not have helped the fancy that the life of this beggar-girl was somehow fatally entwined with my own. Never having been moved to superstitious caprices in my life before, the fancy in this case fell upon me all the more intensely and thus the dangerous conviction grew that in some occult manner my fate depended less upon the freaks of chance, by which I had hitherto been driven to account for all things, than upon Zelda's voice and Zelda's eyes. : Moreover, I had a belief, reasonable enough this time, that Lord Lisburn was still further gone than I. I was a hard subject; and if I felt this kind of fascination, how must it be with him? There seemed meaning, after all, in what Zelda had said of her eyes. They were, at least, unlike any others: I had never before seen actual fire flash from under the stormiest brows; without being evil in the superstitious sense, evil might come of them. What I felt was not love, but its antithesis; I was attracted by the repelling pole of the magnet. But with Lord Lisburn it was clear matters were taking a more perilous course. Then I thought of such human flies as Lucas-he, Carol had told me, was in the whirlpool; even Carol himself, absurd as the idea was, talked like a moth who had been singed by the candle. The public itself, without apparent rhyme or reason, had chosen to be enslaved. I was no reader of poetry in any language; but another song, on which I had once lighted somewhere, seemed to take form and meaning, by mixing with her ballad and adapting itself to her tones: One little wave Wept to the willow--- Though 'twas in May: Life is what death is, Boonless my billow Cygnet and troutlet, Love me and leave me Inlet and outlet, Blossom and bole : Joyless and throeless, Sinless and soulless, How may I weave me Songs for a soul ? '— Swifter, O Swimmer! Strike from her clinging! Ply heart, and swim, Clutch reeds and clamber Down to the amber, Down with her singing, Beareth she Him! This was a queer rhyme for the cab-wheels to rattle out as they passed along the Strand. But I, who had never fitted a couplet together, even when I was of the age for such follies, heard them plainly, and felt as though they were my own. I tried to think where I had come across them, and failed. Then I began to go back to a still farther-off beginning. Such poor mystery as there was about my own origin I never cared to unravel. I was the child of the parish, and what comes before such adoption is not generally worth the knowing. But I had long suspected, by reason of certain dreamlike memories, as of a former existence, that I had Gipsy blood in my veins, and this made me all the more unwilling to press enquiries too closely. A descent from a race of rogues is not a gratifying pedigree for one who tries, at least, to be an honest man. Could this, perhaps, account for my disquietude of heart on the principle that blood is thicker than water? As for Claudia, I will own it fairly, irrespectively of Zelda, or of anybody, I had deliberately closed that chapter for ever. I congratulated myself upon having escaped from a bad bargain, now that all was over, by not having tied myself for life to one who believed ridiculous appearances rather than me. Her fair skin was but the appropriate garb of a cold nature, that could calmly play at love and retire gracefully as soon as the game became earnest. I had heard of flirtation, and I supposed that this had been a case of it: and I thought it by no means a harmless pastime. She had almost, if not quite, spoiled a man's whole life for him, and had seemed to think no more of it than of spoiling the first rough sketch of one of her pictures. Things, it is true, could never be with me again as though I had never seen her; but that was of little moment now. She had done me one good service by opening my eyes. I could not avoid making comparisons. Her eyes had no depths of fire in them, her voice no soul: if she could never have picked a pocket without a blush, she could commit moral murder with a smile. I had loved Claudia, and I almost hated Zelda; but there were strange touches about the living hate, if I must use so definite a word, that touched me more deeply than I had deemed myself capable of being touched by any human being. With Claudia I had been sailing over a waveless sea of kindred tastes and thoughts that made her life-long companionship accord with every point of reason. Setting social etiquette aside, my willing devotion to her was in every sense right and natural: while I believed in her, I gave her my whole life freely, as into the truest, firmest and safest of hands. She had seemed feminine without folly; woman without weakness; a lady in heart and mind, thoughts, words, and ways. Her frankness and straightforwardness would never cost me the minutest shadow of jealousy; she could