FOUR days after these curious incidents a funeral started from
Canterville Chase at about eleven o’clock at night. The hearse was drawn
by eight black horses, each of which carried on its head a great tuft of
nodding ostrich-plumes, and the leaden coffin was covered by a rich
purple pall, on which was embroidered in gold the Canterville
coat-of-arms. By the side of the hearse and the coaches walked the
servants with lighted torches, and the whole procession was wonderfully
impressive. Lord Canterville was the chief mourner, having come up
specially from Wales to attend the funeral, and sat in the first carriage
along with little Virginia. Then came the United States Minister and his
wife, then Washington and the three boys, and in the last carriage was
Mrs. Umney. It was generally felt that, as she had been frightened by
the ghost for more than fifty years of her life, she had a right to see
the last of him. A deep grave had been dug in the corner of the
churchyard, just under the old yew-tree, and the service was read in the
most impressive manner by the Rev. Augustus Dampier. When the ceremony
was over, the servants, according to an old custom observed in the
Canterville family, extinguished their torches, and, as the coffin was
being lowered into the grave, Virginia stepped forward and laid on it a
large cross made of white and pink almond-blossoms. As she did so, the
moon came out from behind a cloud, and flooded with its silent silver the
little churchyard, and from a distant copse a nightingale began to sing.
She thought of the ghost’s description of the Garden of Death, her eyes
became dim with tears, and she hardly spoke a word during the drive home.
The next morning, before Lord Canterville went up to town, Mr. Otis had
an interview with him on the subject of the jewels the ghost had given to
Virginia. They were perfectly magnificent, especially a certain ruby
necklace with old Venetian setting, which was really a superb specimen of
sixteenth-century work, and their value was so great that Mr. Otis felt
considerable scruples about allowing his daughter to accept them.
‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I know that in this country mortmain is held to
apply to trinkets as well as to land, and it is quite clear to me that
these jewels are, or should be, heirlooms in your family. I must beg
you, accordingly, to take them to London with you, and to regard them
simply as a portion of your property which has been restored to you under
certain strange conditions. As for my daughter, she is merely a child,
and has as yet, I am glad to say, but little interest in such
appurtenances of idle luxury. I am also informed by Mrs. Otis, who, I
may say, is no mean authority upon Art—having had the privilege of
spending several winters in Boston when she was a girl—that these gems
are of great monetary worth, and if offered for sale would fetch a tall
price. Under these circumstances, Lord Canterville, I feel sure that you
will recognise how impossible it would be for me to allow them to remain
in the possession of any member of my family; and, indeed, all such vain
gauds and toys, however suitable or necessary to the dignity of the
British aristocracy, would be completely out of place among those who
have been brought up on the severe, and I believe immortal, principles of
republican simplicity. Perhaps I should mention that Virginia is very
anxious that you should allow her to retain the box as a memento of your
unfortunate but misguided ancestor. As it is extremely old, and
consequently a good deal out of repair, you may perhaps think fit to
comply with her request. For my own part, I confess I am a good deal
surprised to find a child of mine expressing sympathy with mediævalism in
any form, and can only account for it by the fact that Virginia was born
in one of your London suburbs shortly after Mrs. Otis had returned from a
trip to Athens.’
Lord Canterville listened very gravely to the worthy Minister’s speech,
pulling his grey moustache now and then to hide an involuntary smile, and
when Mr. Otis had ended, he shook him cordially by the hand, and said,
‘My dear sir, your charming little daughter rendered my unlucky ancestor,
Sir Simon, a very important service, and I and my family are much
indebted to her for her marvellous courage and pluck. The jewels are
clearly hers, and, egad, I believe that if I were heartless enough to
take them from her, the wicked old fellow would be out of his grave in a
fortnight, leading me the devil of a life. As for their being heirlooms,
nothing is an heirloom that is not so mentioned in a will or legal
document, and the existence of these jewels has been quite unknown. I
assure you I have no more claim on them than your butler, and when Miss
Virginia grows up I daresay she will be pleased to have pretty things to
wear. Besides, you forget, Mr. Otis, that you took the furniture and the
ghost at a valuation, and anything that belonged to the ghost passed at
once into your possession, as, whatever activity Sir Simon may have shown
in the corridor at night, in point of law he was really dead, and you
acquired his property by purchase.’
Mr. Otis was a good deal distressed at Lord Canterville’s refusal, and
begged him to reconsider his decision, but the good-natured peer was
quite firm, and finally induced the Minister to allow his daughter to
retain the present the ghost had given her, and when, in the spring of
1890, the young Duchess of Cheshire was presented at the Queen’s first
drawing-room on the occasion of her marriage, her jewels were the
universal theme of admiration. For Virginia received the coronet, which
is the reward of all good little American girls, and was married to her
boy-lover as soon as he came of age. They were both so charming, and
they loved each other so much, that every one was delighted at the match,
except the old Marchioness of Dumbleton, who had tried to catch the Duke
for one of her seven unmarried daughters, and had given no less than
three expensive dinner-parties for that purpose, and, strange to say, Mr.
Otis himself. Mr. Otis was extremely fond of the young Duke personally,
but, theoretically, he objected to titles, and, to use his own words,
‘was not without apprehension lest, amid the enervating influences of a
pleasure-loving aristocracy, the true principles of republican simplicity
should be forgotten.’ His objections, however, were completely
overruled, and I believe that when he walked up the aisle of St.
George’s, Hanover Square, with his daughter leaning on his arm, there was
not a prouder man in the whole length and breadth of England.
The Duke and Duchess, after the honeymoon was over, went down to
Canterville Chase, and on the day after their arrival they walked over in
the afternoon to the lonely churchyard by the pine-woods. There had been
a great deal of difficulty at first about the inscription on Sir Simon’s
tombstone, but finally it had been decided to engrave on it simply the
initials of the old gentleman’s name, and the verse from the library
window. The Duchess had brought with her some lovely roses, which she
strewed upon the grave, and after they had stood by it for some time they
strolled into the ruined chancel of the old abbey. There the Duchess sat
down on a fallen pillar, while her husband lay at her feet smoking a
cigarette and looking up at her beautiful eyes. Suddenly he threw his
cigarette away, took hold of her hand, and said to her, ‘Virginia, a wife
should have no secrets from her husband.’
‘Dear Cecil! I have no secrets from you.’
‘Yes, you have,’ he answered, smiling, ‘you have never told me what
happened to you when you were locked up with the ghost.’
‘I have never told any one, Cecil,’ said Virginia gravely.
‘I know that, but you might tell me.’
‘Please don’t ask me, Cecil, I cannot tell you. Poor Sir Simon! I owe
him a great deal. Yes, don’t laugh, Cecil, I really do. He made me see
what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than
both.’
The Duke rose and kissed his wife lovingly.
‘You can have your secret as long as I have your heart,’ he murmured.
‘You have always had that, Cecil.’
‘And you will tell our children some day, won’t you?’
Virginia blushed.
THE SPHINX WITHOUT A SECRET
AN ETCHING
ONE afternoon I was sitting outside the Café de la Paix, watching the
splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth
at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before me,
when I heard some one call my name. I turned round, and saw Lord
Murchison. We had not met since we had been at college together, nearly
ten years before, so I was delighted to come across him again, and we
shook hands warmly. At Oxford we had been great friends. I had liked
him immensely, he was so handsome, so high-spirited, and so honourable.
We used to say of him that he would be the best of fellows, if he did not
always speak the truth, but I think we really admired him all the more
for his frankness. I found him a good deal changed. He looked anxious
and puzzled, and seemed to be in doubt about something. I felt it could
not be modern scepticism, for Murchison was the stoutest of Tories, and
believed in the Pentateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of
Peers; so I concluded that it was a woman, and asked him if he was
married yet.
‘I don’t understand women well enough,’ he answered.
‘My dear Gerald,’ I said, ‘women are meant to be loved, not to be
understood.’
‘I cannot love where I cannot trust,’ he replied.
‘I believe you have a mystery in your life, Gerald,’ I exclaimed; ‘tell
me about it.’
‘Let us go for a drive,’ he answered, ‘it is too crowded here. No, not a
yellow carriage, any other colour—there, that dark green one will do’;
and in a few moments we were trotting down the boulevard in the direction
of the Madeleine.
‘Where shall we go to?’ I said.
‘Oh, anywhere you like!’ he answered—‘to the restaurant in the Bois; we
will dine there, and you shall tell me all about yourself.’
‘I want to hear about you first,’ I said. ‘Tell me your mystery.’
He took from his pocket a little silver-clasped morocco case, and handed
it to me. I opened it. Inside there was the photograph of a woman. She
was tall and slight, and strangely picturesque with her large vague eyes
and loosened hair. She looked like a _clairvoyante_, and was wrapped in
rich furs.
‘What do you think of that face?’ he said; ‘is it truthful?’
I examined it carefully. It seemed to me the face of some one who had a
secret, but whether that secret was good or evil I could not say. Its
beauty was a beauty moulded out of many mysteries—the beauty, in fact,
which is psychological, not plastic—and the faint smile that just played
across the lips was far too subtle to be really sweet.
