‘They do not know I am dead!’ she said to herself, ‘That all my life is done with — finished! If I had never known the meaning of love; if I had never thought and believed that love was truly mine, how much better it would have been for me! I should have worked on contentedly; I should not have missed what I had no experience of, and I might — yes, I might have been really great. Now there is no hope for any more attainment — Love has murdered me!’
She rested in bed all day, dozing and dreaming and thinking; all night between the slow-pacing hours she had long waking intervals of strange, half-troubled, half-mystic musings. She saw herself, so she imagined, dead; — laid out in her coffin with flowers round her; but as she looked at her own stiffened corpse she knew it was not herself, she thus saw, but only the image of what she had been. She, Delicia, was another being — a being through whose fine essence light and joy were flowing. She fancied she heard sweet voices murmuring in her ears, —
‘Sorrowful Delicia! Slain Delicia! This is not thine end — work has but begun for thee, though earth has no more part in either thy toil or pleasure! Come, Delicia! Love is not dead because of human treachery; Love is immortal, unconquerable, unchangeable, and waits for thee elsewhere, Delicia! Come and see!’
And so persistently was she haunted by the impression that something new and strange awaited her, that almost unconsciously to herself she began to be expectant of a sudden change in her destinies, though what that change might be she could not by herself determine.
When she rose from her bed to resume her daily work an idea flashed upon her, — an idea bold and new, and suggesting itself forcibly for brief and brilliant literary treatment. Seized by this fresh inspiration, she shut herself up in her study and worked day after day, forgetting her own troubles in the fervour of creative energy. She saw no visitors and went nowhere; her morning ride was all the relaxation she permitted herself; and she grew paler and paler as she toiled unremittingly with her pen, and lived a life of almost unbroken solitude all through the height of the London ‘season.’ The people one calls by courtesy ‘friends,’ grew tired of leaving cards which were not responded to, and ‘society’ began to whisper that ‘it was rather singular, my dear, that Lord Carlyon should suddenly have left London and gone by himself to Paris, while that extremely peculiar wife of his remained at home shut up as closely as if she had the small-pox.’ ‘Perhaps she had the small-pox,’ suggested the Noodle section of opinion, deeming the remark witty. Whereupon Lady Brancewith, joining in the general chitter-chatter, ventured upon the scathing observation that ‘if she had, it would make her more popular in society, as no one could then be angry with her for her good looks.’ Which suggestion was voted ‘charming’ of Lady Brancewith; and ‘so generous of Lady Brancewith, being so lovely herself, to even consider for a moment in a favourable light the looks of a “female authoress!” — quite too sweet of Lady Brancewith!’
And the inane whispering of such tongues as wag without any brains to guide them went on and on, and Delicia never heard them. Her old friends, the Cavendishes, had left London for Scotland — they hated the ‘season’ with all the monotony of its joyless round — so that there was no one in town whom she particularly cared to see, And, like the enchanted ‘Lady of Shalott,’ she sat in her own small study weaving her web of thought, or, as her husband had once put it, ‘spinning cocoons.’
Only on one special day was there a break in her self-imposed routine. This occurred when two elderly gentlemen of business-like demeanour arrived carrying small black bags. They were lawyers, and were shown up to the famous author’s study at once, where they remained in private converse with her for the greater part of the afternoon.
When they came down again to the dining-room, where wine and biscuits were prepared for their refreshment, Delicia accompanied them; her face was very pale, yet calm, and she had the look of one whose mind has been relieved of an oppressive burden.
‘You have made everything quite clear now, have you not?’ she asked gently, as she dispensed the wine to her visitors with her usual hospitable forethought and care.
‘Perfectly so,’ responded the elder of the two legal men; ‘And if you will permit me to say so, I congratulate you, Lady Carlyon, on your strength of mind. Had the other will remained in force, your hardly-earned fortune would have soon been squandered.’
She answered nothing. After a little pause she spoke again.
