Finishing this with a bold dash, he put it in an envelope and addressed it to the office of the journal on which he was employed and known, simply as Alfred Brown. Mr Alfred Brown was on the staff of that journal as a critic; and as Brown he praised himself in the person of Aubrey Grovelyn. The great editor of the journal, being half his time away shooting, golfing, or otherwise amusing himself, didn’t know anything about either Grovelyn or Brown, and didn’t care. And the public, seeing Grovelyn described as a Shakespeare, promptly concluded he must be a humbug, and avoided his books as cautiously as though they had been labelled ‘Poison.’ Hence Brown-Aubrey-Grovelyn’s chronic yellow melancholy — his poems wouldn’t ‘sell.’ He crammed his eulogistic review of his own latest production into his pocket, and went over to the doctor, from whose cigar he kindled his own.
‘Have you seen the papers this evening?’ he asked languidly, dropping into a chair next to the club’s ‘Galen,’ and running one skinny hand through his door-mat curls.
‘I have just glanced through them,’ replied the doctor, indifferently. ‘I never do read anything but the telegrams.’
The poet raised his eyebrows superciliously.
‘So? You don’t allow your mind to be influenced by the ebb and flow of the human tide of events,’ he murmured vaguely. ‘But I should have thought you would have observed the ridiculous announcement concerning the new book by that horrid woman, Delicia Vaughan. It is monstrous! A sale of one hundred thousand copies; it’s an infernal lie!’
‘It’s a damnation truth!’ said a pleasant voice, suddenly, in the mildest of accents; and a good-looking man with a pretty trick of twirling his moustache, and an uncomfortable way of flashing his eyes, squared himself upright in front of both physician and poet. ‘I’m the publisher, and I know!’
There was a silence, during which Mr Grovelyn smiled angrily and re-arranged his door-mat. ‘When,’ proceeded the publisher, sweetly, ‘will you enable me to do the same thing for you, Mr Grovelyn?’
The doctor, whose name was Dalley, laughed; the poet frowned.
‘Sir,’ said Grovelyn, ‘my work does not appeal to this age, which is merely prolific in the generating of idiots; I trust myself and my productions to the justice of posterity.’
‘Then you must appeal to posterity’s publishers as well, mustn’t he, Mr Granton?’ suggested Doctor Dalley, with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, addressing the publisher, who, being the head of a wealthy and influential firm, was regarded by all the penniless scribblers in the ‘Bohemian’ with feelings divided betwixt awe and fear.
‘He must, indeed!’ said Granton. ‘Personally, I prefer to speculate in Delicia Vaughan, now Lady Carlyon. Her new book is a masterpiece; I am proud to be the publisher of it. And upon my word, I think the public show capital taste in “rushing” for it.’
‘Pooh, she can’t write!’ sneered Grovelyn. ‘Did you ever know a woman who could?’
‘I have heard of George Eliot,’ hinted Dalley.
‘An old hen, that imagined it could crow!’ said the poet, with intense malignity. ‘She’ll be forgotten as though she never existed, in a little while; and as for that Vaughan woman, she’s several grades lower still, and ought only to be employed for the London Journal!’
Granton looked at him, and bit his lips to hide a smile.
‘It strikes me you’d rather like to stand in Lady Carlyon’s shoes, all the same, Mr Grovelyn,’ he said.
Grovelyn laughed, with such a shrill sound in the laughter, that Dr Dalley immediately made a mental note entitled ‘Splenetic Hysteria,’ and watched him with professional eagerness.
‘Not I,’ he exclaimed. ‘Everybody knows her husband writes more than half her books!’
‘That’s a lie!’ said a full, clear voice behind them. ‘Her husband is as big an ass as you are!’
Grovelyn turned round fiercely, and confronted Paul Valdis. There was a silence of surprise and consternation. Several men rose from various parts of the room, and came to see what was going on. Dr Dalley rubbed his hands in delightful anticipation of a ‘row,’ but no one spoke or moved to interfere. The two men, Grovelyn and Valdis, stood face to face; the one mean-featured, with every movement of his body marked by a false and repulsive affectation, the other a manly and heroic figure distinguished by good looks and grace of bearing, with the consciousness of right and justice flashing in his eyes.