‘Well,’ he cried impatiently, ‘what do you say?’
‘She is the Gioconda in sables,’ I answered. ‘Let me know all about
her.’
‘Not now,’ he said; ‘after dinner,’ and began to talk of other things.
When the waiter brought us our coffee and cigarettes I reminded Gerald of
his promise. He rose from his seat, walked two or three times up and
down the room, and, sinking into an armchair, told me the following
story:—
‘One evening,’ he said, ‘I was walking down Bond Street about five
o’clock. There was a terrific crush of carriages, and the traffic was
almost stopped. Close to the pavement was standing a little yellow
brougham, which, for some reason or other, attracted my attention. As I
passed by there looked out from it the face I showed you this afternoon.
It fascinated me immediately. All that night I kept thinking of it, and
all the next day. I wandered up and down that wretched Row, peering into
every carriage, and waiting for the yellow brougham; but I could not find
_ma belle inconnue_, and at last I began to think she was merely a dream.
About a week afterwards I was dining with Madame de Rastail. Dinner was
for eight o’clock; but at half-past eight we were still waiting in the
drawing-room. Finally the servant threw open the door, and announced
Lady Alroy. It was the woman I had been looking for. She came in very
slowly, looking like a moonbeam in grey lace, and, to my intense delight,
I was asked to take her in to dinner. After we had sat down, I remarked
quite innocently, “I think I caught sight of you in Bond Street some time
ago, Lady Alroy.” She grew very pale, and said to me in a low voice,
“Pray do not talk so loud; you may be overheard.” I felt miserable at
having made such a bad beginning, and plunged recklessly into the subject
of the French plays. She spoke very little, always in the same low
musical voice, and seemed as if she was afraid of some one listening. I
fell passionately, stupidly in love, and the indefinable atmosphere of
mystery that surrounded her excited my most ardent curiosity. When she
was going away, which she did very soon after dinner, I asked her if I
might call and see her. She hesitated for a moment, glanced round to see
if any one was near us, and then said, “Yes; to-morrow at a quarter to
five.” I begged Madame de Rastail to tell me about her; but all that I
could learn was that she was a widow with a beautiful house in Park Lane,
and as some scientific bore began a dissertation on widows, as
exemplifying the survival of the matrimonially fittest, I left and went
home.
‘The next day I arrived at Park Lane punctual to the moment, but was told
by the butler that Lady Alroy had just gone out. I went down to the club
quite unhappy and very much puzzled, and after long consideration wrote
her a letter, asking if I might be allowed to try my chance some other
afternoon. I had no answer for several days, but at last I got a little
note saying she would be at home on Sunday at four and with this
extraordinary postscript: “Please do not write to me here again; I will
explain when I see you.” On Sunday she received me, and was perfectly
charming; but when I was going away she begged of me, if I ever had
occasion to write to her again, to address my letter to “Mrs. Knox, care
of Whittaker’s Library, Green Street.” “There are reasons,” she said,
“why I cannot receive letters in my own house.”
‘All through the season I saw a great deal of her, and the atmosphere of
mystery never left her. Sometimes I thought that she was in the power of
some man, but she looked so unapproachable, that I could not believe it.
It was really very difficult for me to come to any conclusion, for she
was like one of those strange crystals that one sees in museums, which
are at one moment clear, and at another clouded. At last I determined to
ask her to be my wife: I was sick and tired of the incessant secrecy that
she imposed on all my visits, and on the few letters I sent her. I wrote
to her at the library to ask her if she could see me the following Monday
at six. She answered yes, and I was in the seventh heaven of delight. I
was infatuated with her: in spite of the mystery, I thought then—in
consequence of it, I see now. No; it was the woman herself I loved. The
mystery troubled me, maddened me. Why did chance put me in its track?’
‘You discovered it, then?’ I cried.
‘I fear so,’ he answered. ‘You can judge for yourself.’
‘When Monday came round I went to lunch with my uncle, and about four
o’clock found myself in the Marylebone Road. My uncle, you know, lives
in Regent’s Park. I wanted to get to Piccadilly, and took a short cut
through a lot of shabby little streets. Suddenly I saw in front of me
Lady Alroy, deeply veiled and walking very fast. On coming to the last
house in the street, she went up the steps, took out a latch-key, and let
herself in. “Here is the mystery,” I said to myself; and I hurried on
and examined the house. It seemed a sort of place for letting lodgings.
On the doorstep lay her handkerchief, which she had dropped. I picked it
up and put it in my pocket. Then I began to consider what I should do.
I came to the conclusion that I had no right to spy on her, and I drove
down to the club. At six I called to see her. She was lying on a sofa,
in a tea-gown of silver tissue looped up by some strange moonstones that
she always wore. She was looking quite lovely. “I am so glad to see
you,” she said; “I have not been out all day.” I stared at her in
amazement, and pulling the handkerchief out of my pocket, handed it to
her. “You dropped this in Cumnor Street this afternoon, Lady Alroy,” I
said very calmly. She looked at me in terror but made no attempt to take
the handkerchief. “What were you doing there?” I asked. “What right
have you to question me?” she answered. “The right of a man who loves
you,” I replied; “I came here to ask you to be my wife.” She hid her
face in her hands, and burst into floods of tears. “You must tell me,” I
continued. She stood up, and, looking me straight in the face, said,
“Lord Murchison, there is nothing to tell you.”—“You went to meet some
one,” I cried; “this is your mystery.” She grew dreadfully white, and
said, “I went to meet no one.”—“Can’t you tell the truth?” I exclaimed.
“I have told it,” she replied. I was mad, frantic; I don’t know what I
said, but I said terrible things to her. Finally I rushed out of the
house. She wrote me a letter the next day; I sent it back unopened, and
started for Norway with Alan Colville. After a month I came back, and
the first thing I saw in the _Morning Post_ was the death of Lady Alroy.
She had caught a chill at the Opera, and had died in five days of
congestion of the lungs. I shut myself up and saw no one. I had loved
her so much, I had loved her so madly. Good God! how I had loved that
woman!’
‘You went to the street, to the house in it?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘One day I went to Cumnor Street. I could not help it; I was tortured
with doubt. I knocked at the door, and a respectable-looking woman
opened it to me. I asked her if she had any rooms to let. “Well, sir,”
she replied, “the drawing-rooms are supposed to be let; but I have not
seen the lady for three months, and as rent is owing on them, you can
have them.”—“Is this the lady?” I said, showing the photograph. “That’s
her, sure enough,” she exclaimed; “and when is she coming back,
sir?”—“The lady is dead,” I replied. “Oh sir, I hope not!” said the
woman; “she was my best lodger. She paid me three guineas a week merely
to sit in my drawing-rooms now and then.” “She met some one here?” I
said; but the woman assured me that it was not so, that she always came
alone, and saw no one. “What on earth did she do here?” I cried. “She
simply sat in the drawing-room, sir, reading books, and sometimes had
tea,” the woman answered. I did not know what to say, so I gave her a
sovereign and went away. Now, what do you think it all meant? You don’t
believe the woman was telling the truth?’
‘I do.’
‘Then why did Lady Alroy go there?’
‘My dear Gerald,’ I answered, ‘Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania
for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with
her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for
secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘I am sure of it,’ I replied.
He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph.
‘I wonder?’ he said at last.
THE MODEL MILLIONAIRE
A NOTE OF ADMIRATION
UNLESS one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow.
Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the
unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to
have a permanent income than to be fascinating. These are the great
truths of modern life which Hughie Erskine never realised. Poor Hughie!
Intellectually, we must admit, he was not of much importance. He never
said a brilliant or even an ill-natured thing in his life. But then he
was wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut
profile, and his grey eyes. He was as popular with men as he was with
women and he had every accomplishment except that of making money. His
father had bequeathed him his cavalry sword and a _History of the
Peninsular War_ in fifteen volumes. Hughie hung the first over his
looking-glass, put the second on a shelf between _Ruff’s Guide_ and
_Bailey’s Magazine_, and lived on two hundred a year that an old aunt
allowed him. He had tried everything. He had gone on the Stock Exchange
for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears? He
had been a tea-merchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe
and souchong. Then he had tried selling dry sherry. That did not
answer; the sherry was a little too dry. Ultimately he became nothing, a
delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no
profession.
To make matters worse, he was in love. The girl he loved was Laura
Merton, the daughter of a retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his
digestion in India, and had never found either of them again. Laura
adored him, and he was ready to kiss her shoe-strings. They were the
handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them. The
Colonel was very fond of Hughie, but would not hear of any engagement.
‘Come to me, my boy, when you have got ten thousand pounds of your own,
and we will see about it,’ he used to say; and Hughie looked very glum in
those days, and had to go to Laura for consolation.
