Hardly had I read this, when there was a violent knock at the door, and two men came in bringing a picture. Never had I seen anything so good from Lionel's hand; it was simply wonderful. It represented Hylas lying at the bottom of a river, seen through water. The figure of Hylas was a portrait of himself as he was when I first saw him, but somehow into the closed eyes he had infused the expression which I had last seen in his face. Looking down, reflected in the water, was my own face. Starting up, I caught a sight of my face in a mirror; by what prescience did he know that I should look thus on hearing the tidings of his death?
My father died before I was born, and my mother in giving birth to me, so I was born at once to a title and a fortune. I merely mention this to show that Fortune, in a way, seemed from the first to smile upon me. The one passion of my life was beauty, and I thought myself specially fortunate that I realised my own ideal in myself. Even now that I am writing I look round the room, and see portraits of myself at various stages of my life: as a child, boy, and a young man. Never have I seen a face as lovely as my own was. That glorious classic outline, those large, lustrous, dark blue eyes, that curled gold hair, like woven sunshine, that divinely curved mouth and exquisite grace of lips, that splendid poise of neck and throat! I was not vain in the proper sense of the word, for vanity means desire for the approbation of others, and getting up oneself to please others. But I, on the contrary, did not care what others thought; I would remain for hours before the mirror in a kind of ecstasy. No! no single picture I had ever seen could come up to me!
I was spoilt as a child. At school my life was made easy for me. Others did my impositions, and masters overlooked my peccadilloes; and if the boys of my own form hated and envied me, they knew that if they dared lift a finger against me, they would have their lives thrashed out of them by my champions in the upper forms. I do not mean to say by this that my school career was not a success in the ordinary sense of the word; because, besides being beautiful, I was brilliantly clever, and learnt in a day what it would take others months to learn. And if I say I was spoilt, I at least was not pettish and fretful as spoilt children usually are; on the contrary, I was invariably amiable, perhaps because my will was never gainsaid. Unlike most in whom the æsthetic sense is abnormally developed, I had absolutely no passions. I did not love any one—but then, I allowed myself very gracefully to be loved, and always sought to please those who loved me, so that I actually got the reputation of being unselfish.
This was all very well as a boy. When I became of age I was launched into society. Women, one and all, appeared to fall in love with me. I don't mean fortune-seekers and tuft-hunters, but such as had the same wealth and social position as myself. I was congratulated on my conquests, and told that my admirers were celebrated beauties. Beauties, indeed! What was their beauty to mine? I did not understand women or their sentiments at all; but I had read several novels, and tried to be amiable to one and all, and make love to them in the conventional way, as I had read. One time there appeared on the scene a girl who was considered dazzlingly beautiful. She really was rather handsome. She was the daughter of a Mexican millionaire, and, of course, was sought after by every one. Indeed, I was reminded at the time of the Bab Ballad, ‘Dukes with the humble maiden dealt,’ and, unlike Duke Baily and Duke Humphrey, they were willing to cast their coronets and their lands at her feet. But she, unlike the heroine of the Bab Ballad, preferred my ‘miserable and grovelling’ self. I must say here that my vanity was this time rather flattered; it rather pleased me to think that they should be put in the background for my sake, and I was as amiable to her as possible, and used to take her out everywhere. She was certainly clever, but there was a certain savage passionateness about her nature that jarred upon me.
One day her father said to me, ‘You can't think how glad I am to hear that you are engaged to my daughter. As we happen to be alone together, perhaps you wouldn't mind if we settle all the particulars of this business. I intend to behave very handsomely to her, and will give her a dowry of ———.’ (Good heavens! This parvenu!)
‘Engaged to your daughter!’ I cried, ‘there has been no such understanding between us. I am extremely sorry, but I cannot imagine who could have been your informant. This information is wholly and entirely false.’
‘What?’ he said, ‘not engaged to Enriqueta? What on earth do you mean? Do you suppose I should have allowed you to go about with my girl as you have been doing? Again, I ask, what do you mean?’
