my friend at Paris, but dated my letters from the Hague, where I ordered him to direct his answers. The chief business of my writing was to know if my bill was paid him, to inquire if any pursuit was made after me, and what other news he had about me or my wife, and particularly how it had fared with the marquis. I received an answer in a few days, importing that he had received the money on my bill, which he was ready to pay as I should direct; that the marquis was not dead; "but," said he, "you have killed him another way, for he has lost his commission in the Guards, which was worth to him twenty thousand livres, and he is yet a close prisoner in the Bastile;" that pursuit was ordered after me upon suspicion; that they had followed me to Amiens, on the road to Dunkirk, and to Chastean de Cambresis, on the way to Flanders, but missing me that way, had given it over; that the marquis had been too well instructed to own that he had fought with me, but said that he was assaulted on the road, and unless I could be taken, he would take his trial and come off for want of proof; that my flying was a circumstance indeed that moved strongly against him, because it was known that we had had some words that day, and were seen to walk together, but that, nothing being proved on either side, he would come off with the loss of his commission, which, however, being very rich, he could bear well enough. As to my wife, he wrote me word she was inconsolable, and had cried herself to death almost; but he added (very ill-natured indeed), whether it was for me or for the marquis, that he could not determine. He likewise told me she was in very bad circumstances and very low, so that, if I did not take some care of her, she would come to be in very great distress. The latter part of this story moved me indeed, for I thought, however it was, I ought not to let her starve; and, besides, poverty was a temptation which a woman could not easily withstand, and I ought not to be the instrument to drive her to a horrid necessity of crime, if I could prevent it. Upon this I wrote to him again to go to her, and talk with her, and learn as much as he could of her particular circumstances; and that, if he found she was really in want, and, particularly, that she did not live a scandalous life, he should give her twenty pistoles, and tell her, if she would engage to live retired and honestly, she should have so much annually, which was enough to subsist her. She took the first twenty pistoles, but bade him tell me that I had wronged her and unjustly charged her, and I ought to do her justice; and I had ruined her by exposing her in such a manner as I had, having no proof of my charge or ground for any suspicion; that, as to twenty pistoles a year, it was a mean allowance to a wife that had travelled over the world, as she had done with me, and the like; and so expostulated with him to obtain forty pistoles a year of me, which I consented to. But she never gave me the trouble of paying above one year; for after that the marquis was so fond of her again that he took her away to himself, and, as my friend wrote me word, had settled four hundred crowns a year on her, and I never heard any more of her. I was now in London, but was obliged to be very retired and change my name, letting nobody in the nation know who I was, except my merchant by whom I corresponded with my people in Virginia; and particularly with my tutor, who was now become the head manager of my affairs, and was in very good circumstances himself also by my means. But he deserved all I did or could do for him, for he was a most faithful friend as well as servant, as ever man had, in that country at least. I was not the easiest man alive, in the retired, solitary manner I now lived in; and I experienced the truth of the text, that "it is not good for man to be alone," for I was extremely melancholy and heavy, and indeed knew not what to do with myself, particularly because I was under some restraint, that I was too afraid to go abroad. At last I resolved to go quite away, and go to Virginia again, and there live retired as I could. But when I came to consider that part more narrowly, I could not prevail with myself to live a private life. I had got a wandering kind of taste, and knowledge of things begat a desire of increasing it, and an exceeding delight I had in it, though I had nothing to do in the armies or in war, and did not design ever to meddle with it again. Yet I could not live in the world and not inquire what was doing in it; nor could I think of living in Virginia, where I was to hear my news twice a year, and read the public accounts of what was just then upon the stocks, as the history of things past. This was my notion: I was now in my native country, where my circumstances were easy, and though I had ill-luck abroad, for I brought little money home with me, yet, by a little good management, I might soon have money by me. I had nobody to keep but myself, and my plantations in Virginia generally returned me from 400 to 600 a year, one year above 700, and to go thither, I concluded, was to be buried alive; so I put off all thoughts of it, and resolved to settle somewhere in England where I might know everybody and nobody know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French tongue perfectly well, having been so many years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a Frenchman. So I went to Canterbury, called myself an Englishman among the French, and a Frenchman among the English; and on that score was the more perfectly concealed, going by the name of Monsieur Charnot with the French, and was called Mr. Charnock among the English. Here indeed I lived perfectly incog. I made no particular acquaintance so as to be intimate, and yet I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I discoursed in common, talked French with the Walloons, and English with the English; and lived retired and sober, and was well enough received by all sorts; but as I meddled with nobody's business, so nobody meddled with mine; I thought I lived pretty well. But I was not fully satisfied. A settled family life was the thing I loved; had made two pushes at it, as you have heard, but with ill-success; yet the miscarriage of what was past did not discourage me at all, but I resolved to marry. I looked out for a woman as suitable as I could, but always found some thing or other to shock my fancy, except once a gentleman's daughter of good fashion; but I met with so many repulses of one kind or another that I was forced to give it over; and indeed, though I might be said to be a lover in this suit, and had managed myself so well with the young lady that I had no