One morning, as he was on his way to Holland Park, where the Mertons
lived, he dropped in to see a great friend of his, Alan Trevor. Trevor
was a painter. Indeed, few people escape that nowadays. But he was also
an artist, and artists are rather rare. Personally he was a strange
rough fellow, with a freckled face and a red ragged beard. However, when
he took up the brush he was a real master, and his pictures were eagerly
sought after. He had been very much attracted by Hughie at first, it
must be acknowledged, entirely on account of his personal charm. ‘The
only people a painter should know,’ he used to say, ‘are people who are
_bête_ and beautiful, people who are an artistic pleasure to look at and
an intellectual repose to talk to. Men who are dandies and women who are
darlings rule the world, at least they should do so.’ However, after he
got to know Hughie better, he liked him quite as much for his bright,
buoyant spirits and his generous, reckless nature, and had given him the
permanent _entrée_ to his studio.
When Hughie came in he found Trevor putting the finishing touches to a
wonderful life-size picture of a beggar-man. The beggar himself was
standing on a raised platform in a corner of the studio. He was a
wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous
expression. Over his shoulders was flung a coarse brown cloak, all tears
and tatters; his thick boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand
he leant on a rough stick, while with the other he held out his battered
hat for alms.
‘What an amazing model!’ whispered Hughie, as he shook hands with his
friend.
‘An amazing model?’ shouted Trevor at the top of his voice; ‘I should
think so! Such beggars as he are not to be met with every day. A
_trouvaille_, _mon cher_; a living Velasquez! My stars! what an etching
Rembrandt would have made of him!’
‘Poor old chap!’ said Hughie, ‘how miserable he looks! But I suppose, to
you painters, his face is his fortune?’
‘Certainly,’ replied Trevor, ‘you don’t want a beggar to look happy, do
you?’
‘How much does a model get for sitting?’ asked Hughie, as he found
himself a comfortable seat on a divan.
‘A shilling an hour.’
‘And how much do you get for your picture, Alan?’
‘Oh, for this I get two thousand!’
‘Pounds?’
‘Guineas. Painters, poets, and physicians always get guineas.’
‘Well, I think the model should have a percentage,’ cried Hughie,
laughing; ‘they work quite as hard as you do.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense! Why, look at the trouble of laying on the paint
alone, and standing all day long at one’s easel! It’s all very well,
Hughie, for you to talk, but I assure you that there are moments when Art
almost attains to the dignity of manual labour. But you mustn’t chatter;
I’m very busy. Smoke a cigarette, and keep quiet.’
After some time the servant came in, and told Trevor that the framemaker
wanted to speak to him.
‘Don’t run away, Hughie,’ he said, as he went out, ‘I will be back in a
moment.’
The old beggar-man took advantage of Trevor’s absence to rest for a
moment on a wooden bench that was behind him. He looked so forlorn and
wretched that Hughie could not help pitying him, and felt in his pockets
to see what money he had. All he could find was a sovereign and some
coppers. ‘Poor old fellow,’ he thought to himself, ‘he wants it more
than I do, but it means no hansoms for a fortnight’; and he walked across
the studio and slipped the sovereign into the beggar’s hand.
The old man started, and a faint smile flitted across his withered lips.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, ‘thank you.’
Then Trevor arrived, and Hughie took his leave, blushing a little at what
he had done. He spent the day with Laura, got a charming scolding for
his extravagance, and had to walk home.
That night he strolled into the Palette Club about eleven o’clock, and
found Trevor sitting by himself in the smoking-room drinking hock and
seltzer.
‘Well, Alan, did you get the picture finished all right?’ he said, as he
lit his cigarette.
‘Finished and framed, my boy!’ answered Trevor; ‘and, by the bye, you
have made a conquest. That old model you saw is quite devoted to you. I
had to tell him all about you—who you are, where you live, what your
income is, what prospects you have—’
‘My dear Alan,’ cried Hughie, ‘I shall probably find him waiting for me
when I go home. But of course you are only joking. Poor old wretch! I
wish I could do something for him. I think it is dreadful that any one
should be so miserable. I have got heaps of old clothes at home—do you
think he would care for any of them? Why, his rags were falling to
bits.’
‘But he looks splendid in them,’ said Trevor. ‘I wouldn’t paint him in a
frock coat for anything. What you call rags I call romance. What seems
poverty to you is picturesqueness to me. However, I’ll tell him of your
offer.’
‘Alan,’ said Hughie seriously, ‘you painters are a heartless lot.’
‘An artist’s heart is his head,’ replied Trevor; ‘and besides, our
business is to realise the world as we see it, not to reform it as we
know it. _À chacun son métier_. And now tell me how Laura is. The old
model was quite interested in her.’
‘You don’t mean to say you talked to him about her?’ said Hughie.
‘Certainly I did. He knows all about the relentless colonel, the lovely
Laura, and the £10,000.’
‘You told that old beggar all my private affairs?’ cried Hughie, looking
very red and angry.
‘My dear boy,’ said Trevor, smiling, ‘that old beggar, as you call him,
is one of the richest men in Europe. He could buy all London to-morrow
without overdrawing his account. He has a house in every capital, dines
off gold plate, and can prevent Russia going to war when he chooses.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ exclaimed Hughie.
‘What I say,’ said Trevor. ‘The old man you saw to-day in the studio was
Baron Hausberg. He is a great friend of mine, buys all my pictures and
that sort of thing, and gave me a commission a month ago to paint him as
a beggar. _Que voulez-vous_? _La fantaisie d’un millionnaire_! And I
must say he made a magnificent figure in his rags, or perhaps I should
say in my rags; they are an old suit I got in Spain.’
‘Baron Hausberg!’ cried Hughie. ‘Good heavens! I gave him a sovereign!’
and he sank into an armchair the picture of dismay.
‘Gave him a sovereign!’ shouted Trevor, and he burst into a roar of
laughter. ‘My dear boy, you’ll never see it again. _Son affaire c’est
l’argent des autres_.’
‘I think you might have told me, Alan,’ said Hughie sulkily, ‘and not
have let me make such a fool of myself.’
‘Well, to begin with, Hughie,’ said Trevor, ‘it never entered my mind
that you went about distributing alms in that reckless way. I can
understand your kissing a pretty model, but your giving a sovereign to an
ugly one—by Jove, no! Besides, the fact is that I really was not at home
to-day to any one; and when you came in I didn’t know whether Hausberg
would like his name mentioned. You know he wasn’t in full dress.’
‘What a duffer he must think me!’ said Hughie.
‘Not at all. He was in the highest spirits after you left; kept
chuckling to himself and rubbing his old wrinkled hands together. I
couldn’t make out why he was so interested to know all about you; but I
see it all now. He’ll invest your sovereign for you, Hughie, pay you the
interest every six months, and have a capital story to tell after
dinner.’
‘I am an unlucky devil,’ growled Hughie. ‘The best thing I can do is to
go to bed; and, my dear Alan, you mustn’t tell any one. I shouldn’t dare
show my face in the Row.’
‘Nonsense! It reflects the highest credit on your philanthropic spirit,
Hughie. And don’t run away. Have another cigarette, and you can talk
about Laura as much as you like.’
However, Hughie wouldn’t stop, but walked home, feeling very unhappy, and
leaving Alan Trevor in fits of laughter.
The next morning, as he was at breakfast, the servant brought him up a
card on which was written, ‘Monsieur Gustave Naudin, _de la part de_ M.
le Baron Hausberg.’ ‘I suppose he has come for an apology,’ said Hughie
to himself; and he told the servant to show the visitor up.
An old gentleman with gold spectacles and grey hair came into the room,
and said, in a slight French accent, ‘Have I the honour of addressing
Monsieur Erskine?’
Hughie bowed.
‘I have come from Baron Hausberg,’ he continued. ‘The Baron—’
‘I beg, sir, that you will offer him my sincerest apologies,’ stammered
Hughie.
‘The Baron,’ said the old gentleman with a smile, ‘has commissioned me to
bring you this letter’; and he extended a sealed envelope.
On the outside was written, ‘A wedding present to Hugh Erskine and Laura
Merton, from an old beggar,’ and inside was a cheque for £10,000.
When they were married Alan Trevor was the best man, and the Baron made a
speech at the wedding breakfast.
‘Millionaire models,’ remarked Alan, ‘are rare enough; but, by Jove,
model millionaires are rarer still!’
THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.
CHAPTER I
I HAD been dining with Erskine in his pretty little house in Birdcage
Walk, and we were sitting in the library over our coffee and cigarettes,
when the question of literary forgeries happened to turn up in
conversation. I cannot at present remember how it was that we struck
upon this somewhat curious topic, as it was at that time, but I know that
we had a long discussion about Macpherson, Ireland, and Chatterton, and
that with regard to the last I insisted that his so-called forgeries were
merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation; that
we had no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which
he chooses to present his work; and that all Art being to a certain
degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on
some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and
limitations of real life, to censure an artist for a forgery was to
confuse an ethical with an æsthetical problem.
Erskine, who was a good deal older than I was, and had been listening to
me with the amused deference of a man of forty, suddenly put his hand
upon my shoulder and said to me, ‘What would you say about a young man
who had a strange theory about a certain work of art, believed in his
theory, and committed a forgery in order to prove it?’
‘Ah! that is quite a different matter,’ I answered.
Erskine remained silent for a few moments, looking at the thin grey
threads of smoke that were rising from his cigarette. ‘Yes,’ he said,
after a pause, ‘quite different.’
