Happy love leaves no room for troubled thoughts in a woman’s mind; and from the hour when Grace learnt that Arthur Haldane was her trusting and devoted lover, she began to forget the frivolous friends whose desertion she had so deeply resented. She forgot to be angry, because she had ceased to care. That outer world, the world of Mayfair and Belgravia, with its sordid interests and petty ambitions, the world of South African millionaires and new-made nobility, the world to which every smart personage was living in some other smart personage’s house, and everybody who wasn’t accredited with millions was suspected of being on the brink of insolvency; that élite, over-civilized and decadent world — dazzling and alluring in the phosphorescent radiance of decay — seemed so remote from all that makes happiness, that it could not be worth thinking about.
Her world now lay within so narrow a circle. Her world began and ended in a poet, critic, and romancer, whose dreams, thoughts, opinions, and aspirations, filled her mind to overflowing. He was her world, Arthur Haldane, the man of letters, to whom she was to be married as soon as this preposterous scandal was swept into the world’s great ragbag of forgotten things.
The words had been spoken at last, words that had been in his heart two years ago, when Grace Perivale’s beauty first flashed like sudden sunshine into the level grey of his life, and when he discovered that behind the beauty there was a brain and a heart.
He had held himself in check then, had courted her society under a mask of indifference, for more than one reason. First, because she was rich, and a much-talked-of prize in the matrimonial market; next, because of his jealous fear that Rannock’s showy accomplishments and charm of manner had won her heart.
“How could I hope to prevail — a dry-as-dust scribbler — against a man who had been called irresistible?” he asked, when Grace reproached him for his aloofness in that first year of their acquaintance.
“A dry-as-dust scribbler who had written the most pathetic story of the last half century. Every tear I shed over ‘Mary Deane’ was a link that bound me to the man who wrote the book. Of course I don’t pretend that if the man had been fat and elderly — like Richardson — I should have fallen in love with him. But even then I should have valued him, as the young women of those days valued the fat little printer. I should have courted his society, and hung upon his words.”
“It is not every novelist who is so lucky,” said Haldane. “I think I am the first, since Balzac, whose book has won him the love that crowns a life.”
What fairer Eden could there be than that reach of the Thames in a fine August? Other men were turning their faces northward with dogs and guns, ready for havoc on “the twelfth,” or waiting impatiently for “the first.” But Arthur Haldane, who was no mean shot, and had invitations to half a dozen country houses, behaved like a man who had never lifted a gun to his shoulder. The veriest cockney could not have been happier in that river idlesse, in which a punt-pole was his most strenuous exertion, and to boil a tea-kettle his most exciting sport. The summer days, the golden evenings were never too long, and the crimson of the sunset seemed always a surprise.
“I know you must be wanting to kill things,” Grace said one evening; “and you must hate me keeping you dawdling here. I am glad you are not grouse-shooting, for I have always dreaded the moors since my poor Hector caught his death in the ceaseless downpour of one dreadful August day. But why do you not go to your Norfolk friends for the partridge-shooting?”
“You are very kind and thoughtful, but my Norfolk friends were always a trifle boring, and they would be intolerable now, if they kept me away from you.”
“That is very flattering to my vanity. But I will not have you tied to my apron-string.”
“I will tell you if ever the string galls. Come what may, I am not going to leave the neighbourhood of London till your lawsuit has been settled.”
They hoped that everything would be over before the late autumn, so that they could start for Cairo at the right season; and from Cairo they might go on to India. They were of a humour to ramble over the world together; but in the mean time life was so sweet in the Thames backwaters, among flowering rushes and under dipping willows, and on the lawn at Runnymede Grange, that they seldom went as much as a mile afield. Lovers are like children at play in a garden, who dream of the days when they will be grown up and sail through blue skies in a balloon, to find where the world leaves off.
