‘Here you behold the mummy of the villain Love.’  Such love as it was—­the love of the privileged butcher for the lamb.  The burden of the letters, put in epigram, was rattlesnake and bird.  A narrative of Anastasia’s sister, Elizabeth, signed and sealed, with names of witnesses appended, related in brief bald English the history of the events which had killed her.  It warmed pathetically when dwelling on the writer’s necessity to part with letters and papers of greater moment, that she might be enabled to sustain and educate her sister’s child.  She named the certificate; she swore to the tampering with witnesses.  The number and exact indication of the house where the ceremony took place was stated—­a house in Soho;—­the date was given, and the incident on that night of the rape of the beautiful Miss Armett by mad Lord Beaumaris at the theatre doors, aided by masked ruffians, after Anastasia’s performance of Zamira.

‘There are witnesses I know to be still living, Mr. Temple,’ my father said, seeing the young student-at-law silent and observant.  ’One of them I have under my hand; I feed him.  Listen to this.’

He read two or three insufferable sentences from one of the love-epistles, and broke down.  I was ushered aside by a member of the firm to inspect an instrument prepared to bind me as surety for the costs of the appeal.  I signed it.  We quitted the attorney’s office convinced (I speak of Temple and myself) that we had seen the shadow of something.

CHAPTER XL

MY FATHER’S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER

My father’s pleasure on the day of our journey to Bulsted was to drive me out of London on a lofty open chariot, with which he made the circuit of the fashionable districts, and caused innumerable heads to turn.  I would have preferred to go the way of other men, to be unnoticed, but I was subject to an occasional glowing of undefined satisfaction in the observance of the universally acknowledged harmony existing between his pretensions, his tastes and habits, and his person.  He contrived by I know not what persuasiveness and simplicity of manner and speech to banish from me the idea that he was engaged in playing a high stake; and though I knew it, and he more than once admitted it, there was an ease and mastery about him that afforded me some degree of positive comfort still.  I was still most securely attached to his fortunes.  Supposing the ghost of dead Hector to have hung over his body when the inflamed son of Peleus whirled him at his chariot wheels round Troy, he would, with his natural passions sobered by Erebus, have had some of my reflections upon force and fate, and my partial sense of exhilaration in the tremendous speed of the course during the whole of the period my father termed his Grand Parade.  I showed just such acquiescence or resistance as were superinduced by the variations of the ground.  Otherwise I was spell-bound; and beyond interdicting any further public mention of my name or the princess’s, I did nothing to thwart him.  It would have been no light matter.