There was something in the tone of his voice, a slight touch of
bitterness perhaps, that excited my curiosity. ‘Did you ever know
anybody who did that?’ I cried.
‘Yes,’ he answered, throwing his cigarette into the fire,—‘a great friend
of mine, Cyril Graham. He was very fascinating, and very foolish, and
very heartless. However, he left me the only legacy I ever received in
my life.’
‘What was that?’ I exclaimed. Erskine rose from his seat, and going over
to a tall inlaid cabinet that stood between the two windows, unlocked it,
and came back to where I was sitting, holding in his hand a small panel
picture set in an old and somewhat tarnished Elizabethan frame.
It was a full-length portrait of a young man in late sixteenth-century
costume, standing by a table, with his right hand resting on an open
book. He seemed about seventeen years of age, and was of quite
extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently somewhat effeminate.
Indeed, had it not been for the dress and the closely cropped hair, one
would have said that the face with its dreamy wistful eyes, and its
delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl. In manner, and especially
in the treatment of the hands, the picture reminded one of François
Clouet’s later work. The black velvet doublet with its fantastically
gilded points, and the peacock-blue background against which it showed up
so pleasantly, and from which it gained such luminous value of colour,
were quite in Clouet’s style; and the two masks of Tragedy and Comedy
that hung somewhat formally from the marble pedestal had that hard
severity of touch—so different from the facile grace of the
Italians—which even at the Court of France the great Flemish master never
completely lost, and which in itself has always been a characteristic of
the northern temper.
‘It is a charming thing,’ I cried, ‘but who is this wonderful young man,
whose beauty Art has so happily preserved for us?’
‘This is the portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ said Erskine, with a sad smile. It
might have been a chance effect of light, but it seemed to me that his
eyes were quite bright with tears.
‘Mr. W. H.!’ I exclaimed; ‘who was Mr. W. H.?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ he answered; ‘look at the book on which his hand is
resting.’
‘I see there is some writing there, but I cannot make it out,’ I replied.
‘Take this magnifying-glass and try,’ said Erskine, with the same sad
smile still playing about his mouth.
I took the glass, and moving the lamp a little nearer, I began to spell
out the crabbed sixteenth-century handwriting. ‘To the onlie begetter of
these insuing sonnets.’ . . . ‘Good heavens!’ I cried, ‘is this
Shakespeare’s Mr. W. H.?’
‘Cyril Graham used to say so,’ muttered Erskine.
‘But it is not a bit like Lord Pembroke,’ I answered. ‘I know the
Penshurst portraits very well. I was staying near there a few weeks
ago.’
‘Do you really believe then that the sonnets are addressed to Lord
Pembroke?’ he asked.
‘I am sure of it,’ I answered. ‘Pembroke, Shakespeare, and Mrs. Mary
Fitton are the three personages of the Sonnets; there is no doubt at all
about it.’
‘Well, I agree with you,’ said Erskine, ‘but I did not always think so.
I used to believe—well, I suppose I used to believe in Cyril Graham and
his theory.’
‘And what was that?’ I asked, looking at the wonderful portrait, which
had already begun to have a strange fascination for me.
‘It is a long story,’ said Erskine, taking the picture away from
me—rather abruptly I thought at the time—‘a very long story; but if you
care to hear it, I will tell it to you.’
‘I love theories about the Sonnets,’ I cried; ‘but I don’t think I am
likely to be converted to any new idea. The matter has ceased to be a
mystery to any one. Indeed, I wonder that it ever was a mystery.’
‘As I don’t believe in the theory, I am not likely to convert you to it,’
said Erskine, laughing; ‘but it may interest you.’
‘Tell it to me, of course,’ I answered. ‘If it is half as delightful as
the picture, I shall be more than satisfied.’
‘Well,’ said Erskine, lighting a cigarette, ‘I must begin by telling you
about Cyril Graham himself. He and I were at the same house at Eton. I
was a year or two older than he was, but we were immense friends, and did
all our work and all our play together. There was, of course, a good
deal more play than work, but I cannot say that I am sorry for that. It
is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education,
and what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as useful
to me as anything I was taught at Cambridge. I should tell you that
Cyril’s father and mother were both dead. They had been drowned in a
horrible yachting accident off the Isle of Wight. His father had been in
the diplomatic service, and had married a daughter, the only daughter, in
fact, of old Lord Crediton, who became Cyril’s guardian after the death
of his parents. I don’t think that Lord Crediton cared very much for
Cyril. He had never really forgiven his daughter for marrying a man who
had not a title. He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore like
a costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer. I remember seeing him
once on Speech-day. He growled at me, gave me a sovereign, and told me
not to grow up “a damned Radical” like my father. Cyril had very little
affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays
with us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyril
thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate,
I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital
fencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was very
languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a
strong objection to football. The two things that really gave him
pleasure were poetry and acting. At Eton he was always dressing up and
reciting Shakespeare, and when we went up to Trinity he became a member
of the A.D.C. his first term. I remember I was always very jealous of
his acting. I was absurdly devoted to him; I suppose because we were so
different in some things. I was a rather awkward, weakly lad, with huge
feet, and horribly freckled. Freckles run in Scotch families just as
gout does in English families. Cyril used to say that of the two he
preferred the gout; but he always set an absurdly high value on personal
appearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to prove
that it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was
wonderfully handsome. People who did not like him, Philistines and
college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he
was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere
prettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and
nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner.
He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many
people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to
think him dreadfully insincere. It was due, I think, chiefly to his
inordinate desire to please. Poor Cyril! I told him once that he was
contented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed. He was horribly
spoiled. All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of
their attraction.
‘However, I must tell you about Cyril’s acting. You know that no
actresses are allowed to play at the A.D.C. At least they were not in my
time. I don’t know how it is now. Well, of course, Cyril was always
cast for the girls’ parts, and when _As You Like It_ was produced he
played Rosalind. It was a marvellous performance. In fact, Cyril Graham
was the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen. It would be impossible
to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole
thing. It made an immense sensation, and the horrid little theatre, as
it was then, was crowded every night. Even when I read the play now I
can’t help thinking of Cyril. It might have been written for him. The
next term he took his degree, and came to London to read for the
diplomatic. But he never did any work. He spent his days in reading
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and his evenings at the theatre. He was, of
course, wild to go on the stage. It was all that I and Lord Crediton
could do to prevent him. Perhaps if he had gone on the stage he would be
alive now. It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good
advice is absolutely fatal. I hope you will never fall into that error.
If you do, you will be sorry for it.
‘Well, to come to the real point of the story, one day I got a letter
from Cyril asking me to come round to his rooms that evening. He had
charming chambers in Piccadilly overlooking the Green Park, and as I used
to go to see him every day, I was rather surprised at his taking the
trouble to write. Of course I went, and when I arrived I found him in a
state of great excitement. He told me that he had at last discovered the
true secret of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; that all the scholars and critics
had been entirely on the wrong tack; and that he was the first who,
working purely by internal evidence, had found out who Mr. W. H. really
was. He was perfectly wild with delight, and for a long time would not
tell me his theory. Finally, he produced a bundle of notes, took his
copy of the Sonnets off the mantelpiece, and sat down and gave me a long
lecture on the whole subject.
‘He began by pointing out that the young man to whom Shakespeare
addressed these strangely passionate poems must have been somebody who
was a really vital factor in the development of his dramatic art, and
that this could not be said either of Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton.
Indeed, whoever he was, he could not have been anybody of high birth, as
was shown very clearly by the 25th Sonnet, in which Shakespeare
contrasting himself with those who are “great princes’ favourites,” says
quite frankly—
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
And ends the sonnet by congratulating himself on the mean state of him he
so adored.
Then happy I, that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.
This sonnet Cyril declared would be quite unintelligible if we fancied
that it was addressed to either the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of
Southampton, both of whom were men of the highest position in England and
fully entitled to be called “great princes”; and he in corroboration of
his view read me Sonnets CXXIV. and CXXV., in which Shakespeare tells us
that his love is not “the child of state,” that it “suffers not in
smiling pomp,” but is “builded far from accident.” I listened with a
good deal of interest, for I don’t think the point had ever been made
before; but what followed was still more curious, and seemed to me at the
time to dispose entirely of Pembroke’s claim. We know from Meres that
the Sonnets had been written before 1598, and Sonnet CIV. informs us that
Shakespeare’s friendship for Mr. W. H. had been already in existence for
three years. Now Lord Pembroke, who was born in 1580, did not come to
London till he was eighteen years of age, that is to say till 1598, and
Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Mr. W. H. must have begun in 1594, or at
the latest in 1595. Shakespeare, accordingly, could not have known Lord
Pembroke till after the Sonnets had been written.
‘Cyril pointed out also that Pembroke’s father did not die till 1601;
whereas it was evident from the line,
You had a father; let your son say so,
that the father of Mr. W. H. was dead in 1598. Besides, it was absurd to
imagine that any publisher of the time, and the preface is from the
publisher’s hand, would have ventured to address William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, as Mr. W. H.; the case of Lord Buckhurst being spoken of as Mr.