‘I am sorry,’ I replied, ‘that you should have been labouring under such a misapprehension. In proof that I mean what I say, I will avoid all intercourse with your daughter for the future. And I can scarcely believe she is under the same misapprehension as yourself.’ With that remark I left the house abruptly.
A short time afterwards, when I was seated by the fire in my drawing-room reading, who should walk in suddenly but Enriqueta herself, with furiously flashing eyes. She looked like a fiend incarnate. The emblem of anger in the abstract. I remember at that moment the words of the proverb flashing across me, ‘Non est ira sicut ira mulieris.’
‘So,’ she said, ‘this is how you behave! Well, then, take that!’ and saying this, she threw a fluid from a glass phial into my face. It was not vitriol; that would have blinded me: this, unfortunately, did not!
A sudden smart on one side of the face, then gradually the whole face corroded. The cheeks fell in, the flesh part of the nose dropped off, the hair came out in handfuls, several of the teeth dropped out, the mouth contorted into a ghastly grin, the eyes became cavernous and horrible, denuded of eyebrows and lashes. I saw myself in a mirror once; anything more loathsome it would be impossible to imagine.
Some friends called to sympathise with me, but on no consideration would I admit anyone. I had every mirror in the house broken and thrown away, and could scarcely bear to look into a washing-basin. I spoke to my servants from behind a screen, and lived utterly alone, and by night. I had only one opportunity of air and exercise, so I managed to bribe the policeman to let me into Hyde Park just before the gates closed at night, and there I would wander about all night through, till at dawn the gates opened again, when I would hurry home.
One night, when I was going on my usual lonely walk, the wailing voice of a child came out of the darkness.
‘Do please help me,’ it cried, ‘mother left me here, and said she would come back directly, and now I have heard the clock strike the hour four times, and mother hasn't come back, and I am blind, quite blind.’
I lit my lantern; it was a child of about nine or ten years old. It was clad in rags—yet the voice had the accent of a gentleman.
I said, ‘It's impossible to get out now; you must wait till the gates open in the morning. Come and sit here? Are you hungry?’
‘Yes,’ said the child simply.
‘Well, then, let's have something to eat.’ Then I undid my knapsack, wherein I always took with me provisions of various dainties, and wine, for my nocturnal meal, and spreading a napkin, prepared a repast.
Then the child told me his story. I cannot repeat it in the artless way he told it; I can only give the gist of it. He was very delicate-looking, with a very sweet face, and an infinite pathos in the expression of the closed eyes. It appeared he lived alone with his mother. His name, he said, was Tobit: that he had been born blind, and did not know what seeing anything meant. He did not think he had any surname; his mother was always called ‘Bonny Bess,’ because people said she was so handsome.
‘What does handsome mean?’ he asked. I shuddered.
‘Oh!’ I said, ‘it means good-looking; but it's no use being handsome. It's better to be good.’
He said his mother was very unkind to him, and was always beating him; but there was a gentleman, who used to come about every three months, who was very kind to him, and used to bring him presents, and give his mother money. The gentleman was an officer, he said. He always knew when the gentleman was coming, because his mother did not beat him fo
r three weeks beforehand, because one time the gentleman had seen some bruises on him, and had been very angry, and had beaten his mother. And when the gentleman had gone, his mother had said: ‘If you dare to tell the gentleman anything about me again, I'll thrash you within an inch of your life.’
The gentleman used to talk to him, and take him out for walks. But all toys the gentleman brought him his mother would take away from him, and sell them in order to get drink. Twice he had taken him to a place called ‘the country’ for a whole week. There were flowers and birds singing; then he was really happy.
‘The only thing she didn't take away from me,’ he said, ‘is this,’ and from his pocket he produced a penny whistle, ‘because she said she could not get anything for it, and I might go and play it in the street. Then, perhaps, people would give me pennies.’ Then he proceeded to perform on the penny whistle. Good heavens! I had no idea that out of a thing like that so much tone could be elicited! He began with a well-known organ-grinder tune, then came variations filled with roulades. I was simply astounded.
