Fortune's My Foe

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John Bloundelle-Burton. Fortune's My Foe

PROLOGUE. OFF CARTAGENA

CHAPTER I. THE LION AND THE JACKAL

CHAPTER II. AN HEIRESS

CHAPTER III "A COUNTRY CLOD."

CHAPTER IV. AN UNKNOWN VISITOR

CHAPTER V. THE HAPPY MAN

CHAPTER VI. LOVE'S CONTEST

CHAPTER VII. THE CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE

CHAPTER VIII. FOREBODINGS

CHAPTER IX. THE END OF THE FIRST ACT

CHAPTER X "THE MIGNONNE."

CHAPTER XI. THE COLONISTS

CHAPTER XII. VENGEANCE IS SWEET

CHAPTER XIII. A BROKEN SWORD

CHAPTER XIV. BUFTON IS IMPLACABLE

CHAPTER XV. PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

CHAPTER XVI. WEAVING THE NET

CHAPTER XVII. A DISCOVERY

CHAPTER XVIII. RUSE CONTRE RUSE

CHAPTER XIX. THE SECOND MAN

CHAPTER XX. ARIADNE'S COMPASSION

CHAPTER XXI. A DIVINE DESPAIR

CHAPTER XXII "AS YE SOW."

CHAPTER XXIII. QUIBERON

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Seventeen years have passed since the child who was to bear the name of that ship of war, in which she was born, had come into the world-upon the very day and at almost the very hour when her father had left it. Seventeen years! – full of storm and strife and battles, of thrones in danger; of one throne-that of England-almost lost to its holder by the invasion of him to whom it by birth belonged. Years full of storm and strife and battle by land and sea; of Dettingen won and Fontenoy lost, of India coming nearer to our grasp and America imperceptibly receding from it. Years full, too, of changes in many ways, especially in our own land. Of growing alteration in that old mother speech of ours which had become welded, by time and mixture of race into the superb and sonorous diction of the English Bible and of Shakespeare, and which found its last exponent in the great Defoe, but was now sinking into a jargon in which gentlemen and ladies spoke in a mincing and affected manner that was but a poor substitute for the grammar which, if they had ever known it, they had now forgotten. Gentlemen and ladies who should have been scholars, but who did not know the difference between "was" and "were" nor "is" and "are," nor the proper pronunciation of the vowel "e."

Changes, too, of clothes, of habits, customs, and morality. Scarlet and blue cloth taking the place of russet or peach-coloured satin; French dishes and kickshaws in the place of the honest beef and mutton which had made us "eat like wolves and fight like devils"; and with the dancing-master manners of Chesterfield and his imitators superseding the grace and dignity of earlier days. The rogue too was now a crafty, scheming knave who feared public opinion as much as he feared the Lord Chief Justice and his subordinates, and began at this time to think as much of his respectability as of his neck; whereby he was an infinitely less interesting vagabond than his predecessor, who revelled in his crimes, drank to the health of his friend, the gallows, and went drunk to Tyburn, damning and cursing the populace who cheered him, and jerring at the parson who sat in the cart by his side, had been.

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"Have I not said! At the lime-tree avenue, leading up to Fanshawe Manor. Eight of the evening is the hour, and Thursday is the day. Win her-fail not to win her; she is yours for the trouble, and then there is the fortune and a large per centum for me."

"I shall not fail."

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