Sackville being not really a parallel instance, as Lord Buckhurst was not
a peer, but merely the younger son of a peer, with a courtesy title, and
the passage in _England’s Parnassus_, where he is so spoken of, is not a
formal and stately dedication, but simply a casual allusion. So far for
Lord Pembroke, whose supposed claims Cyril easily demolished while I sat
by in wonder. With Lord Southampton Cyril had even less difficulty.
Southampton became at a very early age the lover of Elizabeth Vernon, so
he needed no entreaties to marry; he was not beautiful; he did not
resemble his mother, as Mr. W. H. did—
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
and, above all, his Christian name was Henry, whereas the punning sonnets
(CXXXV. and CXLIII.) show that the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend
was the same as his own—_Will_.
‘As for the other suggestions of unfortunate commentators, that Mr. W. H.
is a misprint for Mr. W. S., meaning Mr. William Shakespeare; that “Mr.
W. H. all” should be read “Mr. W. Hall”; that Mr. W. H. is Mr. William
Hathaway; and that a full stop should be placed after “wisheth,” making
Mr. W. H. the writer and not the subject of the dedication,—Cyril got rid
of them in a very short time; and it is not worth while to mention his
reasons, though I remember he sent me off into a fit of laughter by
reading to me, I am glad to say not in the original, some extracts from a
German commentator called Barnstorff, who insisted that Mr. W. H. was no
less a person than “Mr. William Himself.” Nor would he allow for a
moment that the Sonnets are mere satires on the work of Drayton and John
Davies of Hereford. To him, as indeed to me, they were poems of serious
and tragic import, wrung out of the bitterness of Shakespeare’s heart,
and made sweet by the honey of his lips. Still less would he admit that
they were merely a philosophical allegory, and that in them Shakespeare
is addressing his Ideal Self, or Ideal Manhood, or the Spirit of Beauty,
or the Reason, or the Divine Logos, or the Catholic Church. He felt, as
indeed I think we all must feel, that the Sonnets are addressed to an
individual,—to a particular young man whose personality for some reason
seems to have filled the soul of Shakespeare with terrible joy and no
less terrible despair.
‘Having in this manner cleared the way as it were, Cyril asked me to
dismiss from my mind any preconceived ideas I might have formed on the
subject, and to give a fair and unbiassed hearing to his own theory. The
problem he pointed out was this: Who was that young man of Shakespeare’s
day who, without being of noble birth or even of noble nature, was
addressed by him in terms of such passionate adoration that we can but
wonder at the strange worship, and are almost afraid to turn the key that
unlocks the mystery of the poet’s heart? Who was he whose physical
beauty was such that it became the very corner-stone of Shakespeare’s
art; the very source of Shakespeare’s inspiration; the very incarnation
of Shakespeare’s dreams? To look upon him as simply the object of
certain love-poems is to miss the whole meaning of the poems: for the art
of which Shakespeare talks in the Sonnets is not the art of the Sonnets
themselves, which indeed were to him but slight and secret things—it is
the art of the dramatist to which he is always alluding; and he to whom
Shakespeare said—
Thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance,
he to whom he promised immortality,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men,—
was surely none other than the boy-actor for whom he created Viola and
Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself.
This was Cyril Graham’s theory, evolved as you see purely from the
Sonnets themselves, and depending for its acceptance not so much on
demonstrable proof or formal evidence, but on a kind of spiritual and
artistic sense, by which alone he claimed could the true meaning of the
poems be discerned. I remember his reading to me that fine sonnet—
How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date—
and pointing out how completely it corroborated his theory; and indeed he
went through all the Sonnets carefully, and showed, or fancied that he
showed, that, according to his new explanation of their meaning, things
that had seemed obscure, or evil, or exaggerated, became clear and
rational, and of high artistic import, illustrating Shakespeare’s
conception of the true relations between the art of the actor and the art
of the dramatist.
‘It is of course evident that there must have been in Shakespeare’s
company some wonderful boy-actor of great beauty, to whom he intrusted
the presentation of his noble heroines; for Shakespeare was a practical
theatrical manager as well as an imaginative poet, and Cyril Graham had
actually discovered the boy-actor’s name. He was Will, or, as he
preferred to call him, Willie Hughes. The Christian name he found of
course in the punning sonnets, CXXXV. and CXLIII.; the surname was,
according to him, hidden in the seventh line of the 20th Sonnet, where
Mr. W. H. is described as—
A man in hew, all _Hews_ in his controwling.
‘In the original edition of the Sonnets “Hews” is printed with a capital
letter and in italics, and this, he claimed, showed clearly that a play
on words was intended, his view receiving a good deal of corroboration
from those sonnets in which curious puns are made on the words “use” and
“usury.” Of course I was converted at once, and Willie Hughes became to
me as real a person as Shakespeare. The only objection I made to the
theory was that the name of Willie Hughes does not occur in the list of
the actors of Shakespeare’s company as it is printed in the first folio.
Cyril, however, pointed out that the absence of Willie Hughes’s name from
this list really corroborated the theory, as it was evident from Sonnet
LXXXVI. that Willie Hughes had abandoned Shakespeare’s company to play at
a rival theatre, probably in some of Chapman’s plays. It is in reference
to this that in the great sonnet on Chapman, Shakespeare said to Willie
Hughes—
But when your countenance fill’d up his line,
Then lack’d I matter; that enfeebled mine—
the expression “when your countenance filled up his line” referring
obviously to the beauty of the young actor giving life and reality and
added charm to Chapman’s verse, the same idea being also put forward in
the 79th Sonnet—
Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace;
But now my gracious numbers are decay’d,
And my sick Muse doth give another place;
and in the immediately preceding sonnet, where Shakespeare says—
Every alien pen has got my _use_
And under thee their poesy disperse,
the play upon words (use=Hughes) being of course obvious, and the phrase
“under thee their poesy disperse,” meaning “by your assistance as an
actor bring their plays before the people.”
‘It was a wonderful evening, and we sat up almost till dawn reading and
re-reading the Sonnets. After some time, however, I began to see that
before the theory could be placed before the world in a really perfected
form, it was necessary to get some independent evidence about the
existence of this young actor, Willie Hughes. If this could be once
established, there could be no possible doubt about his identity with Mr.
W. H.; but otherwise the theory would fall to the ground. I put this
forward very strongly to Cyril, who was a good deal annoyed at what he
called my Philistine tone of mind, and indeed was rather bitter upon the
subject. However, I made him promise that in his own interest he would
not publish his discovery till he had put the whole matter beyond the
reach of doubt; and for weeks and weeks we searched the registers of City
churches, the Alleyn MSS. at Dulwich, the Record Office, the papers of
the Lord Chamberlain—everything, in fact, that we thought might contain
some allusion to Willie Hughes. We discovered nothing, of course, and
every day the existence of Willie Hughes seemed to me to become more
problematical. Cyril was in a dreadful state, and used to go over the
whole question day after day, entreating me to believe; but I saw the one
flaw in the theory, and I refused to be convinced till the actual
existence of Willie Hughes, a boy-actor of Elizabethan days, had been
placed beyond the reach of doubt or cavil.
‘One day Cyril left town to stay with his grandfather, I thought at the
time, but I afterwards heard from Lord Crediton that this was not the
case; and about a fortnight afterwards I received a telegram from him,
handed in at Warwick, asking me to be sure to come and dine with him that
evening at eight o’clock. When I arrived, he said to me, “The only
apostle who did not deserve proof was St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was the
only apostle who got it.” I asked him what he meant. He answered that
he had not merely been able to establish the existence in the sixteenth
century of a boy-actor of the name of Willie Hughes, but to prove by the
most conclusive evidence that he was the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets. He
would not tell me anything more at the time; but after dinner he solemnly
produced the picture I showed you, and told me that he had discovered it
by the merest chance nailed to the side of an old chest that he had
bought at a farmhouse in Warwickshire. The chest itself, which was a
very fine example of Elizabethan work, he had, of course, brought with
him, and in the centre of the front panel the initials W. H. were
undoubtedly carved. It was this monogram that had attracted his
attention, and he told me that it was not till he had had the chest in
his possession for several days that he had thought of making any careful
examination of the inside. One morning, however, he saw that one of the
sides of the chest was much thicker than the other, and looking more
closely, he discovered that a framed panel picture was clamped against
it. On taking it out, he found it was the picture that is now lying on
the sofa. It was very dirty, and covered with mould; but he managed to
clean it, and, to his great joy, saw that he had fallen by mere chance on
the one thing for which he had been looking. Here was an authentic
portrait of Mr. W. H., with his hand resting on the dedicatory page of
the Sonnets, and on the frame itself could be faintly seen the name of
the young man written in black uncial letters on a faded gold ground,
“Master Will. Hews.”
‘Well, what was I to say? It never occurred to me for a moment that
Cyril Graham was playing a trick on me, or that he was trying to prove
his theory by means of a forgery.’
‘But is it a forgery?’ I asked.