‘You quite understand that, in the event of my death, you yourself take possession of my last manuscript, and place it personally in the hands of my publishers?’
‘Quite so. Everything shall be carried out in exact accordance with your instructions.
‘You think,’ she went on hesitatingly— ‘that I have given him enough to live upon?’
‘More than enough — more than he deserves, said the lawyer. ‘To be the possessor of two hundred and fifty a year for life is a great advantage in these days. Of course,’ and he laughed a little, ‘he’ll not be able to afford tandem-driving and the rest of his various amusements, but he can live comfortably and respectably if he likes. That is quite sufficient for him.’
‘He has already a sum in his own private bank, which, if placed at interest, will bring him in more than another hundred,’ said Delicia, meditatively. ‘Yes, I think it is sufficient. He cannot starve, and he is sure to marry again.’
‘But you talk as if you were going to leave us at once and for ever, Lady Carlyon,’ and the old lawyer looked somewhat concerned as he observed the extreme pallor of her face and the feverish splendour of her eyes. ‘You will live for many and many a long day yet to enjoy the fruit of your own intellectual labours—’
‘My dear sir, pray do not talk of my “intellectual labours!” In the opinion of my husband and of men generally, especially unsuccessful men, these very labours have rendered me “unsexed.” I am not a woman at all, according to their idea! I have neither heart nor feeling. I am simply a money-making machine, grinding out gold for my “lord and master” to spend.’
Her lawyer looked distressed.
‘If you remember, I told you some time back that I thought you were unaware of your husband’s extravagance,’ he said. ‘I put it as “extravagance,” — because I was unwilling to convey to you all the rumours I had actually heard. Men are naturally fickle; and my experience is that they always take benefits badly, thinking all good fortune their right. You made a mistake, I consider, to trust Lord Carlyon so completely.’
‘What would you have of me?’ asked Delicia, simply. ‘I loved him!’
There followed a silence. Nothing could be said to this, and the two men of the law munched their biscuits and drank their wine hastily, conscious of a sudden excitement stirring in them, — a strange impulse, moving them both to the desire of thrashing Lord Carlyon, which would be an action totally inconsistent with legal custom and procedure. But the sight of the fair, grave, patient woman who had worked so hard, who held such a high position of fame, and who was so grievously wronged in her private life, had a powerful effect upon even the practical and prosaic disposition of the two men born to considerations of red tape and wordy documents; and when they took their leave of her it was with a profound deference and sympathy which she did not fail to notice. Another time their evident interest and kindliness would have moved her, but now she was so strung up with feverish excitement and eagerness to finish the work she had begun, that external things made very little impression upon her.
She returned to her writing with renewed zest; Spartan was her chief companion; and only her maid Emily began to notice how ill she was looking. She had intended to consult a doctor about her health; but, absorbed in her work, she put it off from day to day, promising herself that she would do so when her book was finished. She received no news whatever from her husband; he was trying the effect of a lengthy absence and sustained silence on her always sensitive mind.
And so the days went on, through all bright June and the warm beginning of
July, till one morning she entered her room prepared to write the last portion of what she instinctively felt and knew would lift her higher among the cold pinnacles of fame than she had ever been. She was aware of a soft lassitude upon her, — a sense of languor that was more delightful than unpleasing; the beautiful repose that distinguishes a studious and deeply-thinking mind, which had been hers in a very great degree before her marriage, when, as single-hearted Delicia Vaughan, she had astonished the world by her genius, came back to her now, and the clouds of trouble and perplexity seemed suddenly to clear and leave her life as blank and calm and pure as though the shadow of a false love had never darkened it. The sun fell warmly across her desk, flickering over the pens and paper; and Spartan stretched himself full length in his usual place in the window-nook with a deep sigh of absolute content. And with radiance in her eyes and a smile on her lips, Delicia sat down and wrote her ‘conclusion.’ Her brain had never been clearer, — thoughts came quickly, and with the thoughts were evoked new and felicitous modes of expression, which wrote themselves, as it were, without an effort on her own part.