‘A great many people give me pennies,’ he said, naïvely, ‘but mother takes them all away from me.’
One day he had overheard the gentleman quarrelling with his mother. ‘Then why don't you make me an honest woman?’ she had said.
‘It would be quite impossible to make you an honest woman. Shut up your cant. You know perfectly well I can't marry you. Even if I could, I wouldn't. I only wish to God I could take poor little Tobit away with me.’
‘Rob a mother of her only child,’ said the mother, whimpering, ‘fortunately the law of England does not allow that.’
‘Blast your infernal humbug!’ said the gentleman, ‘I know you don't care a hang about the child. You only want the money. I feel quite certain that you ill-treat him, though he has never said a word to me about it. Bah! you talk of being an honest woman. Look how the child is dressed—look how you are!’
As soon as the gentleman had gone his mother seized upon him, and beat him so severely that he screamed for help. A man came in, and seized her arms and pinned her to the ground.
‘Look here,’ the man had said, ‘that's enough of that, you she-devil! If you try that sort of game again you'll get the worst of it!’
The last time he saw the gentleman he had been more tender than ever before. He had felt hot tears falling on his face.
‘Poor little Tobit!’ he had said. ‘I am going away to a far country, and perhaps may never see you again.’
Then he had heard the gentleman talking to his mother. ‘Look here, Bess,’ he said, ‘this is all the money I can scrape together, and this must last you out while I am away. But I hope to be back soon, and then I shall have higher pay.’
He had cried for many days afterwards, which made his mother very angry. One day, after waiting some time, he had asked when the gentleman would be coming back again from the far country. ‘He won't be coming back again at all,’ answered his mother snappishly. ‘He's dead—got shot in Africa, blast him! Get out and play the whistle.’
He had gone out in the streets, and cried very much at first, and then it seems he put his grief into music: ‘Because,’ he said, ‘he had got more pennies than he had ever got before.’ A little while after he had heard his mother whispering to a man. ‘Damn it!’ said the man, ‘we can't take that bloody brat with us.’
‘Oh, I'll manage that,’ the mother had said. And that evening his mother had taken him out into the park, and had told him she wanted to speak with somebody, and was coming back directly, and told him to stay there. He had heard a man's voice, but his mother had never come back again.
Fortunately, as soon as the child had finished his story he went fast asleep. I do not know what I should have said. Its utter loathsomeness reminded me of the one sight I had had of my own face. At dawn I woke the child up. Putting down my thick black veil I turned home, taking the child with me. I sent a servant to make inquiries, and the result was as I had expected—the mother had decamped with all her possessions, and not paid the rent.
So at last one consolation was sent me. After having been so long alone, at last I had a companion—one who would not recoil from the sight of me. I determined to give up my nocturnal life, and managed to secure a cottage in a remote and desolate part of the country, where one could walk for miles without seeing anyone, and in mercy to my servants, stationed them in the nearest town, requiring them only to bring me provisions and do the house once a day.
The child was delighted with the country. His placid, absolute happiness, in all his blindness, was much more than I had ever experienced in the delight in beauty by the sense of sight. He was very intelligent and phenomenally good, and I managed to teach him music, in which he took the keenest pleasure. The piano, of course, was a thing unknown to him before. His only instrument had been a penny whistle!
One day I read in the paper that an operation had been successfully performed by a certain eminent oculist on a person born blind. An awful struggle rose in my mind; supposing the child could be made to see! I thought of the frightful blank all things which to me had seemed of the greatest value must be to him, and was I to deprive him of that? Then, if he could see, and saw me, he would recoil from me in horror. But then I knew that my health was failing—that I should not live long, and was I, just to gratify my own selfishness for a short time, to condemn him to perpetual darkness, when it lay within my reach to save him? It was, as I said before, a frightful struggle. At last I decided I would consult the oculist. I took the child to London.