‘You accuse me of telling a lie, Mr Valdis,’ hissed Grovelyn, ‘and you call me an ass!’
‘I do,’ retorted Valdis, coolly. ‘It is certainly a lie that Lord Carlyon writes half his wife’s books. I had a letter from him once, and found out by it that he didn’t known how to spell, much less express himself grammatically. And of course you are an ass if you think he could do anything in the way of literature; but you don’t think so — you only say so out of pure jealousy of a woman’s fame!’
‘You shall answer for this, Mr Valdis!’ exclaimed Grovelyn, the curls of his door-mat coiffure bristling with rage. ‘By Heaven, you shall answer for it!’
‘When you please, and how you please,’ returned Valdis, composedly; ‘Now and here, if you like, and if the members permit fighting on the club premises.’
Exclamations of ‘No, no!’ mingled with laughter, partially drowned his voice. Everyone at the ‘Bohemian’ knew and dreaded Valdis; he was the most influential person on the committee, and the most dangerous if offended.
‘Lady Carlyon’s name is hardly fitted to be a bone of contention for us literary and play-acting dogs-in-the-manger,’ he continued. ‘She does not write verse, so she is not in your way, Mr Grovelyn, nor will she interfere with your claim on posterity. She is not an actress, so she does not rob me of any of my honours as an actor, and I think we should do well to magnanimously allow her the peaceful enjoyment of her honestly-earned reputation, without grouping ourselves together like dirty street-boys to try and throw mud at her. Our mud doesn’t stick, you know! Her book is an overwhelming success, and her husband will doubtless enjoy all the financial profits of it.’
He turned on his heel and looked over some papers lying on the table. Grovelyn touched his arm; there was an evil leer on his face.
‘The pen is mightier than the sword, Mr Valdis!’ he observed.
‘Ay, ay! That means you are going to blackguard me in the next number of the ha’penny Clarion? Be it so! Truth shall not budge for a ha’porth of slander!’
He resumed his perusal of the papers, and Grovelyn walked away slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground, and a brooding mischief in his face.
‘You should never ruffle the temper of a man who has liver complaint, Valdis,’ said Dr Dalley, cheerfully, drawing his chair up to the table where the handsome actor still leaned. ‘All evil humours come from the troubles of that important organ, and I am sure, if I could only meet a would-be murderer in time, I could save him from the committal of his intended wicked deed by a dose — quite a small dose — of suitable medicine!’
Valdis laughed rather forcedly.
‘Could you? Then you’d better attend to Grovelyn without delay. He’s ripe for murder — with the pen!’
Dr Dalley rubbed his well-shaven, rounded chin meditatively.
‘Is he? Well, perhaps he is; I really shouldn’t wonder! Curiously enough, now I come to think of it, he has certain points about him that are synonymous with a murderer’s instinct — phrenologically and physiologically speaking, I mean. It is rather strange he should be a poet at all.’
‘Is he a poet?’ queried Valdis, contemptuously; ‘I never heard it honestly admitted. One does not acknowledge a man as a poet simply because he has a shock head of very dirty hair.’
‘My dear Valdis,’ expostulated the little doctor, amiably, ‘you really are very bitter, almost violent in your strictures upon the man, who to me is one of the most interesting persons I have ever met! Because I foresee his death — due to very complex and entertaining complications of disease — in the space of — let me see! Well, suppos
e we say eighteen months! I do not think we shall have any chance of an autopsy. I wish I could think it likely, but I am afraid—’ Here Dr Dalley shook his head, and looked so despondent concerning the slender hope he had of dissecting Grovelyn after death, that Valdis laughed heartily, and this time unrestrainedly.
‘You forget, there’s the new photography; you could photograph his interior while he’s alive!’
‘By Jove! I never thought of that!’ cried the doctor, joyfully; ‘Of course! I’ll have it done when the disease has made a little more progress. It will be extremely instructive!’
‘It will,’ said Valdis. ‘Especially if you reproduce it in the journals, and call it “Portrait of a Lampooner’s Interior under Process of Destruction by the Microbes of Disappointment and Envy.”
‘Good! good!’ chuckled Dalley, ‘And, my dear Valdis, how would you like a photo entitled, “Portrait of a Distinguished Actor’s Imaginative Organism consumed by the Fires of a Hopeless Love?”’