Suddenly she started to her feet; — a great and solemn sound was in her ears, like the stormy murmur of a distant sea, or the beginning of a grand organ chant, gravely sustained. Listening, she looked wildly up at the dazzling sunlight streaming through her window pane. What strange, what distant Glory did she see, that all the light and all the splendour of the summer day should seem, for that one moment, to be mirrored in her eyes? Then — she gave a sharp, choking cry, ...
‘Spartan! Spartan!’
With one bound the great dog obeyed the call, and sprang up against her, putting his huge, soft paws upon her breast. Convulsively she clasped them close, — as she would have clasped the hands of an only friend, — and fell back heavily in her chair — dead!
* * * * *
So they found her an hour later, — her cold hands still holding Spartan’s rough paws to her bosom, — while he, poor faithful beast, imprisoned in that death-grip, sat patiently watching his mistress with anxious and loving eyes, waiting till she should wake. For she looked as if she had merely fallen asleep for a few minutes; a smile was on her lips, — the colour had not quite left her face, — and her body was yet warm. For some time no one dared touch the dog, and only at last by dint of sheer force and close muzzling could they drag him away and lock him up in the yard, where he filled the surrounding neighbourhood with his desolate howling. He was ‘only a dog;’ he had not the beautiful reasoning ability of a man, who is able to console himself easily for the death of friends by making new ones. He had a true heart, poor Spartan! It is an unfashionable commodity, and useless, too, since it cannot be bought or sold. And when all the newspapers had headings— ‘Death of Delicia Vaughan,’ with accounts of the ‘sudden heart failure,’ which had been the cause of her unexpected end, Lord Carlyon returned in haste to town to attend the funeral and to hear the will. But he found his presence scarcely needed, — for the great public, seized by a passionate grief for the loss of one of its favourite authors, took it upon itself to make the obsequies of this ‘unsexed’ woman as imposing as any that ever attended king or emperor. Thousands followed the coffin to the quiet Mortlake cemetery, where Delicia had long ago purchased her own grave; hundreds among these thousands wept, and reminded each other of the good actions, the many kindnesses that had made her suddenly-ended life a blessing and consolation to the sick and the afflicted, and many wondered where they should again find so true and sympathetic a friend. And when it came to be publicly known that all her fortune, together with all future royalties to be obtained from her books, was left in equal shares among the poverty-stricken of certain miserable London districts, with full and concise instructions as to how it was to be paid and when, — then callous hearts melted at the sound of her name, and eyes unaccustomed to weeping shed soft tears of gratitude and spoke of her with a wondering tenderness of worship and reverence as though she had been a saint. The Press made light of her work, and had scarce a word of sympathy for her untimely demise; their general ‘tone’ being that adopted by the late Edward Fitzgerald, who wrote of one of England’s greatest poets thus:— ‘Mrs Barrett Browning is dead. Thank God we shall have no more “Aurora Leighs!”’ It is the usual manner assumed by men who have neither the brain nor the feeling to write an ‘Aurora Leigh’ themselves. All the same, the public ‘rushed,’ in its usual impulsive fashion, for the last book Delicia had written, and when they got it, such a chorus of enthusiasm arose as entirely overwhelmed the ordinary press cackle and brought down the applauding verdict of such reasoning readers and sober judges who did not waste their time in writing newspaper paragraphs. Delicia’s name became greater in death than in life; and only one person spoke of her with flippant ease and light disparagement; this was her husband. His indignation at finding her fortune entirely disposed of among ‘charities’ was too deep and genuine to be concealed. He considered his allowance of two hundred and fifty a year an ‘insult,’ and he became an ardent supporter of the tyrannic theories of the would-be little Nero of Germany, who permits a law to be in active force which unjustly provides that all the earnings of wives shall belong to their husbands. He considered the painter-poet-composer-autocrat of the Fatherland an extremely sensible person, and wished such a law might be carried into effect in England. He forgot all Delicia’s tenderness, all her beauty, all her intelligence, all her thoughtfulness and consideration for his personal comfort; and all her love counted as nothing when set against the manner in which he considered he had been ‘done’ in the results of his marriage with an ‘unsexed’ woman of genius. But gradually, very gradually, by some mysterious means, probably best known to Lady Brancewith, who had never forgiven the slight inflicted on her by his look and manner when he suddenly refused to drive home with her after promising to do so, rumour began to whisper the story of his selfishness, and to comment upon it.
