Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II

On the third day after Edward Lovegrove's appearance before the magistrate, he set off about noon for Christchurch, in order to dispose of his flute – a sacrifice which could no longer be delayed. It was growing late, and his wife was sitting up in impatient expectation of his return, when an alarm of "Fire" was raised, and it was announced that a wheat-rick belonging to Nichols, who farmed in a small way, was in flames. Many of the villagers hastened to the spot; but the fire, by the time they arrived, had been effectually got under, and after hanging about the premises a short time, they turned homeward. Edward Lovegrove joined a party of them, and incidently remarked that he had been to Christchurch, where he had met young Nichols, and had some rough words with him: on his return, the young man had passed him on horseback when about two miles distant from the elder Nichols' house, and just as he (Lovegrove) neared the attorney's premises, the rick burst into flames. This relation elicited very little remark at the time, and bidding his companion good-night, Lovegrove hastened home.

"The constables are looking for you," said a young woman, abruptly entering the chandler's shop, whither Edward Lovegrove had proceeded the following morning to discharge the trifling debt he had incurred.

"For me?" exclaimed the startled young man.

"Yes, for you;" and, added the girl with a meaning look and whisper, "if you were near the fire last night, I would advise you to make yourself scarce for a time."

Her words conveyed no definite meaning to Edward Lovegrove's mind. The fire! Constables after him! He left the shop, and took with hasty steps, his way to the cottage, distant over the fields about a quarter of a mile.

"Lawyer Nichols' fire," he muttered as he hurried along. "Surely they do not mean to accuse me of that!"

The sudden recollection of the threatening letter he had sent glanced across and smote, as with the stroke of a dagger, upon his brain. "Good God! to what have I exposed myself?"

His agitation was excessive; and at the instant the constables, who had been to his home in search of him, turned the corner of a path, a few paces ahead, and came full upon him. In his confusion and terror he turned to flee, but so weakly and irresolutely, that he was almost immediately overtaken and secured.

"I would not have believed this of you, Edward Lovegrove," exclaimed the constable.

"Believed what?" ejaculated the bewildered man.

"That you would have tried to revenge yourself on Lawyer Nichols by such a base, dastardly trick. But it's not my business to reproach you, and the less you say the better. Come along."

As they passed on toward the magistrate's house, an eager and curious crowd gradually collected and accompanied them; and just as they reached Digby Hall, a distant convulsive scream, and his name frantically pronounced by a voice which the prisoner but too well recognized, told him that his wife had heard of his capture, and was hurrying to join him. He drew back, but his captors urged him impatiently on; the hall-door was slammed in the faces of the crowd, and he found himself in the presence of the magistrate and the elder Nichols.

The attorney, who appeared to be strongly agitated, deposed in substance that the prisoner had been seen by his son near his premises a few minutes before the fire burst out; that he had abused and assaulted young Mr. Nichols but a few hours previously in the market at Christchurch; and that he had himself received a threatening letter, which he now produced, only two days before, and which he believed to be in the prisoner's handwriting —

The prisoner, bewildered by terror, eagerly denied that he wrote the letter.

This unfortunate denial was easily disposed of, by the production, by the constable, of a half sheet of letter-paper found in the cottage, the ragged edge of which precisely fitted that of the letter. Edward Lovegrove would have been fully committed at once, but that the magistrate thought it desirable that the deposition of Arthur Nichols should be first formally taken. This course was reluctantly acquiesced in by the prosecutor, and the prisoner was remanded to the next day.

The dismay of Charity Symons, when he found that his well-intentioned present had only brought additional suffering upon the Lovegroves, was intense and bitter; but how to help them, he knew not. He had half made up his mind to obtain – no matter by what means – a sight of certain papers which he had long dimly suspected would make strange revelations upon matters affecting Mary Lovegrove, when the arrest of her husband on a charge of incendiarism thoroughly determined him to risk the expedient he had long hesitatingly contemplated. The charge, he was quite satisfied in his own mind, was an atrocious fabrication, strongly as circumstances seemed to color and confirm it.

