'Oh, it was a dream, a horrid dream. It is almost morning, and you said it would be gone by morning.'

'What, darling?'

'The dread of the Grey Wolf.'

He pressed his lips convulsively to hers, as intuition told him that the end was very near for both of them.

A change came over her.

'No, you mustn't take me from him. He's only got me to love in the whole wide world. He'

'Hush, darling, hush!'

'You can go out into the sunlight beyond, but for him it is all cold darkness without me! He isn't beautiful and strong, like you, but I can't leave him—I won't.'

Her eyes were closed, but the terrible conflict of the past lived again in this delirium.

It was more than he could bear, and he turned his eyes from her face, only to meet those of the man he had wronged. He was standing by the open door, and his face appeared to Eustace ennobled, transfigured.

Her eyes opened. 'The Grey Wolf!' she shrieked. 'Oh, God! the Grey Wolf has come upon us at last!' She sank back and her hands clutched the bed-clothes.

'Stella!' cried two voices simultaneously, but each knew that there could be no answer.

'She was mine,' cried Lefroy fiercely, ' mine at the last, and now I in my turn am yours.'

The other covered him mechanically with his pistol. Every phase of feeling seemed to have died from his face, which was white as that of his dead wife.

He lowered the pistol and approached the bed.

The horror on the dead woman's lips seemed to fascinate him. He stared into her face for some minutes, and then he kissed her humbly on the forehead. He turned to Lefroy, who was standing with folded arms at the head of the bed. You caused this thing to be,' he said faintly. You made this picture of a husband and a wife; let it live in your memory, as in mine; that is the punishment for each.'

He stumbled out into the snow. And as Lefroy bent over the dead face, disfigured by the horror of life, he knew that he had been spared but not pardoned.

J. A. T. LLOYD.

SIR CHARLES NAPIER:

A STUDY.

IN an article published some time back in this magazine I have written of the youth of the Napiers. With the termination of the Peninsular War closes the record of that brotherhood united in battle. None of the Napiers was present at Waterloo; William reached the field but only after the fight; he remained for some years with the army of occupation in France, a residence. made painful to him by his passionate cult of Napoleon; and when on his return it became apparent that another man of little service was about to purchase the command of the 43rd over his head, he retired on half-pay. About the same time George Napier also quitted active service, because the death of his wife left him alone in charge of young children, and he thought he could do them more justice in private life. In later years he governed the Cape with success and credit, a soldier who did everything to avoid war. Henry Napier, too, abandoned the navy and settled down into a retirement from which he never emerged.

Thus only Charles was left serving the king, but his activity was ceaseless in almost every quarter of the globe. He was called away from the Peninsula in 1812 to command a regiment stationed at Bermuda—a hateful inactivity, soon broken by a share in Admiral Cochrane's expedition to the American coast. Here bitter experience taught him the evils of a divided command; little was accomplished and no credit gained; and he returned home to join the military college at Farnham-for reading, to Charles Napier's mind, was no secondary part of a soldier's training. Thence in 1819 he went as inspecting field-officer to the Ionian Islands, then governed by Sir Thomas Maitland.

The cause of Greek independence had its full fascination for him, and he was sent on a mission to Ali Pasha, whom he advised to strong action. He failed here owing to the chief's nature, but generally the Greek character pleased him; he had not the ordinary Briton's intolerance of the qualities bred of a long servitude. And when in 1822 he was appointed Military Resident in Cephalonia (that is to say, the despotic lieutenant of the Lord

High Commissioner), he found himself for the first time in a position that fully harmonised with his bent and abilities. To govern in the old Roman way, absolute in his province, but to govern with a single eye to the good of the governed, and wear himself to the bone in doing justice and amending the face of the land-that was Charles Napier's notion of felicity. 'A too easy chair is the rack for me,' he writes; elsewhere, Incessant activity and bustle is heartsease to me, giving no time to be sick or sorry. The eternal judgment seat to punish delinquents is the worst part; yet even that is interesting when one acts with feelings for justice; it is painful to punish, but pleasing to protect.' Cephalonia was his training for Scinde; and the semi-feudal civilisation he found there did not much excel that of the Indus valley under the Ameers. He had his kingdom of 60,000 souls, to whom he was despotis, their autocrat. What he did there he may sum up himself: There I protected the poor, regulated justice, and executed really great works. Forty miles of road hewn out of the living rock, and many fine buildings, and horses with carts introduced into a country previously ignorant of them, were things to make a man feel he had lived for some good.' It is a record for any one to read who is interested in government. Napier was a Radical, but a Radical who realised that advanced political institutions are for fully developed societies; the rulers and the ruled he was the last man to confound, but he insisted that the ruler should rule, and not plunder. The story throws many sidelights, too, on the workings of the movement for Grecian freedom; and most interesting is his sketch of Byron. He saw Byron at the noblest moment in Byron's life, and the two men, both emphatically men, trusted and admired each other. Byron was anxious that Napier should assume command of the Greek forces, but this Napier, much as he desired it, would not do without making his position in the British army perfectly assured, and the home authorities looked on the scheme with disfavour.