‘Of course it is,’ said Erskine. ‘It is a very good forgery; but it is a
forgery none the less. I thought at the time that Cyril was rather calm
about the whole matter; but I remember he more than once told me that he
himself required no proof of the kind, and that he thought the theory
complete without it. I laughed at him, and told him that without it the
theory would fall to the ground, and I warmly congratulated him on the
marvellous discovery. We then arranged that the picture should be etched
or facsimiled, and placed as the frontispiece to Cyril’s edition of the
Sonnets; and for three months we did nothing but go over each poem line
by line, till we had settled every difficulty of text or meaning. One
unlucky day I was in a print-shop in Holborn, when I saw upon the counter
some extremely beautiful drawings in silver-point. I was so attracted by
them that I bought them; and the proprietor of the place, a man called
Rawlings, told me that they were done by a young painter of the name of
Edward Merton, who was very clever, but as poor as a church mouse. I
went to see Merton some days afterwards, having got his address from the
printseller, and found a pale, interesting young man, with a rather
common-looking wife—his model, as I subsequently learned. I told him how
much I admired his drawings, at which he seemed very pleased, and I asked
him if he would show me some of his other work. As we were looking over
a portfolio, full of really very lovely things,—for Merton had a most
delicate and delightful touch,—I suddenly caught sight of a drawing of
the picture of Mr. W. H. There was no doubt whatever about it. It was
almost a _facsimile_—the only difference being that the two masks of
Tragedy and Comedy were not suspended from the marble table as they are
in the picture, but were lying on the floor at the young man’s feet.
“Where on earth did you get that?” I said. He grew rather confused, and
said—“Oh, that is nothing. I did not know it was in this portfolio. It
is not a thing of any value.” “It is what you did for Mr. Cyril Graham,”
exclaimed his wife; “and if this gentleman wishes to buy it, let him have
it.” “For Mr. Cyril Graham?” I repeated. “Did you paint the picture of
Mr. W. H.?” “I don’t understand what you mean,” he answered, growing
very red. Well, the whole thing was quite dreadful. The wife let it all
out. I gave her five pounds when I was going away. I can’t bear to
think of it now; but of course I was furious. I went off at once to
Cyril’s chambers, waited there for three hours before he came in, with
that horrid lie staring me in the face, and told him I had discovered his
forgery. He grew very pale and said—“I did it purely for your sake. You
would not be convinced in any other way. It does not affect the truth of
the theory.” “The truth of the theory!” I exclaimed; “the less we talk
about that the better. You never even believed in it yourself. If you
had, you would not have committed a forgery to prove it.” High words
passed between us; we had a fearful quarrel. I dare say I was unjust.
The next morning he was dead.’
‘Dead!’ I cried,
‘Yes; he shot himself with a revolver. Some of the blood splashed upon
the frame of the picture, just where the name had been painted. By the
time I arrived—his servant had sent for me at once—the police were
already there. He had left a letter for me, evidently written in the
greatest agitation and distress of mind.’
‘What was in it?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that he believed absolutely in Willie Hughes; that the forgery of
the picture had been done simply as a concession to me, and did not in
the slightest degree invalidate the truth of the theory; and, that in
order to show me how firm and flawless his faith in the whole thing was,
he was going to offer his life as a sacrifice to the secret of the
Sonnets. It was a foolish, mad letter. I remember he ended by saying
that he intrusted to me the Willie Hughes theory, and that it was for me
to present it to the world, and to unlock the secret of Shakespeare’s
heart.’
‘It is a most tragic story,’ I cried; ‘but why have you not carried out
his wishes?’
Erskine shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because it is a perfectly unsound
theory from beginning to end,’ he answered.
‘My dear Erskine,’ I said, getting up from my seat, ‘you are entirely
wrong about the whole matter. It is the only perfect key to
Shakespeare’s Sonnets that has ever been made. It is complete in every
detail. I believe in Willie Hughes.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Erskine gravely; ‘I believe there is something
fatal about the idea, and intellectually there is nothing to be said for
it. I have gone into the whole matter, and I assure you the theory is
entirely fallacious. It is plausible up to a certain point. Then it
stops. For heaven’s sake, my dear boy, don’t take up the subject of
Willie Hughes. You will break your heart over it.’
‘Erskine,’ I answered, ‘it is your duty to give this theory to the world.
If you will not do it, I will. By keeping it back you wrong the memory
of Cyril Graham, the youngest and the most splendid of all the martyrs of
literature. I entreat you to do him justice. He died for this
thing,—don’t let his death be in vain.’
Erskine looked at me in amazement. ‘You are carried away by the
sentiment of the whole story,’ he said. ‘You forget that a thing is not
necessarily true because a man dies for it. I was devoted to Cyril
Graham. His death was a horrible blow to me. I did not recover it for
years. I don’t think I have ever recovered it. But Willie Hughes?
There is nothing in the idea of Willie Hughes. No such person ever
existed. As for bringing the whole thing before the world—the world
thinks that Cyril Graham shot himself by accident. The only proof of his
suicide was contained in the letter to me, and of this letter the public
never heard anything. To the present day Lord Crediton thinks that the
whole thing was accidental.’
‘Cyril Graham sacrificed his life to a great Idea,’ I answered; ‘and if
you will not tell of his martyrdom, tell at least of his faith.’
‘His faith,’ said Erskine, ‘was fixed in a thing that was false, in a
thing that was unsound, in a thing that no Shakespearean scholar would
accept for a moment. The theory would be laughed at. Don’t make a fool
of yourself, and don’t follow a trail that leads nowhere. You start by
assuming the existence of the very person whose existence is the thing to
be proved. Besides, everybody knows that the Sonnets were addressed to
Lord Pembroke. The matter is settled once for all.’
‘The matter is not settled!’ I exclaimed. ‘I will take up the theory
where Cyril Graham left it, and I will prove to the world that he was
right.’
‘Silly boy!’ said Erskine. ‘Go home: it is after two, and don’t think
about Willie Hughes any more. I am sorry I told you anything about it,
and very sorry indeed that I should have converted you to a thing in
which I don’t believe.’
‘You have given me the key to the greatest mystery of modern literature,’
I answered; ‘and I shall not rest till I have made you recognise, till I
have made everybody recognise, that Cyril Graham was the most subtle
Shakespearean critic of our day.’
As I walked home through St. James’s Park the dawn was just breaking over
London. The white swans were lying asleep on the polished lake, and the
gaunt Palace looked purple against the pale-green sky. I thought of
Cyril Graham, and my eyes filled with tears.
CHAPTER II
IT was past twelve o’clock when I awoke, and the sun was streaming in
through the curtains of my room in long slanting beams of dusty gold. I
told my servant that I would be at home to no one; and after I had had a
cup of chocolate and a _petit-pain_, I took down from the book-shelf my
copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and began to go carefully through them.
Every poem seemed to me to corroborate Cyril Graham’s theory. I felt as
if I had my hand upon Shakespeare’s heart, and was counting each separate
throb and pulse of passion. I thought of the wonderful boy-actor, and
saw his face in every line.
Two sonnets, I remember, struck me particularly: they were the 53rd and
the 67th. In the first of these, Shakespeare, complimenting Willie
Hughes on the versatility of his acting, on his wide range of parts, a
range extending from Rosalind to Juliet, and from Beatrice to Ophelia,
says to him—
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend—
lines that would be unintelligible if they were not addressed to an
actor, for the word ‘shadow’ had in Shakespeare’s day a technical meaning
connected with the stage. ‘The best in this kind are but shadows,’ says
Theseus of the actors in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and there are
many similar allusions in the literature of the day. These sonnets
evidently belonged to the series in which Shakespeare discusses the
nature of the actor’s art, and of the strange and rare temperament that
is essential to the perfect stage-player. ‘How is it,’ says Shakespeare
to Willie Hughes, ‘that you have so many personalities?’ and then he goes
on to point out that his beauty is such that it seems to realise every
form and phase of fancy, to embody each dream of the creative
imagination—an idea that is still further expanded in the sonnet that
immediately follows, where, beginning with the fine thought,
O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which _truth_ doth give!
Shakespeare invites us to notice how the truth of acting, the truth of
visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving
life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form. And yet,
in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to abandon the
stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face and
unreal costume, its immoral influences and suggestions, its remoteness
from the true world of noble action and sincere utterance.
Ah, wherefore with infection should he live
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare, who
realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man on the
ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have written in
these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that in Sonnets CX.
and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied of the world of
puppets, and full of shame at having made himself ‘a motley to the view.’
The 111th Sonnet is especially bitter:—
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew’d—
and there are many signs elsewhere of the same feeling, signs familiar to
all real students of Shakespeare.
One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was days
before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril Graham
himself seems to have missed. I could not understand how it was that
Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend marrying. He himself
had married young, and the result had been unhappiness, and it was not
likely that he would have asked Willie Hughes to commit the same error.
The boy-player of Rosalind had nothing to gain from marriage, or from the
passions of real life. The early sonnets, with their strange entreaties
to have children, seemed to me a jarring note. The explanation of the
mystery came on me quite suddenly, and I found it in the curious
dedication. It will be remembered that the dedication runs as follows:—
TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF
THESE INSUING SONNETS
MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE
AND THAT ETERNITIE
PROMISED
BY
OUR EVER-LIVING POET
WISHETH
THE WELL-WISHING
ADVENTURER IN
SETTING
FORTH.