Valdis coloured violently, and anon grew pale.
‘You are an old friend of mine, Dalley,’ he said slowly, ‘but you may go too far!’
‘So I may, and so I have!’ returned the little doctor, penitently, and with an abashed look. ‘Forgive me, my dear boy; I’ve been guilty of a piece of impertinence, and I’m sorry! There! But I should like a few words with you alone, if you don’t mind. It’s Sunday night; you can’t go and be “Ernani.” Will you waste a few minutes of your company on me — outside these premises, where the very walls have ears?’
Valdis assented, and in a few minutes they left the club together. With their departure there was a slight stir among the men in the room, who were reading, smoking, and drinking whisky and water.
‘I wish she’d take up with him!’ growled one man, whose head was half hidden behind a Referee. ‘Why the devil doesn’t she play the fool like other women?’
‘Whom are you speaking of?’ inquired a stout personage, who was busy correcting his critical notes on a new play which had been acted for the first time the previous evening.
‘Delicia Vaughan — Lady Carlyon,’ answered the first man. ‘Valdis is infatuated with her. Why she doesn’t go over to him, I can’t imagine; a writing female need not be more particular than a dancing female, I should say they’re both public characters, and Carlyon has thrown himself down as a free gift at the feet of La Marina, so there’s no obstacle in the way, except the woman’s own extraordinary “cussedness.”
‘What good would it do you that she should “go over,” as you call it, to Valdis?’ inquired the stout scribbler, dubiously, biting the end of his pencil.
‘Good? Why, none to me in particular,’ said the other, ‘but it would drag her down! Don’t you see? It would prove to the idiotic public, that is just now running after her as if she were a goddess, that she is only the usual frail stuff of which women are made. I should like that! I confess I should like it! I like women to keep in their places—’
‘That is, on the down grade,’ suggested the stout gentleman, still dubiously.
‘Of course! what else were they made for? La Marina, who kicks up her skirts, and hits her nose with the point of her big toe, is far more of a woman, I take it, and certainly more to the taste of a man, than the insolent, brilliant, superior Delicia Vaughan!’
‘Oh! You admit she is brilliant and superior?’ said the stout critic, with a smile. ‘Well, you know that’s saying a great deal! I’m an old-fashioned man—’
‘Of course you are!’ put in a young fellow, standing near. ‘You like to believe there may be good women, — real angels, — on earth; you like to believe it, and so do I!’
He was a fresh-coloured youth, lately come up to London from the provinces to try his hand at literature; and the individual with the Referee, who had started the conversation, glanced him over with the supremest contempt.
‘I hope your mother’s in town to take care of you, you ninny,’ he said. ‘You’re a very callow bird!’
The young man laughed good-naturedly.
‘Am I? Well, all the same, I’d rather honour women than despise them.’
The stout critic looked up from his notebook approvingly.
‘Keep that up as long as you can, youngster,’ he said. ‘It won’t hurt you!’
A silence followed; the man with the Referee spoke not another word, and the fresh-coloured provincial, getting tired of the smoke and the general air of egotistical self-concentration with which each member of the club sat fast in his own chosen chair, absorbed in his own chosen form of inward meditation, took a hasty departure, glad to get out into the cool night air. His way home lay through a part of Mayfair, and at one of the houses he passed he saw a long line of carriages outside and a brilliant display of light within. Some fashionable leader of society was holding a Sunday evening reception; and moved by a certain vague interest and curiosity, the young reporter lingered for a moment watching the gaily-dressed women passing in and out. While he yet waited, a dignified butler appeared on the steps and murmured something in the ear of a gold-buttoned commissionaire, who thereupon shouted vociferously, —
‘Lady Car-ly-on’s carriage! This way!’
And as an elegant coupé, drawn by two spirited horses drove swiftly up in response to the summons, a woman wrapped in a soft, white mantilla of old Spanish lace, and holding up her silken train with one hand, came out of the house with a gentleman, evidently her host, who was escorting her to the carriage. The young man from the country leaned eagerly forward and caught sight of a proud, delicate face illumined by two dark violet eyes, a flashing glimpse of beauty that vanished ere fully seen. But it was enough to make him who had been called a ‘callow bird’ wax suddenly indignant with certain self-styled celebrities he had just left behind at the ‘Bohemian.’