difficulty left but what would soon have been adjusted, yet her father was so difficult, made so many objections, was to-day not pleased one way, to-morrow another, that he would stand by nothing that he himself had proposed, nor could he be ever brought to be of the same mind two days together; so that we at last put an end to the pretensions, for she would not marry without her father's consent, and I would not steal her, and so that affair ended. I cannot say but I was a little vexed at the dis appointment of this, so I left the city of Canterbury and went to London in the stage-coach. Here I had an odd scene presented as ever happened of its kind. There was in the stage-coach a young woman and her maid. She was sitting in a very melancholy posture, for she was in the coach before me, and sighed most dreadfully all the way, and whenever her maid spoke to her she burst out into tears. I was not long in the coach with her but, seeing she made such a dismal figure, I offered to comfort her a little, and inquired into the occasion of her affliction. But she would not speak a word; but her maid, with a force of crying too, said her master was dead, at which word the lady burst out again into a passion of crying, and between mistress and maid this was all I could get for the morning part of that day. When we came to dine, I offered the lady, that seeing, I supposed, she would not dine with the company, if she would please to dine with me, I would dine in a separate room; for the rest of the company were foreigners. Her maid thanked me in her mistresses name, but her mistress could eat nothing, and desired to be private. Here, however, I had some discourse with the maid, from whom I learned that the lady was wife to a captain of a ship, who was outward bound to somewhere in the Straits--I think it was to Zante and Venice; that, being gone no farther than the Downs, he was taken sick, and after about ten days' illness had died at Deal; that his wife, hearing of his sickness, had gone to Deal to see him, and had come but just time enough to see him die; had stayed there to bury him, and was now coming to London in a sad, disconsolate condition indeed. I heartily pitied the young gentlewoman indeed, and said some things to her in the coach to let her know I did so, which she gave no answer to, but in civility now and then made a bow, but never gave me the least opportunity to see her face, or so much as to know whether she had a face or no, much less to guess what form of a face it was. It was winter time, and the coach put up at Rochester, not going through in a day, as was usual in summer; and a little before we came to Rochester I told the lady I understood she had ate nothing to-day, that such a course would but make her sick, and, doing her harm, could do her deceased husband no good; and therefore I entreated her that, as I was a stranger, and only offered a civility to her in order to abate her severely afflicting herself, she would yield so far to matters of ceremony as let us sup together as passengers; for, as to the strangers, they did not seem to understand the custom or to desire it. She bowed, but gave no answer; only, after pressing her by arguments, which she could not deny was very civil and kind, she returned, she gave me thanks, but she could not eat. "Well, madam," said I, "do but sit down; though you think you cannot eat, perhaps you may eat a bit. Indeed you must eat, or you will destroy yourself at this rate of living, and upon the road too; in a word, you will be sick indeed." I argued with her. The maid put in, and said, "Do, madam; pray try to divert yourself a little." I pressed her again, and she bowed to me very respectfully, but still said, "No," and she could not eat. The maid continued to importune her, and said, "Dear madam, do. The gentleman is a civil gentleman; pray, madam, do;" and then, turning to me, said, "My mistress will, sir, I hope," and seemed pleased, and indeed was so. However, I went on to persuade her; and, taking no notice of what her maid said, that I was a civil gentleman, I told her, "I am a stranger to you, madam; but if I thought you were shy of me on any account, as to civility, I will send my supper up to you in your own chamber, and stay below myself." She bowed then to me twice, and looked up, which was the first time, and said she had no suspicion of that kind; that my offer was so civil that she was as much ashamed to refuse it as she should be ashamed to accept it, if she was where she was known; that she thought I was not quite a stranger to her, for she had seen me before; that she would accept my offer so far as to sit at table, because I desired it; but she could not promise me to eat, and that she hoped I would take the other as a constraint upon her, in return to so much kindness. She startled me when she said she had seen me before; for I had not the least knowledge of her, nor did I remember so much as to have heard of her name; for I had asked her name of her maid; and indeed it made me almost repent my compliment, for it was many ways essential to me not to be known. However, I could not go back; and, besides, if I was known, it was essentially necessary to me to know who it was that knew me, and by what circumstances; so I went on with my compliment. We came to the inn but just before it was dark. I offered to hand my widow out of the coach, and she could not decline it; but though her hoods were not then much over her face, yet, being dark, I could see little of her then. I waited on her then into the stairfoot, and led her up the inn-stairs to a dining-room which the master of the house offered to show us, as if for the whole company; but she declined going in there, and said she desired rather to go directly to her chamber, and turning to her maid, bade her speak to the innkeeper to show her to her lodging-room. So I waited on her to the door, and took my leave, telling her I would expect her at supper. In order to treat her moderately well, and not extravagantly, for I had no thoughts of anything farther than civility, which was the effect of mere compassion for the unhappiness of the most truly disconsolate woman that I ever met with; I say, in order to treat her handsomely, but not extravagantly, I provided what the house afforded, which was a couple of partridges and a very good dish of stewed oysters. They brought us up afterwards a neat's tongue and a ham that was almost cut quite down, but we ate none of it; for the other was fully enough for us both, and the maid made her supper off the oysters we had left, which were enough. I mention this because it should appear I did not treat her as a person I was making any court to, for I had