The oculist came, and said in his case the operation would be quite simple—not nearly so difficult as the case mentioned in the papers. It would merely require—well, I don't know what. I know nothing of medical terms, so I consented to have the operation performed. The child was given chloroform, and, the operation completed, his eyes were bound with bandages, which I was told to take off on the third day.
On the third day I did so. I had always thought that the blind, even though born blind, made visual images of things. In his case it was not so. The operation had been successful, and he could see. He knew well enough, by the touch, what a chair or a table was, but I had the greatest difficulty in explaining this or that was a chair or table as he saw it. He seemed quite dazed. Then he said ultimately:
‘And you are the most beautiful person in the world!’
It would not seem surprising at first sight that Seraphine de Sainte Amaranthe, incontestably the most beautiful girl of the Paris season, and one of the richest of heiresses, should have been married to the Marquis Célestin de Laval, the last representative of one of the most ancient families in France, and that being married ‘they lived happily ever afterwards.’ The incident appears entirely commonplace, and rather more fit for The Morning Post than anywhere else. But to those who were more intimate with either party, it was an occasion of great surprise.
The title of De Sainte Amaranthe was not of very ancient date. Indeed, ill-natured persons assert his name was originally Joseph Levi; and there certainly was a Hebraic strain about him. But then had he not vast wealth? and was he not married to a ‘mondaine’ of the first water? And Seraphine herself had received the usual education of the Parisian mondaine. At the time I am speaking of (I wish to narrate the actual facts of this case), she was being dragged about to balls and parties, after having first of all been spoilt as a child, and then shut up in a convent.
She was certainly a very beautiful girl, with dark hair, and liquid, spiritual eyes. But somehow she did not take to balls and parties, but hankered after her convent, where she determined to become a nun, of which of course her parents would not hear. She was not morose, and did not mind going to the theatre, and things of that kind. But then she would say, ‘Yes, this is all great fun, but it is not my life.’ The one thing she loathed and detested was a ball.
She had one of those graceful figures which would look well even if clothed in a sack; and she was far from being awanting in the femi
nine love of dress, and managed to clothe herself very well. She was also a graceful dancer. But the inane compliments and conversation, and the lasciviously amorous looks of her many admirers, filled her with unutterable loathing. The celebrated ‘sport’ and ‘’ighlif’ man, the Duc de Morlaix, whom her parents desired to thrust upon her, was her special abhorrence. Then how pleased were her parents when she seemed to be taking a fancy to the Marquis de Laval!
Célestin de Laval in many respects resembled her, though of course he had seen much more of the world. He was a dilettante in literature, art, and music; and somewhat luxurious in his tastes. He had determined for some years to become a monk; always the courage failed him to take the final step. He would say: ‘All these things I can get on without; they are not necessary to me. I can easily give them up.’ His friends would say, ‘Oh yes! we believe that.’ But anyhow, although in touch with every latest form of modern thought, he did not lose his religion. Indeed it was in connection with that he first met Mademoiselle de Ste. Amaranthe. He was a good-looking man, with an intellectual type of face, of about thirty. It happened one day when he was in a church at Salut; he happened to be seated next to a lady, who dropped her prayer-book, which he handed to her. He was rather struck with her beauty, as he was with all beautiful things, though none of his friends ever remembered his having loved a woman.
In France, almost the Oriental system of the Harem is kept up. A man may be even intimately acquainted with another man in restaurants and cafés, and such like places, and yet never have been introduced into his family; and Célestin had frequently met here and there the Baron de Ste. Amaranthe. One day, meeting him at some cercle, Ste. Amaranthe begged him to honour him with his presence at a large ball that he was giving in celebration of his daughter's birthday. Now, if there was one thing that Célestin hated more than another, it was a ball. Not having an excuse handy, he was obliged to accept. So he went. Great was his surprise to find there the girl whom he had met a few days before in church. He was obliged out of common politeness to engage her for one dance. She said to him, with a singularly candid expression—
Of Kings and Things Page 4