‘What beasts they are!’ he muttered; ‘what cads! Thank God they’ll never be famous; they’re too mean! To fling their dirty spite at a woman like that! It’s disgusting! Wait till I get a chance; I’ll “review” their trash for them!’
And warmed by the prospect of this future vengeance, the ‘callow bird’ went home to roost.
CHAPTER IV
Some days after the war of words between Valdis and Aubrey Grovelyn at the ‘Bohemian,’ Delicia was out shopping in Bond Street, not for herself, but for her husband. She had a whole list of orders to execute for him, from cravats and hosiery up to a new and expensive ‘coach-luncheon-basket,’ to which he had taken a sudden fancy; and besides this, she was looking about in all the jeweller’s shops for some tasteful and valuable thing to give him as a souvenir of the approaching anniversary of their marriage day. Pausing at last in front of one glittering window, she saw a rather quaint set of cuff-studs which she thought might possibly answer her purpose, and she went inside the shop to examine them more closely. The jeweller, not knowing her personally, but judging from the indifferent way in which she took the announcement of his rather stiff prices, that she must be a tolerably rich woman, began to show her some of his most costly pieces of workmanship, hoping thereby to tempt her into the purchase of something for herself. She had no very great love for jewels, but she had for artistic design, and she gratified the jeweller by her intelligent praise of some particularly choice bits, the merits of which could only be fully recognised by a quick eye and cultivated taste.
‘That is a charming pendant,’ she said, taking up a velvet case, in which rested a dove with outspread wings, made of the finest diamonds, carrying in its beak the facsimile of a folded letter in finely-wrought gold, with the words, ‘Je t’adore ma mie!’ set upon it in lustrous rubies. ‘The idea is graceful in itself, and admirably carried out.’
The jeweller smiled.
‘Ah, that’s a very unique thing,’ he said, ‘but it’s not for sale. It has been made to special order for Lord Carlyon.’
A faint tremor passed over Delicia like the touch of a cold wind, and for a moment the jewels spread out on the glass counter before her da
nced up and down like sparks flying out of a fire, but she maintained her outward composure. And in another minute she smiled at herself, wondering why she had been so startled, for, of course, her husband had ordered this pretty piece of jewellery as a gift for her, on the very anniversary she was preparing to celebrate by a gift to him! Meanwhile the jeweller, who was of an open mind, and rather fond of confiding bits of gossip to stray customers, took the diamond dove out of its satin-lined nest, and held it up in the sunlight to show the lustre of the stones.
‘It’s a lovely design!’ he said enthusiastic-ally; ‘It will cost Lord Carlyon a little over five hundred pounds. But gentlemen of his sort never mind what they pay, so long as they can please the lady they are after. And the lady in this case isn’t his lordship’s wife, as you may well suppose!’
He sniggered, and one of his eyelids trembled as though it were on the point of a profane wink. Delicia regarded him with a straight, clear look.
‘Why should I suppose anything of the sort?’ she queried calmly. ‘I should, on the contrary, imagine that it was just the tasteful gift a man would wish to choose for his wife.’
The jeweller made a curious little bow over his counter, implying deference towards Delicia’s unsuspicious nature.
‘Would you really?’ he said. ‘Well, now, as a matter of fact, in our trade, when we get special orders from gentlemen for valuable jewels, they are never by any chance intended for the gentlemen’s wives. Of course it is not our business to interfere with, or even comment upon the actions of our customers; but as far as our own artistic work goes, it often pains us — yes, I may say it pains us — to see some of our finest pieces being thrown away on dancers and music-hall singers, who don t really know how to appreciate them, because they haven’t the taste or culture for it. They know the money’s worth of jewels — oh, you may trust them for that. And whenever they want to raise cash, why, of course their jewels come handy. But it’s not satisfactory to us as a firm, for we take a good deal of pride in our work. This dove, for instance,’ and again he dangled the pendant in the sunbeams, ‘It’s a magnificent specimen of diamond-setting, and of course we, as the producers of such a piece, would far rather know it was going to Lady Carlyon than to La Marina.’
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 400