nothing of that in my thoughts; but merely in pity to the poor woman, who I saw in a circumstance that was indeed very unhappy. When I gave her maid notice that supper was ready, she fetched her mistress, coming in before her with a candle in her hand, and then it was that I saw her face, and being in her dishabille, she had no hood over her eyes or black upon her head, when I was truly surprised to see one of the most beautiful faces upon earth. I saluted her, and led her to the fireside, the table, though spread, being too far from the fire, the weather being cold. She was now something sociable, though very grave, and sighed often on account of her circumstances. But she so handsomely governed her grief, yet so artfully made it mingle itself with all her discourse, that it added exceedingly to her behaviour, which was every way most exquisitely genteel. I had a great deal of discourse with her, and upon many subjects, and by degrees took her name, that is to say, from herself, as I had done before from her maid; also the place where she lived, viz., near Ratcliff, or rather Stepney, where I asked her leave to pay her a visit when she thought fit to admit company, which she seemed to intimate would not be a great while. It is a subject too surfeiting to entertain people with the beauty of a person they will never see. Let it suffice to tell them she was the most beautiful creature of her sex that I ever saw before or since; and it cannot be wondered if I was charmed with her the very first moment I saw her face. Her behaviour was likewise a beauty in itself, and was so extraordinary that I cannot say I can describe it. The next day she was much more free than she was the first night, and I had so much conversation as to enter into particulars of things on both sides; also she gave me leave to come and see her house, which, however, I did not do under a fortnight or thereabouts, because I did not know how far she would dispense with the ceremony which it was necessary to keep up at the beginning of the mourning. However, I came as a man that had business with her, relating to the ship her husband was dead out of, and the first time I came was admitted; and, in short, the first time I came I made love to her. She received that proposal with disdain. I cannot indeed say she treated me with any disrespect, but she said she abhorred the offer, and would hear no more of it. How I came to make such a proposal to her I scarce knew then, though it was very much my intention from the first. In the meantime I inquired into her circumstances and her character, and heard nothing but what was very agreeable of them both; and, above all, I found she had the report of the best-humoured lady and the best-bred of all that part of the town; and now I thought I had found what I had so often wished for to make me happy and had twice miscarried in, and resolved not to miss her, if it was possible to obtain her. It came indeed a little into my thoughts that I was a married man, and had a second wife alive, who, though she was false to me and a whore, yet I was not legally divorced from her, and that she was my wife for all that. But I soon got over that part; for, first, as she was a whore, and the marquis had confessed it to me, I was divorced in law, and I had a power to put her away. But having had the misfortune of fighting a duel, and being obliged to quit the country, I could not claim the legal process which was my right, and therefore might conclude myself as much divorced as if it had been actually done, and so that scruple vanished. I suffered now two months to run without pressing my widow any more, only I kept a strict watch to find if any one else pretended to her. At the end of two months I visited her again, when I found she received me with more freedom, and we had no more sighs and sobs about the last husband; and though she would not let me press my former proposal so far as I thought I might have done, yet I found I had leave to come again, and it was the article of decency which she stood upon as much as anything; that I was not disagreeable to her, and that my using her so handsomely upon the road had given me a great advantage in her favour. I went on gradually with her, and gave her leave to stand off for two months more. But then I told her the matter of decency, which was but a ceremony, was not to stand in competition with the matter of affection; and, in short, I could not bear any longer delay, but that, if she thought fit, we might marry privately; and, to cut the story short, as I did my courtship, in about five months I got her in the mind, and we were privately married, and that with so very exact a concealment that her maid, that was so instrumental in it, yet had no knowledge of it for near a month more. I was now, not only in my imagination, but in reality, the most happy creature in the world, as I was so infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was indeed the best-humoured woman in the world, a most accomplished, beautiful creature indeed, perfectly well-bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I, that was to be the most unhappy fellow alive in the article of matrimony, had at last a disappointment of the worst sort even here. I had three fine children by her, and in her time of lying-in with the last she got some cold, that she did not in a long time get off; and, in short, she grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors. Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, it goes on by little and little to their destruction. So in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that, till, in short, she could not live without them, and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking. As I likened drink to the devil, in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table--nay, in her own closet by herself, till, instead of a well-made, fine shape, she was as fat as a hostess; her fine face, bloated and blotched, had not so much as the ruins of the most beautiful person alive--nothing remained but a good eye; that indeed she held to the last. In short, she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue; and, giving herself up to drinking, killed herself in about a year and a half after she first began that cursed trade, in which time she twice was exposed in the most scandalous manner with a captain of a ship, who, like a villain, took the advantage of her being in drink and not knowing what she did. But it had this unhappy effect, that instead of her being ashamed and repenting of it when she came to herself, it hardened her in the crime, and she grew as void

row

How many times the word 'row' appears in the text?