The clerk, as he sat that afternoon in the office silently pursuing his ill-paid drudgery, noticed that his employer was strangely ill at ease. He was restless, and savagely impatient of the slightest delay on the most necessary question. Evening fell early – it was now near the end of October, and Symons with a respectful bow, left the office. A few minutes afterward, the attorney having carefully locked his desk, iron chest, &c., and placed the keys in his pocket, followed.

Two hours had elapsed, when Symons re-entered the house by the back way, walked through the kitchen, softly ascended the stairs, and groped his way to the inner, private office. There was no moon, and he dared not light a candle; but the faint starlight fortunately enabled him to move about without stumbling or noise. He mounted the office steps, and inserted the edge of a sharp broad chisel between the lock and the lid of a heavy iron-bound box marked 'C.' The ease and suddenness with which the lid yielded to the powerful effort he applied to it, overthrew his balance, and he with difficulty saved himself from falling on the floor. The box was not locked, and on putting his hand into it, he discovered that it was entirely empty! The tell-tale papers had been removed, probably destroyed! At the moment Symons made this exasperating discovery, the sound of approaching footsteps struck upon his startled senses, and shaking with fright, he had barely time to descend the steps, and coop himself up in a narrow cupboard under one of the desks, when the Nicholses, father and son, entered the office – the former with a candle in his hand.

"We are private here," said the father in a low, guarded voice; "and I tell you you must listen to reason.

"I don't like it a bit," rejoined the young man. "It's a cowardly, treacherous business; and as for swearing I saw him near the fire when it so strangely burst out, I won't do it at any price."

"Listen to me, you foolish, headstrong boy," retorted the elder Nichols, "before you decide on beggary for yourself, and ruin – the gallows, perhaps, for me."

"Wh-e-e-e-w! Why, what do you mean?"

"I will tell you. You already know that Mary Woodhouse married Robert Clarke against his uncle's consent; you also know that Robert Clarke died about five years after the marriage, and that the seventy pounds a year which the uncle allowed his nephew to keep him from starvation was continued to be paid through me to his widow."

"Yes, I have heard all this before."

"But you do not know," continued the attorney in an increasingly-agitated voice, "that about six years after Robert Clarke's death, the uncle so far relented toward the widow and daughter – though he would never see either of them – as to increase the annuity to two hundred pounds, and that at his death, four years since, he bequeathed Mrs. Clarke five hundred pounds per annum, with succession to her daughter: all of which sums, I, partly on account of your riot and extravagance, have appropriated."

"Good heaven, what a horrible affair! What would you have me do?"

"I have told you. The dread of discovery has destroyed my health, and poisoned my existence. Were he once out of the country, his wife would doubtless follow him; detection would be difficult; conviction, as I will manage it, impossible."

There was more said to the same effect; and the son, at the close of a long and troubled colloquy, departed, after promising to "consider of it."

He had been gone but a few minutes; the elder Nichols was silently meditating the perilous position in which he had placed himself, when a noiseless step approached him from behind, and a heavy hand was suddenly placed upon his shoulder. He started wildly to his feet, and confronted the stern and triumphant glance of the once humble and submissive Charity Symons. The suddenness of the shock overcame him, and he fainted.

Mary Lovegrove, whose child had sobbed itself to sleep, was sitting in solitude and darkness in the lower room of the cottage, her head bowed in mute and tearless agony upon the table, when, as on a previous evening, a tap at the back window challenged her attention. It was once more Charity Symons. "What do you here again?" exclaimed the wretched wife with some asperity of tone: "you no doubt intended well; but you have nevertheless ruined, destroyed me."

"Not so," rejoined the deformed clerk, his pale, uncouth, but expressive features gleaming with wild exultation in the clear starlight. "God has at last enabled me to requite your kindness to a contemned outcast. Fear not for to-morrow. Your husband is safe, and you are rich." With these words he vanished.