understand most things, and could sympathise wherever she could not understand. All these praises, and more, my heart had sung of her a thousand times. And now all these virtues had taken the guise of so many sins. One frost-bite had spoiled them all. Folly ought not to be better than wisdom and yet is not the best part of love the foolishness that by its blindness saves us from losing trust in the face of the grossest cause for suspicion? The man who loved Claudia, I thought bitterly ought not to button his glove awry: the man who loved Zelda might dare to fly in the face of the whole world. Again, strength is better than weakness; but the strength suggested by Claudia was that of self-restraint: the weakness suggested by Zelda was that which, by making self-restraint impossible, lets a man's whole nature out, so that he may be and do all things for which he is made. Which is the better of the two? Finally, if there is any limit to such comparisons, Claudia is a lady-it would be sheer paradox to call Zelda a lady in the most forced sense of the term. But the word "lady" implies the limits of a definition: to be without any such limits, implies all the infinite possibilities of the unknown. I could not imagine Zelda as the wife of any common tax-paying and bread-winning householder. But I had seen her as a wandering beggar, and I could conceive her as a queen, either banished or enthroned, as the willing sharer in an outlaw's perils, as a great criminal, as a prophetess, as anything, bad or good, so long as it was in heroic extremes, and included nothing of restraint or duty, beyond the duty of devotion, or the restraint of self-will. And all this was the result of three short interviews and two public spectacles. No wonder I fought against such fancies. What a wife or mistress for a boy like Lord Lisburn, if, as I suspected, he was, in his weak state, already caught in the toils! I liked him with all my heart, apart from gratitude; but I would as soon have thought of matching Joan of Arc with him as Zelda. Since every phenomenon of love had its corresponding feeling in my case, jealousy was thus represented by my making out the peer to be unworthy of the adventuress, instead of the adventuress unworthy of the peer. So that my moral relation towards Zelda, composed, among more hidden elements, of superstition, dislike, admiration, curiosity, distrust, confidence, fascination, and antipathy, was a complete reflex of the most chaotic of all the passions down to its smallest recognised details. I would not have married her for the universe; and yet I felt that if it were my fate to do so, I should scarcely think it worth while to struggle against my doom. Did any man in his sober senses ever feel like this towards any woman before? It was in this self-inconsistent mood that I reached the door of a small water-colour exhibition that Brandon had sent me to criticise. As usual, I in my usual bungling amateur fashion paid most undue attention to No. 1, and took it as my standard for the remainder of the gallery. For once it was not to be so, however. I was brought to an unexpected stand before No. 41. The subject was a landscape-an English home-scene: apparently discovered in that Western County which was only too familiar to me. Those red cliffs and that stream of silver mud could only belong to the mouth of the Lesse, and to no other. It was by that very path that I had reached Lessmouth on that miserable Whit-Monday which had been the turningpoint in my own course, leading me I knew not whither. I had by this time seen pictures enough to observe that this was admirably finished-it was an exact and faithful portrait, though with but little of the force that marks a master. I suppose that like most amateur critics I appreciated a subject better than its treatment: with a mind full of Zelda and myself I seemed to be once more walking along those red and green banks in that bright sunshine when I let my own miserable self vanish into the sunlight of what I believed to be the love of a whole long life to come, and which had vanished into nothingness even before the sun had gone down. That part of England was not in the painters' groove, so that was one reason for my being brought to a pause before No. 41. But it was not the only reason. I had in my life been the frequenter of but one studio: and if I knew nothing of other mannerisms I had learned by heart every line and hue of that one. Had that painting been placed before me elsewhere, I should have exclaimed "Claudia Brandt." Why, after all, should it not be Claudia? Rich ladies have artistic caprices sometimes: she might have taken to care for fame as a substitute for love, even if she had no need to care for gold. The nine days' wonder following upon her father's failure had belonged to a fortnight