Grace looked back, in many a happy reverie, and recalled that year before the beginning of the scandal, when the man who was now her impassioned lover had seemed to her cold and distant. Only by his seriousness in seeking her society, his grave pleasure in ministering to her love of books, and bringing her in touch with the choicest things in contemporary literature, could Lady Perivale discover that his friendship was any more than the admiring regard which every intelligent man must needs feel for a young and beautiful woman who is also intelligent. Much as Haldane admired beauty — from its spiritual essence in a picture by Burne-Jones, to its earthliest form in a Roman flower-girl on the steps below the Church of the Trinity — his affections would never have been taken captive by beauty allied with silliness. He was a man to whom community of thought was an essential element in love. And, in Grace Perivale, he had discovered mind and imagination in sympathy with his own thoughts and dreams; and he was completely happy in her company, happy to be her friend, yet hesitating to become her lover, till, in some future day, her intimate knowledge of his character might make it impossible for her to misread his motives.
And then had come the bitter blow, when he, who had tortured himself with jealous apprehensions of her liking for Colonel Rannock, heard the story of those chance meetings in the South.
He had been vehement in his denunciation of the slander. If the story were so far true that she was the person who had been seen with Rannock, could any one who knew her doubt for a moment that he had a legal right to her company, that they had been quietly married, and, for some reason of their own, chose to delay the publication of their marriage.
He was laughed at for his vehemence, and for his simplicity.
“Did you never hear of a woman throwing her cap over the mill?” asked his friend. “Have you lived so long in a civilized world, and don’t you know that women are always doing the most unexpected things? Have you known no delicately-reared woman take to the gin-bottle and drink herself to death? Have you never heard of the household angel — the devoted wife and mother — who, after twenty years of honourable wedlock, went off with her daughter’s Italian singing-master? And these rich women are the very sort who go wrong. Their opulence demoralizes them. They are petty Cleopatras, and pine for the fierce passion of a Cæsar or a Marc Antony.”
There was not much stirring in London in the early part of that season, and the scandal about Lady Perivale was dinned into Haldane’s ears wherever he went. Young women talked about it, in allusive speech, with a pretence of naïveté. What was the story? They pretended not to know what it all meant; but they knew their mothers were not going to call upon her ever again; so they opined that it must be something very dreadful, considering the sort of people their mothers went on visiting and entertaining season after season. It must be something worse than the things that were said about Lady Such-and-Such, or even about Mrs. So-and-So.
Haldane heard, and the iron entered into his soul; and he held himself aloof from the woman he loved, fearing, doubting, waiting.
“If that man appears upon the scene I shall know it’s all over,” he thought.
He walked from his rooms in Jermyn Street to Grosvenor Square every night, and paced the pavements within view of Lady Perivale’s windows, steering clear of the houses where there were parties, with awnings, and blocks of bystanders, and policemen, and linkmen. He saw the lighted windows of the morning-room, and sometimes saw a graceful shadow flit across the blind, and knew that she was there, and alone. No masculine form ever passed between the lamp and the windows. Susan Rodney appeared there once or twice a week, and he some
times saw her driven away in a humble four-wheeler, on the stroke of eleven. But the figure he feared to sec never crossed the threshold.
And then a man at his club told him that Rannock had not been in London that season. He had gone under. He was said to be in America, but that was as might be. He had come to the end of his tether.
It had been a time of agonizing doubt, expiated by almost as agonizing remorse. But it was over now, and life was a dream of bliss — a dream of the fast coming days when Grace Perivale would be his wife, when the evening shadows would bring no parting, the night no loneliness.
Susan Rodney was an ideal third for a pair of lovers, as she had plenty of interests and occupations of her own, spending all her leisure in the composition of a light opera which she had been engaged upon for years, with only a faint hope of ever getting it produced; perhaps in Brussels, perhaps in Frankfort, she dared hardly think of London.