For nine years he ruled Cephalonia, ceaselessly active and happy in his activity (in Scinde he sighs for the Cephalonian days when I laughed at eighteen hours under a scorching sun '); dealing out life and death with the instant sense of responsibility heavy on him, yet finding that 'power is never disagreeable; and he only resigned because of a quarrel with his superior, Sir F. Adam, to whom Charles Napier's activity seemed no virtue but a dangerous comparison. Napier took the course he followed

through life, in defiance of the taciturn tradition of official departments; he wrote a memorial defending himself and strongly arraigning Sir F. Adam. It was a bold step, and for most men would have meant ruin. Napier was then fifty, with a family, and no capital laid by; and for eight years he had to eat his heart in enforced retirement. Political feeling ran high in those days. Charles and William Napier were conspicuous for opinions rare in their class; but in 1839 the Government, beset with terror of a Chartist rising, determined on a singularly bold and wise step. They appointed Charles Napier, who was known to hold with many points in the Charter (for instance, with the right of universal suffrage), to command the Northern district, embracing half of England, and incomparably the more dangerous half. The temper of the times was fierce: an indiscretion might have plunged England into civil war. Civilian magistrates were eager for strong measures: the soldier who had seen war had a wiser humanity. The same magistrates were desirous, every man of them, for troops told off for the protection of their houses; but the General sternly refused to fritter away his force in detachments, and kept it concentrated in great towns, and there, as far as possible, in barracks. The consequences of a mishap were terribly apparent to him: let a corporal's guard be overpowered, the military prestige would be shaken and revolt would spread like wildfire. Besides, even the troops themselves were touched with Chartism, and to quarter them in billets was to assimilate them with the people they lived among. Here is a curious passage from his letters:-'There are many Chartists among the Rifles. One in particular is an able fellow, but I have information of all he does and he is not a bad man. I told the Horse Guards this, and that I intended to speak to him rationally, as man to man.'1 The Horse Guards suggested that one of his staff should interview him instead, but Napier shrewdly feared the results of such an experiment; his officers were more fit to fight than argue. whole success or hope of it,' he adds, 'rested on my being known to hold the man's own opinions, and only differing as to the means taken to give them effect; upon the General himself reasoning with him, and upon my being an old Rifleman.'

Concerning the civilisation and the progress' which had brought about the conditions then existing, he holds the language of Mr. Ruskin: Manchester is the chimney of the world.'

Life of Sir Charles Napier, vol. i. p. 54.

Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is hung with Manchester cottons.'

Strangely enough, at an earlier period his brother William had been applied to, and more than once, to take the command of a military force which was to be organised to terrorise the Government into passing the Reform Bill-a 'national guard.' The proposal came from Erskine Perry and Charles Buller. But the soldier, like his brother, knew what was meant by the appeal to arms, and held back. Even in the bitterest opposition, also, his loyalty to old chiefs was never forgotten. None the less, he felt bitterly the Duke's opposition to reform. He is great only by the head, not by the

heart,' he wrote.

In 1841 Charles Napier went to India to command the Bombay forces. From this time onward the union between the two brothers, so widely divided in space as never before, grew so intimate that William Napier may be said to have lived in vehement imagination the life that his brother led in so strenuous action. Charles Napier reached India in December 1841, the epoch of the Cabul disasters. Il tidings came thick and fast, and Lord Ellenborough, arriving as Governor-General, applied to Napier for views upon the manner in which the honour of our arms may most effectually be re-established in Afghanistan.' It is impossible to separate this desire from the occupation of Scinde. The conquest of Scinde was not merely an acquisition of territory; it was a recovery of military prestige upon the North-West frontier. Charles Napier at once saw what was to come, and girded himself up for it. He is to be sent fifteen hundred miles off to command 20,000 men in a difficult war against natives defending one of the most difficult countries in the world: add to this, the worst part of the affair, a bad cause.'

1

Yet the inner passion of the man breaks out in these words: Who would be buried by a sexton in a churchyard rather than by an army on the field of battle?' 'To try my hand with an army is a longing not to be described.' He set out amid horrors cholera broke out on the steamer that took him to Kurrachee, and turned the ship into a kind of floating madhouse of men plague-stricken or drunken; fifty out of two hundred perished in three days. The General was untouched; yet outside Kurrachee in the disorder they narrowly escaped shipwreck; and three days after he landed, in artillery practice a rocket mis

1 Italics mine.-S. G.