of my life when I neither read nor heard the news of the day, so that the obvious manner of accounting for the coincidence never occurred to me. Why did I not look in the catalogue for the painter's name? I found nothing but H. Vincent: a name unknown to the galleries. And yet the name had somehow a not unfamiliar ring. Ah, it was only that H. V. stood not only for Henry, or Hugh, or Hubert Vincent, but for Harold Vaughan. If, then, it was a nom de guerre it was assuredly not Claudia's. Still my curiosity was not allayed. I made enquiry, but only learned that the picture was unsold, and that H. Vincent, whoever he or she might be, was to be communicated with in a small street leading out of Golden Square. Then it certainly could not be Claudia. And if it had been Miss Brandt, what was that to me? So I went my way. My way was to Golden Square itself. Lord Lisburn, with his usual impulsiveness, had, now that he was well enough to act for himself, packed off his nurse and sent for his sailor servant-had paid Sir Godfrey his parting guinea and sent for me. I was ex officio his medical adviser, he insisted, as surgeon to the Esmeralda, so that there was nothing to be done but to yield. What excuses he made to my great confrère I know not: I am sure they were polite, and am equally sure they were blundering, for I have it on good authority that I was professionally considered to have acted unprofessionally. However, that mattered little to me then, and matters still less now. I passed through the little street that led to the square, and the view on the Lesse had passed from my mind. I had written my criticism, and, for once, had gone out of my way to praise. I think I would have bought it if I had had a few guineas to spare, for the sake of my one day of pure gold, and then would have hung it up as a warning against belief in golden days. I was a professed cynic at that time, and should have found some satisfaction in proving to myself that I, even I, was no better than a human fool. wisdom. But when a man makes that discovery he is not far from Not, however, that I knocked at the house of Wisdom when I arrived at the joint-lodgings of the actress and the peer. It was the very palace of scandal, which would have tumbled about its tenants' ears if tongues could sap and shrugs could burn. I had not the slightest intention of seeing Zelda: I was conscious of a hope that accident might throw her in my way, so I was all the more resolved that any such accident should fail. I listened for the rustling of a dress upon the stairs until I heard one suddenly sweep upon me and past me before I had time to get out of the way. To my relief and disappointment, however, it was not Zelda. What I should have said to her if it had been, I know not: I had no experience in the art of conversation with such strange compounds as a nineteenth century sorceress. She was after all but a thieving beggar, and yet if I met her it would be the honest man's eyes, I knew to my shame, that would be the first to quail. Lord Lisburn was this time in his own room, lying outside the bed and staring at the flies. His foreign servant, half sailor and half valet, was busily engaged upon a portmanteau. "Vaughan," he said in an altogether new tone of decision, "I am going to be well. I am well, in fact. And the first thing I shall do will be to throw this world of idiots overboard." "Why-what has happened? You are surely not packing already for the North Pole ? " "I'm not packing for anywhere: that is to say I am packing for nowhere. Go out of the room, Pedro. You can finish that any time. Vaughan, I am almost out of my senses with rage. I wish everybody was at the North Pole, with all my heart-and if they were I would sail for the Equator." "Personally I am inclined to agree with you. But medically I won't listen to such nonsense. You are not a hermit-crab like me, and have been out of the world too long. Get well as fast as you can, too fast if you like, so long as you can get into a wholesome atmosphere. What's this—an invitation to a ball? The very thing for you. I beg your pardon: I see there are memoranda. Nothing has really gone wrong I hope ?" "Put that card down again, there's a good fellow. You ask if nothing has gone wrong? Just everything, that's all. The card's after date, and so much the better-and if it wasn't I shouldn't go. Hang that chickenbroth woman-Lady Penrose, I mean." "What has she done to you ?" -as though I had One might as well a woman without a "She has been here to look after my moral welfare turned off one old woman to make room for another. have a woman without a body to nurse one's body as soul to nurse one's soul. Lady Penrose is a good woman in her way, I believe, goes to church and gives soup to rich and poor-but defend me from 'good women in their way."" |