‘He had committed no crime. Oh, no,’ said society, beginning to waver in its former adoration of his manly perfections, ‘but he broke his wife’s heart! Yes, that was it! How he did it nobody quite knew; there was something about the “Marina” woman at the “Empire,” but nothing was quite certain. Anyhow, she died very suddenly, and Lord Carlyon was away at the time.’
And as people nowadays hardly ever express regret for a person’s death, but immediately ask ‘What money has been left behind?’ the gossips had ample food for reflection, in the fact that nearly forty thousand pounds was Delicia’s legacy to the poor.
‘She must have had a very noble nature,’ said the world at last, when the shrieking pipe of irritated criticism had died away, and when from the dark vista of death Delicia’s star of fame shone clear, ‘Her husband was not worthy of her!’
And Paul Valdis, stricken to the soul with a grief beyond expression, heard this great verdict of the world finally pronounced, with an anguish of mind, and a despair as tragic as that of Romeo when he found his lady in her death-like sleep.
‘Too late, too late! My love, my darling!’ he groaned in bitterness of spirit. ‘What is it worth, all this shouting of praise over your silent grave? Oh, my Delicia! All you sought was love; so little to ask, my darling, so little in return for all the generous overflow of your gifted soul! If you could have loved me; but no! I would not have had you change your nature; you would not have been Delicia had you loved more than once!’
And his eyes rested tenderly on the wistful companion of his musing, Spartan, who had been left to his care in a very special manner, with a little note from Delicia herself, which was delivered to him by her lawyers and which ran thus: —
‘DEAR FRIEND, — Take care of Spartan. He will be contented with you, for he loves you. Please console him and make him happy for my sake. DELICIA.’
Valdis knew that little letter by heart; it was more priceless to him than any other worldly possession.
‘Spartan,’ he said now, calling the faithful animal to his side and taking his shag
gy, massive head between his hands, ‘Out of the whole world that calls our Delicia “famous,” the world that has gained new beauty, hope and joy from the blossoming of her genius, — only you and I loved her!’
Spartan sighed. He had become a melancholy, meditative creature, and his great brown eyes were often suffused with tears. Had he been able to answer his new master then, he might have said, —
‘Honesty is an ordinary quality in dogs, but it is exceptional in men. Dogs love and are faithful; men desire, and with possession are faithless! Yet men, so they say, are higher in the scale of creation than dogs. I do not understand this. If truth, fidelity and devotion are virtues, then dogs are superior to men; if selfishness, cunning and hypocrisy are virtues, then men are certainly superior to dogs! I cannot argue it out, being only a dog myself; but to me it seems a strange world!’
And truly it is a strange world to many of us, though perhaps the strangest and most incomprehensible part of the whole mystery is the perpetual sacrifice of the good to the bad, and the seeming continual triumph of conventional lies over central truths. But, after all, that triumph is only ‘seeming’; and the martyrdom of life and love endured by thousands of patiently-working, self-denying women will bring its own reward in the Hereafter, as well as its own terrific vengeance on the heads of the callous egotists among men who have tortured tender souls on the rack, or burnt them in the fire, making ‘living torches’ of them, to throw light upon the wicked deeds done in the vast arena of Sensualism and Materialism. Not a tear, not a heart-throb of one pure woman wronged shall escape the eyes of Eternal Justice, or fail to bring punishment upon the wrong-doer! This we may believe, — this we MUST believe, — else God Himself would be a demon and the world His Hell!
THE END
Ziska
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 410