On the next morning a letter was placed in the magistrate's hands from Mr. Nichols, stating that circumstances had come to the writer's knowledge which convinced him that Edward Lovegrove was entirely innocent of the offense imputed to him; that the letter, which he had destroyed, bore quite another meaning from that which he had first attributed to it; and that he consequently abandoned the prosecution. On further inquiry, it was found that the attorney had left his house late the preceding night, accompanied by his son, had walked to Christchurch, and from thence set off post for London. His property and the winding up of his affairs had been legally confided to his late clerk. Under these circumstances the prisoner was of course immediately discharged; and after a private interview with Symons, returned in joy and gladness to his now temporary home. He was accompanied by the noisy felicitations of his neighbors, to whom his liberation and sudden accession to a considerable fortune had become at the same moment known. As he held his passionately-weeping wife in his arms, and gazed with grateful emotion in her tearful but rejoicing eyes, he whispered, "That kind act of yours toward the despised hunchback has saved me, and enriched our child. 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy!'"

[From Dickens's Household Words.]

THE GAMBLERS OF THE RHINE

In literature, in science, in art, we find Germany quite on a level with the present age. She has produced men and books equal to the men and books of England or France, as the names of Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Liebig, and a score of others bear testimony. But while in poetry, philosophy, and science, she is on a par with the best portions of modern Europe; in politics – in the practical science of government – she is an indefinite number of centuries behindhand. Governmentally, she is now where the English were during the Saxon Heptarchy, with seven or more kingdoms in a space that might be well governed by one sceptre. Where she might get along very well with two, she has a dozen petty kings, and petty courts, and petty national debts, and petty pension-lists, and paltry debased and confusing coinages, and petty cabals, quarrels, and intermixture of contending interests.

Out of this division of territory arises, of course, a number of small poor princes; and as poor princes do not like to work hard when their pockets are low, we find them busy with the schemes, shifts, and contrivances, common from time immemorial with penniless people who have large appetites for pleasure, small stomachs for honest work – real, living, reigning dukes though they be, they have added to the royal "businesses" to which they were born, little private speculations for the encouragement of rouge et noir and roulette. These small princes have, in fact, turned gambling house keepers – hell-keepers, in the vulgar but expressive slang of a London police court – proprietors of establishments where the vicious and the unwary, the greedy hawk and the silly pigeon, congregate, the one to plunder and the other to be plucked. That which has been expelled from huge London, as too great an addition to its vice, or, if not quite expelled, is carried on with iron-barred doors, unequal at times to protect its followers from the police and the infamy of exposure – that which has been outlawed from the Palais Royal and Paris, as too bad even for the lax morality of a most free-living city – that huge vice which caters to the low senses of cunning and greediness, and tempts men to lose fortune, position, character, even hope, in the frantic excitements of, perhaps, one desperate night – such a vice is housed in fine buildings raised near mineral springs, surrounded by beautiful gardens, enlivened by music, and sanctioned by the open patronage of petty German princes holding sway in the valley watered by the Rhine. In fact, unscrupulous speculators are found to carry on German gaming-tables at German spas, paying the sovereign of the country certain thousands of pounds a year for the privilege of fleecing the public.

The weakened in body are naturally weakened in mental power. The weak in body are promised health by "taking the waters" at a German bath. The early hours, the pleasant walks, the good music, the promised economy, are inducements. The weakened mind wants more occupation than it finds, for these places are very monotonous, and the gaming-table is placed by the sovereign of the country in a noble room – the Kursaal, to afford excitement to the visitor, and profits – the profits of infamy – to himself.

There are grades in these great gaming-houses for Europe. Taking them in the order in which they are reached from Cologne, it may be said that Wiesbaden is the finest town, having very pleasant environs, and the least play. The Grand Duke of Nassau, therefore, has probably the smallest share of the gaming-table booty.

