O Publicola Thompson!  Phoesphor to the Tower Hamlets and Boanerges of the platform—­will you not allow that, amid a wilderness of weeds, this one fair plant flourishes under “the cold shade?”

CHAPTER XXII.

     “Shy she was, and I thought her cold;
       Thought her proud, and fled over the sea;
     Filled I was with folly and spite,
       When Ellen Adair was dying for me.”

When I came to Livingstone’s chambers on the following morning, I found him alone.  His head was resting listlessly against the back of the vast easy-chair in which he was reclining, and his face, thrown out in relief against the crimson velvet, looked haggard and drawn.  The calumet—­not of peace—­was between his lips, and the dense blue clouds were wreathing round him like a Scotch mist.  On a table near lay a heap of gold and notes.  He had finished the night at his club, where lansquenet had been raging till long after sunrise.  Fortune had been more kind than usual, and the fruits of “passing” eight times lay before me.  An open liqueur-case close at his elbow showed that play was not the only counter-excitement to which he had resorted.

I hoped to have found him in a repentant mood, but his first words undeceived me:  “I start for Paris by this evening’s train;” and then I remarked all about me the signs of immediate departure.

I only had a confused idea of what had happened, and was anxious to know the truth, but he was very brief in his answers:  the particulars of what had passed I learned long afterward.

“Can nothing be done?” I asked, when he had finished all he chose to tell me.

“Nothing!” replied Livingstone, decisively.  “If excuse or explanation had been of any use, I think I should have tried them last night.  You would not advise me to humiliate myself to no purpose, I suppose?”

There is a certain scene in AEschylus which came into my mind just then.

A group of elderly men, with grave, rather vacuous faces, and grizzled beards, stand in the court-yard of an ancient palace.  On one side is the peristyle, with its square stunted pillars, looking as if the weight above crushed them, though it wearies them no more than the heavens do Atlas; on the other, a gateway, vast, low-browed, shadowy with Cyclopean stones.  Somewhat apart is a strange weird figure, ever and anon starting up and tossing her arms wildly as she utters some new denunciation, and then cowering down again in a despairing weariness.  There are traces yet in the thin, wan face of the beauty which enslaved Loxian Apollo, and of the pride which turned his great love into a greater hate:  round it hang the black elf-locks, disheveled, that have never been braided since the gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely.  In her great, troubled eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming death—­death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail.  No wonder that the reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering courage enough sometimes to answer her with a pious platitude.  Alas! alas!  Cassandra.