T. T.
Some scholars have supposed that the word ‘begetter’ in this dedication
means simply the procurer of the Sonnets for Thomas Thorpe the publisher;
but this view is now generally abandoned, and the highest authorities are
quite agreed that it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, the
metaphor being drawn from the analogy of physical life. Now I saw that
the same metaphor was used by Shakespeare himself all through the poems,
and this set me on the right track. Finally I made my great discovery.
The marriage that Shakespeare proposes for Willie Hughes is the marriage
with his Muse, an expression which is definitely put forward in the 82nd
Sonnet, where, in the bitterness of his heart at the defection of the
boy-actor for whom he had written his greatest parts, and whose beauty
had indeed suggested them, he opens his complaint by saying—
I grant thou wert not married to my Muse.
The children he begs him to beget are no children of flesh and blood, but
more immortal children of undying fame. The whole cycle of the early
sonnets is simply Shakespeare’s invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon
the stage and become a player. How barren and profitless a thing, he
says, is this beauty of yours if it be not used:—
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
You must create something in art: my verse ‘is thine, and _born_ of
thee’; only listen to me, and I will ‘_bring forth_ eternal numbers to
outlive long date,’ and you shall people with forms of your own image the
imaginary world of the stage. These children that you beget, he
continues, will not wither away, as mortal children do, but you shall
live in them and in my plays: do but—
Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
I collected all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this view,
and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete
Cyril Graham’s theory really was. I also saw that it was quite easy to
separate those lines in which he speaks of the Sonnets themselves from
those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work. This was a point
that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up to Cyril Graham’s
day. And yet it was one of the most important points in the whole series
of poems. To the Sonnets Shakespeare was more or less indifferent. He
did not wish to rest his fame on them. They were to him his ‘slight
Muse,’ as he calls them, and intended, as Meres tells us, for private
circulation only among a few, a very few, friends. Upon the other hand
he was extremely conscious of the high artistic value of his plays, and
shows a noble self-reliance upon his dramatic genius. When he says to
Willie Hughes:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in _eternal lines_ to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee;—
the expression ‘eternal lines’ clearly alludes to one of his plays that
he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to
his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In
his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we find the same
feeling.
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the Mistress of Tragedy and
Comedy for her ‘neglect of Truth in Beauty dyed,’ and says—
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for ‘t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
It is, however, perhaps in the 55th Sonnet that Shakespeare gives to this
idea its fullest expression. To imagine that the ‘powerful rhyme’ of the
second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to mistake Shakespeare’s
meaning entirely. It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the
general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and
that the play was none other but _Romeo and Juliet_.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful wars shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
It was also extremely suggestive to note how here as elsewhere
Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that appealed to
men’s eyes—that is to say, in a spectacular form, in a play that is to be
looked at.
For two weeks I worked hard at the Sonnets, hardly ever going out, and
refusing all invitations. Every day I seemed to be discovering something
new, and Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual presence, an
ever-dominant personality. I could almost fancy that I saw him standing
in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his
golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep-sunken eyes,
his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands. His very name
fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded!
Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare’s
passion, {1} the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage, {2}
the delicate minion of pleasure, {3} the rose of the whole world, {4} the
herald of the spring {5} decked in the proud livery of youth, {6} the
lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear, {7} and whose beauty was the
very raiment of Shakespeare’s heart, {8} as it was the keystone of his
dramatic power? How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his desertion
and his shame!—shame that he made sweet and lovely {9} by the mere magic
of his personality, but that was none the less shame. Yet as Shakespeare
forgave him, should not we forgive him also? I did not care to pry into
the mystery of his sin.
His abandonment of Shakespeare’s theatre was a different matter, and I
investigated it at great length. Finally I came to the conclusion that
Cyril Graham had been wrong in regarding the rival dramatist of the 80th
Sonnet as Chapman. It was obviously Marlowe who was alluded to. At the
time the Sonnets were written, such an expression as ‘the proud full sail
of his great verse’ could not have been used of Chapman’s work, however
applicable it might have been to the style of his later Jacobean plays.
No: Marlowe was clearly the rival dramatist of whom Shakespeare spoke in
such laudatory terms; and that
Affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
was the Mephistopheles of his _Doctor Faustus_. No doubt, Marlowe was
fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him away
from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston of his
_Edward II_. That Shakespeare had the legal right to retain Willie
Hughes in his own company is evident from Sonnet LXXXVII., where he
says:—
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The _charter of thy worth_ gives thee releasing;
My _bonds_ in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
_And so my patent back again is swerving_.
Thyself thou gayest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
But him whom he could not hold by love, he would not hold by force.
Willie Hughes became a member of Lord Pembroke’s company, and, perhaps in
the open yard of the Red Bull Tavern, played the part of King Edward’s
delicate minion. On Marlowe’s death, he seems to have returned to
Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have thought of the
matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and treachery of the young
actor.
How well, too, had Shakespeare drawn the temperament of the stage-player!
Willie Hughes was one of those
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone.
He could act love, but could not feel it, could mimic passion without
realising it.
In many’s looks the false heart’s history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
but with Willie Hughes it was not so. ‘Heaven,’ says Shakespeare, in a
sonnet of mad idolatry—
Heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate’er thy thoughts or thy heart’s workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
In his ‘inconstant mind’ and his ‘false heart,’ it was easy to recognise
the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem inseparable from the
artistic nature, as in his love of praise that desire for immediate
recognition that characterises all actors. And yet, more fortunate in
this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to know something of
immortality. Inseparably connected with Shakespeare’s plays, he was to
live in them.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead.
There were endless allusions, also, to Willie Hughes’s power over his
audience—the ‘gazers,’ as Shakespeare calls them; but perhaps the most
perfect description of his wonderful mastery over dramatic art was in _A
Lover’s Complaint_, where Shakespeare says of him:—
In him a plenitude of subtle matter,
Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives,
Of burning blushes, or of weeping water,
Or swooning paleness; and he takes and leaves,
In either’s aptness, as it best deceives,
To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,
Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows.
* * * * *
So on the tip of his subduing tongue,
All kind of arguments and questions deep,
All replication prompt and reason strong,
For his advantage still did wake and sleep,
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep.
He had the dialect and the different skill,
Catching all passions in his craft of will.
Once I thought that I had really found Willie Hughes in Elizabethan
literature. In a wonderfully graphic account of the last days of the
great Earl of Essex, his chaplain, Thomas Knell, tells us that the night
before the Earl died, ‘he called William Hewes, which was his musician,
to play upon the virginals and to sing. “Play,” said he, “my song, Will
Hewes, and I will sing it to myself.” So he did it most joyfully, not as
the howling swan, which, still looking down, waileth her end, but as a
sweet lark, lifting up his hands and casting up his eyes to his God, with
this mounted the crystal skies, and reached with his unwearied tongue the
top of highest heavens.’ Surely the boy who played on the virginals to
the dying father of Sidney’s Stella was none other but the Will Hews to
whom Shakespeare dedicated the Sonnets, and who he tells us was himself
sweet ‘music to hear.’ Yet Lord Essex died in 1576, when Shakespeare
himself was but twelve years of age. It was impossible that his musician
could have been the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets. Perhaps Shakespeare’s
young friend was the son of the player upon the virginals? It was at
least something to have discovered that Will Hews was an Elizabethan
name. Indeed the name Hews seemed to have been closely connected with
music and the stage. The first English actress was the lovely Margaret
Hews, whom Prince Rupert so madly loved. What more probable than that
between her and Lord Essex’s musician had come the boy-actor of
Shakespeare’s plays? But the proofs, the links—where were they? Alas! I
could not find them. It seemed to me that I was always on the brink of
absolute verification, but that I could never really attain to it.
From Willie Hughes’s life I soon passed to thoughts of his death. I used
to wonder what had been his end.
Perhaps he had been one of those English actors who in 1604 went across
sea to Germany and played before the great Duke Henry Julius of
Brunswick, himself a dramatist of no mean order, and at the Court of that
strange Elector of Brandenburg, who was so enamoured of beauty that he
was said to have bought for his weight in amber the young son of a
travelling Greek merchant, and to have given pageants in honour of his
slave all through that dreadful famine year of 1606–7, when the people
died of hunger in the very streets of the town, and for the space of
seven months there was no rain. We know at any rate that _Romeo and
Juliet_ was brought out at Dresden in 1613, along with _Hamlet_ and _King
Lear_, and it was surely to none other than Willie Hughes that in 1615
the death-mask of Shakespeare was brought by the hand of one of the suite
of the English ambassador, pale token of the passing away of the great
poet who had so dearly loved him. Indeed there would have been something
peculiarly fitting in the idea that the boy-actor, whose beauty had been
so vital an element in the realism and romance of Shakespeare’s art,
should have been the first to have brought to Germany the seed of the new
culture, and was in his way the precursor of that _Aufklärung_ or
Illumination of the eighteenth century, that splendid movement which,
though begun by Lessing and Herder, and brought to its full and perfect
issue by Goethe, was in no small part helped on by another
actor—Friedrich Schroeder—who awoke the popular consciousness, and by
means of the feigned passions and mimetic methods of the stage showed the
intimate, the vital, connection between life and literature. If this was
so—and there was certainly no evidence against it—it was not improbable
that Willie Hughes was one of those English comedians (_mimæ quidam ex
Britannia_, as the old chronicle calls them), who were slain at Nuremberg
in a sudden uprising of the people, and were secretly buried in a little
vineyard outside the city by some young men ‘who had found pleasure in
their performances, and of whom some had sought to be instructed in the
mysteries of the new art.’ Certainly no more fitting place could there
be for him to whom Shakespeare said, ‘thou art all my art,’ than this
little vineyard outside the city walls. For was it not from the sorrows
of Dionysos that Tragedy sprang? Was not the light laughter of Comedy,
with its careless merriment and quick replies, first heard on the lips of
the Sicilian vine-dressers? Nay, did not the purple and red stain of the
wine-froth on face and limbs give the first suggestion of the charm and
fascination of disguise—the desire for self-concealment, the sense of the
value of objectivity thus showing itself in the rude beginnings of the
art? At any rate, wherever he lay—whether in the little vineyard at the
gate of the Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar
and bustle of our great city—no gorgeous monument marked his
resting-place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet’s verse,
his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with
others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The
ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and
on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young
Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.
