Birds of Prey

ain in his intercourse with the world - had been guilty during the course of a long career, there was none for

wing river into eternity's trackless ocean, that the warmest thrill of gratitude which ever stirred the slow pulses of his cold heart quickened its beating as he clasped the hand that had held him back from the unknown region whose icy breath had chilled him with an awful fear. Such men as Horatio Paget are apt to feel a strange terror when the black night drops suddenly down upon them, and the "Gray Boatman's" voice sounds hollow and mysterious in the darkness, announcing that the ocean is near. Th

he sole coin with which the medical man would be paid for his services; "thank that young woman, if you want to thank anybody; for if it had not been for her you wouldn't be here to t

rgeon took his departure, leaving Horatio Page

little street leading out of the Old Kent-road, and letting a meagrely-furnished little parlour and a still more meagrely-furnished little bedroom to any single gentleman whom reverse of f

the purses of other people. It was in that hopeless interval that Horatio Paget established himself in the widow's parlour. But though he slept in the Old Kent-road, he had not yet brought himself to endure ex

o the last, and sinks in a moment. Captain Paget's wardrobe was in its Indian summer in these days; and when he felt how fatally near the

in Paget's fast friends seemed to have simultaneously decided upon spending their existence out of doors, as it appeared to the impecunious Captain. The servants of his friends were afflicted with a strange uncertainty as to their masters' movements. At whatever hall-door Horatio Paget presented himself, it seemed equally doubtful whether the proprietor of the mansion would be home to dinner that day, or whether he would be at home any time next day, or the day after that, or at the end of the week, or indeed whether he would ever come home again. Sometimes the Captain, calling in the evening dusk, in the faint hope of gaining admittance to some friendly dwelling, saw the glimmer of light under a dining-room door, and heard the clooping of corks and the pleasant jingl

- success the rare exception. Crossing the river now on his way westward, he was wont to loiter a little on Waterloo Bridge, and to look dreamily down at the water, wondering

y, and bury one decently, there'd be no particular horror in that kind of death. But to be found like that, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotti

Paget's intellectual resources were exhausted, and an angry impatience took possession of him. Then, in defiance of the pelting rain or the lowering sky, he flung his slippers into the farthest corner - and the farthest corner of Mrs. Kepp's parlour was not very remote from the Captain's arm-chair - he drew on the stoutest of his varnished boots - and there were none of them very stout now - buttoned his perfect overcoat, adjusted his hat before the looking-glass, and sallied forth, umbrella in hand, to make his way westward. Westward always, through storm and shower, back to the haunts of his youth, went the wanderer and outcast, to see the red glow of cheery fires reflected on the plate-glass windows of his favourite clubs; to see the lamps in spacious reading-rooms lit early in the autumn dusk, and to watch the soft light glimmering on the rich bindings of the books, and losing itself in the sombre depths of crimson draperies. To this poor worldly creature the agony of banishment from those palace

odging with his garments dripping, and his beautiful varnished boots reduced to a kind of pulp; and the chill resulted in a violent inflammati

d taken about as much notice as he had been wont to take of the coloured servants who tended him when he was with his regiment in India. Horatio Paget had been a night-brawler and a gamester, a duellist and a reprobate, in the glorio

remembered had received their patent from the Prince Regent, and had graduated in the houses of Devonshire and Hertford. How should the faded bachelor know that this girl, in a shabby cotton gown, with unkempt hair dragged off her pale face, and with grimy smears from the handles of saucepans and fire-irons imprinted upon her cheeks - how should he know that

her mother dozed in a corner with a worsted stocking drawn over her arm and a pair of spectacles resting upon her elderly nose. Mrs. Kepp and her

smile as she looked at me when I was first presented to her. I was very young in the beautiful Jersey's time; and then there was the other one - whom I used to drin

rons were dead and gone, and the men he had patronised shut their doors upon him in the day of his poverty. As for his relations, he had turned his back upon them long ago, when first he followed in the shining wake of that gorgeous vessel, the Royal Georg

ble flooring of her mother's dwelling was honoured by the tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots, and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger's slim white hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous accents - all these had impressed Mary Anne's tender little heart so much the more because of his poverty and loneliness. That such a man should be forgotten and deserted - that such a man should be poor and lonely, seemed so cruel a chance to the simple maiden:

inst the Captain's lamen

and the "hisself," though they proceeded from the lips of his consoler; -"you've got many, many years before you yet

shook his he

e of my commission; and I have parted with every object of any value that I ever possessed - in vulgar parlance, I am cleaned out, Mary Anne. But other men have spent every sixpence belonging to them, and have contrived to live pleasantly enough for half a century afterwards;

some notion that he had been saying something wicked and blasphemo

sir," she entreated. "It makes me so

say make you unhappy, Mary Ann

t very low over her work to hide those painful blushes. She did not know that the Captain's tone

had ever been conscious of being loved before. He saw too that she was beautiful. To an ugly woman Captain Paget might have felt extremely grateful; but he could never have thought of an ugly woman as he thought of Mary Anne Kepp. The end of his contemplation and his deliberation came to this: She was beautiful, and she loved him, and his life was utterly wretched and lonely; so he determined on proving his gratitude by a sublime sacrifice. Before the girl had lifted her face from

e exclaimed. "O, surely,

s a man can be. But I don't mean to be poor all my life. Come, my dear, don't cry," he exclaimed, just a little impatiently - for the girl had covered her face with her h

old and sluggish, rarely fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness. Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and that religion had its begin

my dear?" he asked, with,

at him with tearfu

, and nurse you when you are ill, and work

olatry - the GENTLEMAN whose varnished boots had been to her as a glimpse of another and a fairer world than that represente