Absorbed in the thrilling delight of a quintette, or a chorus, Sue only gave the lovers her company when they wanted it, which they very often did, as her bright and cheerful spirit harmonized with their own happiness. They both liked her, and were both very sure of her sympathy.
In one of their garden tête-à-tête, their talk having drifted on to Haldane’s famous novel, the one work of fiction which had made his reputation with the general reader, he confessed to having nearly finished a second story.
“I only began it in May,” he said, “during a fit of insomnia. My mind was full of scorpions, like Macbeth’s, and I think I should have gone mad if I had not summoned those shadows from the unseen world, and set myself to anatomize them. It is a bitter book, a story of Fate’s worst irony; and in a better period of English literature — in the day of Scott, or Dickens and Thackeray — it would have stood no chance of being widely every-day world. You will tell me about your dream-people, won’t you, Arthur, as they spring into life?”
“The fear is that I shan’t be able to refrain from talking of them, to the other half of my soul.”
“You cannot weary the other half by much talking.”
Do you think not? I can imagine a husband’s art becoming an unspeakable bore to his wife.”
“Not if she loves him and loves his art.”
“Ah, there’s the rub.”
Lady Perivale was recalled from the shadow-world of the novelist by the substantial apparition of John Faunce, who arrived unannounced on a sultry afternoon, and found her sitting in the garden with Mr. Haldane and Miss Rodney, at a table strewn with all the new magazines and some of the old poets, in those miniature editions that so lend themselves to being carried about and not read.
“I thought I might venture to call without notice,” said Faunce, “as I have some rather important news for your ladyship.”
“I have no such power, Grace. They come to me as mysteriously as the shadows in a dream, and their spell is strong. I cannot create them; and I cannot change them.”
She wanted him to read his story to her before it was printed; but this was just the one thing he could not do. He could not imagine himself reading his own words.
“It would make me hate my work,” he said. “Every clumsy phrase, every banal word, would leap out of the page and gibber at me as I read. I will bring you the first copy fresh from the press, and when you have read it you shall tell me afterwards whether I am ever to write another story.”
“You shall write another, and another, and go on writing,” she answered gaily. “You will give me a second world, a world peopled with strange or lovely creatures — villains as colossal as Milton’s Satan, heroines as innocent as his Eve. My life in the world of your imagining will be almost as intense as your own. You will give me a second existence, better than the every-day world. You will tell me about your dream-people, won’t you, Arthur, as they spring into life?”
“The fear is that I shan’t be able to refrain from talking of them, to the other half of my soul.”
“You cannot weary the other half by much talking.”
Do you think not? I can imagine a husband’s art becoming an unspeakable bore to his wife.”
“Not if she loves him and loves his art.”
“Ah, there’s the rub.”
Lady Perivale was recalled from the shadow-world of the novelist by the substantial apparition of John Faunce, who arrived unannounced on a sultry afternoon, and found her sitting in the garden with Mr. Haldane and Miss Rodney, at a table strewn with all the new magazines and some of the old poets, in those miniature editions that so lend themselves to being carried about and not read.
“I thought I might venture to call without notice,” said Faunce, “as I have some rather important news for your ladyship.”
“Indeed!”
“A libel — a most audacious libel,” said Faunce, taking a paper from his pocket.
“Where? where? What paper?” Grace and Sue exclaimed excitedly.
“Strange to say, in a society paper of most respectable character, though of a somewhat limited circulation,” replied Faunce; “a paper which, to my knowledge, has never offended in this manner until now — the Bon Ton and Cricket Review, a journal printed at Kennington, and mostly circulated in the South of London.”
He handed the paper to Lady Perivale, who turned the leaves hurriedly, too agitated to read a line for the first few minutes.
