look which I shall never forget. She did not move or speak, while I, as well as I could, put on her cloak and bonnet, but when I was preparing to lift her into the carriage, she asked in a faint, broken voice, the hour.
“Six,” I answered.
She put out her hand. “It must be all over. I must go upstairs,” she said.
“Impossible: you cannot stand.”
“With you,” she said faintly.
I could not oppose the pleading of that voice. Alas! what right had I to oppose it? We ascended the stairs. On the fourth landing-place she left my arm, and opened the door resolutely. It was a poor room, and I was surprised at first to see it full of light. Only for a moment. I could see, as I stood on the threshold, reflected fan wise on the ceiling, the seven luminous spots of light that shone from the seven lights below round the bed. On it was a corpse. I saw the outline of a figure, but a sheet covered it. A priest in the corner of the room was reading some prayers.
Madame Rabenfels had fallen on her knees beside the bed. After a while, she rose and uncovered the face. She stooped over it with a gesture and expression which would have convinced me at once and for ever, had I had a doubt left, that whatever mysterious tie might subsist between her and that poor clay, it was not the tie of guilty love.
At that supreme moment of sorrow there could be no feigning. No sister ever kissed her brother, no mother ever pressed her lips to the pale brow of her son, with more pure or more holy affection. She then looked round the room once more, and left it without a word.
I supported her in silence into the carriage. She sank back, and I could hear her weeping convulsively. I have never witnessed such tears: they were mingled with such sobs, such faint cries, such deep sad sighs. The heart must have been well nigh broken from which such a manifestation of grief could proceed.
The carriage stopped at some little distance from her usual entrance into her house. I dismissed it. She would not let me accompany her farther than the door. She wrung my hand in silence, and entered.
Two days afterwards a servant brought me a packet and a letter. His mistress had left Paris. This, then, was her farewell; that farewell is shrined in my soul. With the letter were enclosed some closely-written sheets which contained her history. I will transcribe it.
OUR ENGLISH WORLD-WINNERS.
An earnest artist named William Walker, not being wholly absorbed in the pursuit of gain, but working with enthusiasm on his own perceptions of what is great in humanity and fitting in a nation, has for many years devoted himself to the task of gathering and grouping together the great men who were living in the early part of the present century when the great man-preyer, Napoleon Bonaparte, was in the zenith of his power,—the man-preyer who cared for no arts but those conducive nearly or remotely to his war-trade, and who called Englishmen shop-keepers, because he could not plunder their shops at his pleasure,—the man-preyer who would have slain the whole human race, in order to sit on an universal throne.
While he was doing, and trying to do more of these things, the English nation withstood him; and with all that labour upon them, leisure was found amongst them to follow up the peaceful processes by which the world has gradually been won from a wilderness. The works of war they wrought at, unceasingly, in self-defence; but the works of peace went on notwithstanding, to pay the cost of war, and yet heap up a constantly accumulating capital of which the world had never before an example.
When our progenitor Adam left Eden behind him, changing the spontaneous growth of food for that grown by labour, then began the processes by which the brain of man, labouring on from year to year, had to win from nature her hoarded knowledge, and convert her physical forces into the servants of man and the substitutes for his physical strength. And these processes will go on enlarging and improving till the whole habitable world shall become an Eden by the operations of art; and then the drudgery of mere labour shall cease, and that labour only which is exercise of the mental and physical nerves and muscles shall remain. Our chemists and our machinists are the pro-creators of these latter days, destined to achieve the art-creation that shall remove the primal curse, making happiness the normal condition of mankind, and misery only an accident. Before us, by dint of the loving energy and enthusiasm of Mr. Walker, is a picture, not painted for the few, but engraved for the many, of some fifty of the pioneers of this our land, who have led the way in winning from the wilderness this portion of the earth, and setting the fashion to those of other lands to go and do likewise.
This is of a verity a picture of great men—men whose instinct it was to work for the world and fight against misery: some of them wealthy and some of them poor; with visions perchance of wealth to come, but still working for the world’s welfare as the only path through which to ensure their own,—the race of path-finders who are ever setting copies for the English nation to work by, and thus gain more results by the development of national energy.
Accompanying the picture, which contains upwards of fifty portraits, some full figures, and some more or less hidden, but all admirably grouped, there is a volume, by Mr. Walker’s son, giving a brief memoir of the salient points of each individual history; this also is well executed, and it forms a useful book of reference for those who would know more than the picture can tell.
Philosophers, astronomers, naturalists, and physicians, are put in the group; then follow the chemists, and, lastly, the engineers: this is as it should be,—they who gather knowledge from the stores of Nature build up the groundwork whereon true art is based, and whereby empiricism is corrected.
Prominent in the first group is Herschel, with a