Homburg which comes next in order, is far more out of reach, is smaller, duller – (it is indeed very, very dreary) – and has to keep its gaming-tables going all the year round, to make up the money paid by the lessees of the gambling-house to the duke. The range of the Taunus is at the back of the "town" (a village about as large, imposing, and lively as Hounslow), and affords its chief attraction. The rides are agreeable, if the visitor has a good horse – (a difficult thing to get in that locality) – and is fond of trotting up steep hills, and then ambling down again. In beauty of position, and other attractions, it is very far below both Wiesbaden and Baden.

Baden-Baden is the third, and certainly most beautiful of these German gambling-towns. The town nestles, as it were, in a sheltered valley, opening among the hills of the Black Forest. In summer its aspect is very picturesque and pleasant; but it looks as if in winter it must be very damp and liable to the atmosphere which provokes the growth of goitre. At Baden there is said to be more play than at the other two places put together. From May till the end of September, roulette and rouge et noir– the mutter of the man who deals the cards, and the rattle of the marble – are never still. The profits of the table at this place are very large. The man who had them some years ago retired with an immense fortune; and one of his successors came from the Palais Royal when public gaming was forbidden in Paris, and was little less successful than his predecessor. The permanent residents at Baden could alone form any idea of the sums netted, and only such of those as were living near the bankers. They could scarcely avoid seeing the bags of silver, five franc pieces chiefly, that passed between the gaming-tables and the bank. A profit of one thousand pounds a fortnight was thought a sign of a bad season; and so it must have been, when it is calculated that the gambling-table keeper paid the duke a clear four thousand pounds a year as the regal share of the plunder, and agreed to spend two thousand a year in decorating the town of Baden. The play goes on in a noble hall called the Conversations House, decorated with frescoes and fitted up most handsomely. This building stands in a fine ornamental garden, with green lawns and fine avenues of tall trees; and all this has been paid for by the profits of roulette and rouge et noir. Seeing this, it may cause surprise that people play at all; yet the fascination is so great that, once within its influence, good resolutions and common sense seem alike unequal to resistance. All seems fair enough, and some appear to win, and then self-love suggests, "Oh, my luck will surely carry me through!" The game is so arranged that some win and some lose every game, the table having, it is said, only a small percentage of chance in its favor. These chances are avowedly greater at roulette than at rouge et noir, but at both it is practically shown that the player, in the long run, always loses. It is whispered that, contrary to the schoolboy maxim, cheating does thrive at German baths; and those who have watched the matter closely, say a Dutch banker won every season by following a certain plan. He waited till he saw a heavy stake upon the table, and then backed the other side. He always won.

Go into one of the rooms at any of these places, and whom do you see? The off-scourings of European cities – professional gamblers, ex-officers of all sorts of armies; portionless younger brothers; pensioners; old men and old women who have outlived all other excitements; a multitude of silly gulls, attracted by the waters, or the music, or the fascination of play; and a sprinkling of passing tourists, who come – "just look in on their way," generally to be disappointed – often to be fleeced. Young and handsome women are not very often seen playing. Gaming is a vice reserved for middle age. While hearts are to be won, dollars are not worth playing for. Cards, and rouge, and dyspepsy seem to be nearly allied, if we may judge by the specimens of humanity seen at the baths of Wiesbaden, Homburg, and Baden. The players – and player and loser are almost synonymous terms – are generally thin and anxious; the bankers, fat and stolid. As the brass whirls round, the table-keeper has the look of a quiet bloated spider, seemingly passionless, but with an eye that glances over every chance on the board. At his side see an elderly man, pale and thin, the muscles of whose lower jaw are twitching spasmodically, yet with jaded, forced resignation, he loses his last five pounds. Next him is a woman highly dressed, with false hair and teeth, and a great deal of paint. She has a card in her hand, on which she pricks the numbers played, and thus flatters herself she learns the best chances to take. Next to her see one of the most painful sights these places display. A father, mother, and young girl are all trying their fortune; the parents giving money to the child that they "may have her good luck," reckless of the fatal taste they are implanting in her mind. Next is a Jew, looking all sorts of agonies, and one may fancy he knows he is losing in an hour, what it has cost him years of cunning and self-denial to amass. And so on, round the table, we find ill-dressed and well dressed Germans, French, Russians, English, Yankees, Irish, mixed up together, in one eager crowd; thirsting to gain gold without giving value in return; risking what they have in an insane contest which they know has destroyed thousands before them; losing their money, and winning disgust, despondency, and often despair and premature death. Never a year is said to go by without its complement of ruined fools and hasty suicides. The neighboring woods afford a convenient shelter; and a trigger, or a handkerchief and a bough, complete the tragedy.