CHAPTER III
AFTER three weeks had elapsed, I determined to make a strong appeal to
Erskine to do justice to the memory of Cyril Graham, and to give to the
world his marvellous interpretation of the Sonnets—the only
interpretation that thoroughly explained the problem. I have not any
copy of my letter, I regret to say, nor have I been able to lay my hand
upon the original; but I remember that I went over the whole ground, and
covered sheets of paper with passionate reiteration of the arguments and
proofs that my study had suggested to me. It seemed to me that I was not
merely restoring Cyril Graham to his proper place in literary history,
but rescuing the honour of Shakespeare himself from the tedious memory of
a commonplace intrigue. I put into the letter all my enthusiasm. I put
into the letter all my faith.
No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over
me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the
Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me,
as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject.
What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say. Perhaps, by
finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted the passion
itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their
positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a
theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence.
Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having
burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However
it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt
that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the
boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more
anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.
As I had said some very unjust and bitter things to Erskine in my letter,
I determined to go and see him at once, and to make my apologies to him
for my behaviour. Accordingly, the next morning I drove down to Birdcage
Walk, and found Erskine sitting in his library, with the forged picture
of Willie Hughes in front of him.
‘My dear Erskine!’ I cried, ‘I have come to apologise to you.’
‘To apologise to me?’ he said. ‘What for?’
‘For my letter,’ I answered.
‘You have nothing to regret in your letter,’ he said. ‘On the contrary,
you have done me the greatest service in your power. You have shown me
that Cyril Graham’s theory is perfectly sound.’
‘You don’t mean to say that you believe in Willie Hughes?’ I exclaimed.
‘Why not?’ he rejoined. ‘You have proved the thing to me. Do you think
I cannot estimate the value of evidence?’
‘But there is no evidence at all,’ I groaned, sinking into a chair.
‘When I wrote to you I was under the influence of a perfectly silly
enthusiasm. I had been touched by the story of Cyril Graham’s death,
fascinated by his romantic theory, enthralled by the wonder and novelty
of the whole idea. I see now that the theory is based on a delusion.
The only evidence for the existence of Willie Hughes is that picture in
front of you, and the picture is a forgery. Don’t be carried away by
mere sentiment in this matter. Whatever romance may have to say about
the Willie Hughes theory, reason is dead against it.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Erskine, looking at me in amazement.
‘Why, you yourself have convinced me by your letter that Willie Hughes is
an absolute reality. Why have you changed your mind? Or is all that you
have been saying to me merely a joke?’
‘I cannot explain it to you,’ I rejoined, ‘but I see now that there is
really nothing to be said in favour of Cyril Graham’s interpretation.
The Sonnets are addressed to Lord Pembroke. For heaven’s sake don’t
waste your time in a foolish attempt to discover a young Elizabethan
actor who never existed, and to make a phantom puppet the centre of the
great cycle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.’
‘I see that you don’t understand the theory,’ he replied.
‘My dear Erskine,’ I cried, ‘not understand it! Why, I feel as if I had
invented it. Surely my letter shows you that I not merely went into the
whole matter, but that I contributed proofs of every kind. The one flaw
in the theory is that it presupposes the existence of the person whose
existence is the subject of dispute. If we grant that there was in
Shakespeare’s company a young actor of the name of Willie Hughes, it is
not difficult to make him the object of the Sonnets. But as we know that
there was no actor of this name in the company of the Globe Theatre, it
is idle to pursue the investigation further.’
‘But that is exactly what we don’t know,’ said Erskine. ‘It is quite
true that his name does not occur in the list given in the first folio;
but, as Cyril pointed out, that is rather a proof in favour of the
existence of Willie Hughes than against it, if we remember his
treacherous desertion of Shakespeare for a rival dramatist.’
We argued the matter over for hours, but nothing that I could say could
make Erskine surrender his faith in Cyril Graham’s interpretation. He
told me that he intended to devote his life to proving the theory, and
that he was determined to do justice to Cyril Graham’s memory. I
entreated him, laughed at him, begged of him, but it was of no use.
Finally we parted, not exactly in anger, but certainly with a shadow
between us. He thought me shallow, I thought him foolish. When I called
on him again his servant told me that he had gone to Germany.
Two years afterwards, as I was going into my club, the hall-porter handed
me a letter with a foreign postmark. It was from Erskine, and written at
the Hôtel d’Angleterre, Cannes. When I had read it I was filled with
horror, though I did not quite believe that he would be so mad as to
carry his resolve into execution. The gist of the letter was that he had
tried in every way to verify the Willie Hughes theory, and had failed,
and that as Cyril Graham had given his life for this theory, he himself
had determined to give his own life also to the same cause. The
concluding words of the letter were these: ‘I still believe in Willie
Hughes; and by the time you receive this, I shall have died by my own
hand for Willie Hughes’s sake: for his sake, and for the sake of Cyril
Graham, whom I drove to his death by my shallow scepticism and ignorant
lack of faith. The truth was once revealed to you, and you rejected it.
It comes to you now stained with the blood of two lives,—do not turn away
from it.’
It was a horrible moment. I felt sick with misery, and yet I could not
believe it. To die for one’s theological beliefs is the worst use a man
can make of his life, but to die for a literary theory! It seemed
impossible.
I looked at the date. The letter was a week old. Some unfortunate
chance had prevented my going to the club for several days, or I might
have got it in time to save him. Perhaps it was not too late. I drove
off to my rooms, packed up my things, and started by the night-mail from
Charing Cross. The journey was intolerable. I thought I would never
arrive. As soon as I did I drove to the Hôtel l’Angleterre. They told
me that Erskine had been buried two days before in the English cemetery.
There was something horribly grotesque about the whole tragedy. I said
all kinds of wild things, and the people in the hall looked curiously at
me.
Suddenly Lady Erskine, in deep mourning, passed across the vestibule.
When she saw me she came up to me, murmured something about her poor son,
and burst into tears. I led her into her sitting-room. An elderly
gentleman was there waiting for her. It was the English doctor.
We talked a great deal about Erskine, but I said nothing about his motive
for committing suicide. It was evident that he had not told his mother
anything about the reason that had driven him to so fatal, so mad an act.
Finally Lady Erskine rose and said, George left you something as a
memento. It was a thing he prized very much. I will get it for you.
As soon as she had left the room I turned to the doctor and said, ‘What a
dreadful shock it must have been to Lady Erskine! I wonder that she
bears it as well as she does.’
‘Oh, she knew for months past that it was coming,’ he answered.
‘Knew it for months past!’ I cried. ‘But why didn’t she stop him? Why
didn’t she have him watched? He must have been mad.’
The doctor stared at me. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
‘Well,’ I cried, ‘if a mother knows that her son is going to commit
suicide—’
‘Suicide!’ he answered. ‘Poor Erskine did not commit suicide. He died
of consumption. He came here to die. The moment I saw him I knew that
there was no hope. One lung was almost gone, and the other was very much
affected. Three days before he died he asked me was there any hope. I
told him frankly that there was none, and that he had only a few days to
live. He wrote some letters, and was quite resigned, retaining his
senses to the last.’
At that moment Lady Erskine entered the room with the fatal picture of
Willie Hughes in her hand. ‘When George was dying he begged me to give
you this,’ she said. As I took it from her, her tears fell on my hand.
The picture hangs now in my library, where it is very much admired by my
artistic friends. They have decided that it is not a Clouet, but an
Oudry. I have never cared to tell them its true history. But sometimes,
when I look at it, I think that there is really a great deal to be said
for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
FOOTNOTES
{1} Sonnet xx. 2.
{2} Sonnet xxvi. 1.
{3} Sonnet cxxvi. 9.
{4} Sonnet cix. 14.
{5} Sonnet i. 10.
{6} Sonnet ii. 3.
{7} Sonnet viii. 1.
{8} Sonnet xxii. 6.
{9} Sonnet xcv. 1.