It was an eminently proper paper — a paper that told of dances at Tooting, private theatricals at Norwood, and At Homes at Tulse Hill, a paper that described dresses and millinery, and gave receipts for cornflower creams and jellies made without wine, for cleaning kid gloves and making golden hair-dye. Pages were devoted to the Oval, and other pages to school cricket. There was the usual short story of the ultra-smart world. There was a Denmark Hill celebrity at home. There was everything nice and proper that a Society paper should have; and there, amidst all this respectability — like a hideous wen upon a handsome face — appeared three atrocious paragraphs about Lady Perivale’s tête-à-tête tour with Colonel Rannock; the first setting forth the surprise of the lady’s friends on meeting her travelling alone with a man of dubious character; the second debating whether the freedom of fin-de-siècle manners would not permit of any lady travelling with any gentleman without causing scandal; the third, of a some-what grosser tone, winding up with a couplet from Pope:
“Nor Cæsar’s empress would I deign to prove,
No, make me mistress to the man I love.”
“It’s abominable! “ cried Grace, flushing crimson, and throwing down the paper in a rage.
“And you tell me I’m not to horsewhip the scoundrel who wrote that!” said Haldane, who had read the paragraphs over her shoulder.
“I do — most decidedly,” answered Faunce, edging away from him with an involuntary movement. “We wanted a libel — a gross libel — and we’ve got it, We are going to bring an action against the proprietor of the Bon Ton, but we are not going to put ourselves in the wrong by assaulting him first. No, sir, we shall proceed against the proprietor, editor, and printer of the Bon Ton, and we shall ask for exemplary damages.”
“Damages! “ exclaimed Grace. “Do you suppose I want the loathsome creature’s money?”
“Why not make it a criminal suit, and send him to prison?” asked Haldane.
“I think not, sir. Her ladyship’s solicitors, Messrs. Harding, have gone into the matter with me, and we are agreed that a criminal action is not advisable.”
“How does this thing happen to appear so long after the circulation of the scandal?”
“Ah! that’s the question,” said Faunce, blandly. “You see, fashionable gossip takes a considerable time to cross the Thames and filter down to Tooting. The proprietor — and editor — lives at Tooting, and I dare say, to his mind, the slander appeared a novelty. I’m glad he didn’t get hold of it sooner, for we should not have been prepared to deal with the case as we are now.”
Miss Rodney had picked up the Bon Ton, and was reading the paragraphs with a fro
wning brow.
“How can you look at that atrocious stuff?” cried Grace, snatching the paper from her and rolling it into a ball for her poodle, who rushed across the lawn with it and then laid himself down and proceeded to tear it into shreds with his paws and teeth.
“It’s lucky that isn’t the only copy in existence, Lady Perivale, “said Faunce.
CHAPTER XIII.
“They draw a nourishment
Out of defamings, grow upon disgraces;
And, when they see a virtue fortified
Strongly above the battery of their tongues,
Oh, how they cast to sink it!
ONE of the most interesting cases in the Law Courts that winter was Perivale v. Brown Smith, a claim of £10,000 damages on account of a gross libel published in a paper of which the defendant was editor and proprietor.
Brown Smith pleaded justification, and it was said that he was going to make a good fight, and that he would produce witnesses who had met the lady and gentleman on their travels as Mr.and Mrs.Randall.
The case came on late in November, when there were a good many people in town, staying for the weeks before Christmas, or passing through; and the court was packed with smart clothes and well-known faces. Conspicuous among these curious impertinents were two well-known figures in the little world of Belgravia and Mayfair: Lady Morningside, whose ample person, clothed in black satin and chinchilla, filled a considerable space on the privileged seats; and the spare and wiry form of “the most honourable,” her husband, a man whose weather-beaten countenance, trim whiskers and keen eye, cut-away coat and Bedford cords, indicated the indomitable sportsman.
Eye-glasses and opera-glasses glittered across the fog, and the point to which they were chiefly directed was the figure of Lady Perivale, in a neat black gown, with cape and toque of Russian sable, seated in the well of the court, with Arthur Haldane sitting beside her.
There was much whispering among the eye-glasses about the lady and her companion.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 995