[From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal.]

THE CONFLICT OF LOVE – A TALE OF REAL LIFE

In the north of France, near the Belgian frontier, is situated a small, obscure town. It is surrounded by high fortifications, which seem ready to crush the mean houses in the centre. Inclosed, so to speak, in a net-work of walls, the poor little town has never sent a suburb to wander on the smooth green turf outside; but as the population increased, new streets sprang up within the boundary, crowding the already narrow space, and giving to the whole the aspect of some huge prison.

The climate of the north of France during half the year is usually damp and gloomy. I shall never forget the sensation of sadness which I felt when obliged by circumstances to leave the gay, sunny south, and take up my abode for a while in the town I have described. Every day I walked out; and in order to reach the nearest gate, I had to pass through a narrow lane, so very steep, that steps were cut across it in order to render the ascent less difficult. Traversing this disagreeable alley, it happened one day that my eyes rested on a mean-looking, gray-colored house, which stood detached from the others. Seldom, indeed, could a ray of sunshine light up its small, green-paned windows, and penetrate the interior of its gloomy apartments. During the winter the frozen snow on the steps made it so dangerous to pass through the narrow alley, that its slippery pavement seemed quite deserted. I do not remember to have met a single person there in the course of my daily walk; and my eye used to rest with compassion on the silent gray house. "I hope," thought I, "that its inhabitants are old – it would be fearful to be young there!" Spring came; and in the narrow lane the ice changed into moisture; then the damp gradually dried up, and a few blades of grass began to appear beneath the rampart wall. Even in this gloomy passage there were tokens of awakening life, but the gray house remained silent and sad as before. Passing by it, as usual, in the beginning of June, I remarked, placed on the window-sill of the open casement, a glass containing a bunch of violets. "Ah," thought I, "there is a soul here!"

To love flowers, one must either be young, or have preserved the memories of youth. The enjoyment of their perfume implies something ideal and refined; and among the poor a struggle between the necessities of the body and the instincts of the soul. I looked at the violets with a feeling of sadness, thinking that they probably formed the single solace of some weary life. The next day I returned. Even in that gloomy place the sweet rejoicing face of summer had appeared, and dissipated the chill silence of the air. Birds were twittering, insects humming, and one of the windows in the old gray house was wide open.

Seated near it was a woman working busily with her needle. It would be difficult to tell her age, for the pallor and sadness of her countenance might have been caused as much by sorrow as by years, and her cheek was shadowed by a profusion of rich dark hair. She was thin, and her fingers were long and white. She wore a simple brown dress, a black apron, and white collar; and I remarked the sweet, though fading bunch of violets carefully placed within the folds of her kerchief. Her eyes met mine, and she gently inclined her head. I then saw more distinctly that she had just reached the limit which separates youth from mature age. She had suffered, but probably without a struggle, without a murmur – perhaps without a tear. Her countenance was calm and resigned, but it was the stillness of death. I fancied she was like a drooping flower, which, without being broken, bends noiselessly toward the earth.

Every day I saw her in the same place, and, without speaking, we exchanged a salutation. On Sundays I missed her, and concluded that she walked into the country, for each Monday a fresh bunch of violets appeared in the window. I conjectured that she was poor, working at embroidery for her support; and I discovered that she was not alone in the house, for one day a somewhat impatient voice called "Ursula!" and she rose hastily. The tone was not that of a master, neither did she obey the summons after the manner of a servant, but with an expression of heartfelt readiness; yet the voice breathed no affection; and I thought that Ursula perchance was not loved by those with whom she lived.