But I am talking of things you don't understand. You will be my wife; and a very good, kind, obedient little wife, I have no doubt. That is all settled. As for working for me, my love, it would be about as much as these poor little hands could do to earn me a cigar a day - and I seldom smoke less than half a d

me tea for the beloved sleeper. The cups and saucers made more noise to-night than they were wont to make in the girl's careful hands. The fluttering of her heart seemed to communicate itself to the tips of her fingers, and the jingling of the crockery-ware betrayed the intensity of her emotion. He was to be her husband! She was to have a gentleman for a husband; and such a gentleman! Out of

eupon Mary Anne endured the first of the long series of disappointments which were to arise out of her affection for the penniless Captain. The widow was a woman of the world, and was obstinately blind to the advantages of a union with a ruined gentleman of fifty. "How's h

al arguments; "you go on as if all I cared for was being fed and clothed. Besides,

r that week, and have I ever had it regular? And ain't I keeping him out of charity now? - a poor widow-woman like me - which I may be wanting charity myself before long

in the streets, mother!" cried Mary;

ement of her idol - the mother had no mercy upon her daughter's folly; and after much wearisome contention and domestic misery - carefully hidden from the penniless sybarite in the parlour - after many tears and heart-burnings, and wakeful nights and prayerful watches, Mary Anne Kepp consented to leave the house quietly one morning with the gentleman lodger while the widow h

ry Anne attired herself in her Sabbath-day raiment, and left Tulliver's-terrace with the Captain in a cab. She would fain have taken a little lavender paper-cov

age, my dear," he said sententiously;

it in which one talks to a faithful canine companion - as Napoleon III. may talk to his favourite Nero; "I have great plans yet unfulfilled, my honest Nero, though you may not be wise enough to gues

ttle onyx ring off his own finger, and put it on the clumsier finger of his bride. It was the last of his jewels - the rejected of the pawnbrokers, who, not being learned in antique intaglios, had condemned the ring as trumpery. There is always something a little ominous in the bridegroom's forgetfulness of that simple golden circle which typifies an eternal union; and a superstitious person might have drawn a sinister augury from the subject of Captain Paget's intaglio, which was a

surprised to hear him tell the landlady that he and his wife had just arrived from Devonshire, a

me of the sights of London in spite of the abominable weather. But the deuce of it is, that my servant has misun

nates of the land. The Captain knew enough of human nature to know that if references are only sufficiently imposing, they are very unlikely to be verified. The swindler who refe

ment which she did not know to be false. He had joined the ranks of the vultures. He had lain down upo

would infallibly be realized, and desirous to meet with another gentleman of equal capital; as the mysterious X.Y.Z. who will - for so small a recompense as thirty postage-stamps - impart the secret of an elegant and pleasing employment, whereby seven-pound-ten a-week may be made by any individual, male or female; - under every flimsy disguise with which the swindler hides his execrable form, Captain Paget plied his cruel trade, and still contrived to find fresh dupes. Of course there were occasions when the pigeons were slow to flutter into the fascinating snare, and when the vulture had a bad time of it; and it was a c

entially cowardly. She could not bring herself to encounter her mother without the money owed by the Captain; she could not bring herself to en

at your life is a falsehood and a snare, and that to leave a place is to leave contempt and execration behind you - these things constitute the burden of a woman whose husband lives by his wits. And over and above these miseries, Mrs. Paget had to endure all the variations of temper to which the schemer is subject. If the pigeons dropped readily into the snare, and if their plumage proved well worth the picking, the Captain was very kind to his wife, after his own fashion; that is to say, he took her out with him, and after lecturing her angrily because of the shabbiness of her bonnet, bought her a new one, and gave her a dinner that made her ill, and then sent her home in a cab, while he finished the evening in more congenial society. But if the times were bad for the vulture tribe - O, then, what a gloomy companion for the

that this low-born and low-bred girl could have scruples that he never felt, and might suffer agonies of remorse and shame of which his coarser nature was incapable - never entered the Captain's mind. It would have been too great an absurdity for the daughter of plebeian Kepps to affect a tenderness of conscience unknown to the scion of Pagets and Cromies and Nugents. Mary Anne was afraid of her elegant husband; and she worshipped and waited upon him in meek silence, keeping the secret of her own sorrows, and keeping it so well that he never guessed the manifold sources of that pallor of countenance and hollow brightness of eye which had of late annoyed him when he looked at his wife. She had borne him a child - a sweet girl baby, with

five years after the birth of her child, and during those miserable years the one effort of her life was to secure the miserable stipend paid for the little girl's maintenance; but before the child's fifth birthday the mother faded off the face of the earth. She died in a miserable lodging not very far from Tulliver's-te

in the dreary ward, where he and half a dozen other depressed and melancholy men sat at little tables writing letters, or pretending to read newspapers, and looking

r dear gentleman;" but the lad grew nervous and bewildered at sight of the Captain's fierce ho

ning, please, sir; and mother said I w

staggered un

kety Windsor chair, that creaked under his wei

d life had been one long heart-sickness -