"Well, about five years ago, before I had taken my degree, I became
acquainted with a woman whom I will call 'Delia,'--it is near
enough to the name by which she went. She was a few years older
than myself, very beautiful, and I believed her to be what she
described herself--the innocent victim of circumstance and false
appearance, a helpless prey to the vile calumnies of worldlings.
In sober fact, I am afraid that, whatever her life may have been
actually at the time that I knew her--a subject which I have never
cared to investigate--her past had been not only bad enough
irretrievably to fix her position in society, but bad enough to
leave her without an ideal in the world, though still retaining
within her heart the possibilities of a passion which, from the
moment that it came to life, was strong enough to turn her whole
existence into one desperate reckless straining after an object
hopelessly beyond her reach. That was the woman with whom, at the
age of twenty, I fancied myself in love. She wanted to get a
husband, and she thought me--rightly--ass enough to accept the
post. I was very young then even for my years,--a student, an
idealist, with an imagination highly developed, and no knowledge
whatever of the world as it actually is. Anyhow, before I had
known her a month, I had determined to make her my wife. My
parents were abroad at the time, George and Lucy here, so that it
was to Jack that I imparted the news of my resolve. As you may
imagine, he did all that he could to shake it. But I was
immovable. I disbelieved his facts, and despised his contempt from
the standpoint of my own superior morality. This state of things
continued for several weeks, during the greater part of which time
I was at Oxford. I only knew that while I was there, Jack had made
Delia's acquaintance, and was apparently cultivating it
assiduously.
"One day, during the Easter vacation, I got a note from her asking
me to supper at her house. Jack was invited too: we lodged
together while my people were away.
"There is no need to dwell upon that supper. There were two or
three women there of her own sort, or worse, and a dozen men from
among the most profligate in London. The conversation was, I
should think, bad even for that class; and she, the goddess of my
idolatry, outstripped them all by the foul, coarse shamelessness of
her language and behavior. Before the entertainment was half over,
I rose and took my leave, accompanied by Jack and another man,--
Legard was his name,--who I presume was bored. Just as we had
passed through into the anteroom, which lay beyond the one in which
we had been eating, Delia followed us, and laying her hand on
Jack's arm, said that she must speak with him. Legard and I went
into the outer hall, and we had not been there more than a minute
when the door from the anteroom opened, and we heard Delia's voice.
I remember the words well,--that was not the only occasion on which
I was to hear them. 'I will keep the ring as a record of my love,'
she said, 'and understand, that though you may forget, I never
shall.' Jack came through, the door closed, and as we went out I
glanced towards his left hand, and saw, as I expected to see, the
absence of the ring which he usually wore there. It contained a
gem which my mother had picked up in the East, and I knew that he
valued it quite peculiarly. We always called it Jack's talisman.
"A miserable time followed, a time for me of agonizing wonder and
doubt, during which regret for my dead illusion was entirely
swallowed up in the terrible dread of my brother's degradation.
Then came the announcement of his engagement to Lady Sylvia Grey;
and a week later, the very day after I had finally returned to
London from Oxford, I received a summons from Delia to come and see
her. Curiosity, and the haunting fear about Jack, which still hung
round me, induced me to consent to what otherwise would have been
intolerably repellent to me, and I went. I found her in a mad
passion of fury. Jack had refused to see her or to answer her
letters, and she had sent for me, that I might give him her
message,--tell him that he belonged to her and her only, and that
he never should marry another woman. Angry at my interference,
Jack disdained even to repudiate her claims, only sending back a
threat of appealing to the police if she ventured upon any further
annoyance. I wrote as she told me, and she emphasized my silence
on the subject by writing back to me a more definite and explicit
assertion of her rights. Beyond that for some weeks she made no
sign. I have no doubt that she had means of keeping watch upon
both his movements and mine; and during that time, as she
relinquished gradually all hopes of inducing him to abandon his
purpose, she was being driven to her last despairing resolve.
"Later, when all was over, Jack told me the story of that spring
and summer. He told me how, when he found me immovable on the
subject, he had resolved to stop the marriage somehow through Delia
herself. He had made her acquaintance, and sought her society
frequently. She had taken a fancy to him, and he admitted that he
had availed himself of this fact to increase his intimacy with her,
and, as he hoped ultimately, his power over her. But he was not
conscious of ever having varied in his manner towards her of
contemptuous indifference. This contradictory behavior,--his being
constantly near her, yet always beyond her reach,--was probably the
very thing which excited her fancy into passion, the one strong
passion of the poor woman's life. Then came his deliberate demand
that she should by her own act unmask herself in my sight. The
unfortunate woman tried to bargain for some proof of affection in
return, and on this occasion had first openly declared her feelings
towards him. He did not believe her; he refused her terms; but
when as her payment she asked for the ring which was so especially
associated with himself, he agreed to give it to her. Otherwise
hoping, no doubt against hope, dreading above all things a quarrel
and final separation, she submitted unconditionally. And from the
time of that evening, when Legard and I had overheard her parting
words, Jack never saw her again until the last and final
catastrophe.
"It was in July. My parents had returned to England, but had come
straight on here. Jack and I were dining together with Lady Sylvia
at her father's house--her brother, young Grey, making the fourth
at dinner. I had arranged to go to a party with your mother, and I
told the servants that a lady would call for me early in the
evening. The house stood in Park Lane, and after dinner we all
went out on to the broad balcony which opened from the drawing-
room. There was a strong wind blowing that night, and I remember
well the vague, disquieted feeling of unreality that possessed me,--
sweeping through me, as it were, with each gust of wind. Then,
suddenly, a servant stood behind me, saying that the lady had come
for me, and was in the drawing-room. Shocked that my aunt should
have troubled herself to come so far, I turned quickly, stepped
back into the room, and found myself face to face with Delia. She
was fully dressed for the evening, with a long silk opera-cloak
over her shoulders, her face as white as her gown, her splendid
eyes strangely wide open and shining. I don't know what I said or
did; I tried to get her away, but it was too late. The others had
heard us, and appeared at the open window. Jack came forward at
once, speaking rapidly, fiercely; telling her to leave the house at
once; promising desperately that he would see her in his own rooms
on the morrow. Well I remember how her answer rang out,--
"'Neither to-morrow nor another day: I will never leave you again
while I live.'
"At the same instant she drew something swiftly from under her
cloak, there was the sound of a pistol shot and she lay dead at our
feet, her blood splashing upon Jack's shirt and hands as she fell."
Alan paused in his recital. He was trembling from head to foot;
but he kept his eyes turned steadily downwards, and both face and
voice were cold--almost expressionless.
"Of course there was an inquest," he resumed, "which, as usual,
exercised its very ill-defined powers in inquiring into all
possible motives for the suicide. Young Grey, who had stepped into
the room just before the shot had been fired, swore to the last
words Delia had uttered; Legard to those he had overheard the night
of that dreadful supper: there were scores of men to bear witness
to the intimate relations which had existed between her and Jack
during the whole of the previous spring. I had to give evidence.
A skillful lawyer had been retained by one of her sisters, and had
been instructed by her on points which no doubt she had originally
learnt from Delia herself. In his hands, I had not only to
corroborate Grey and Legard, and to give full details of that last
interview, but also to swear to the peculiar value which Jack
attached to the talisman ring which he had given Delia; to the
language she had held when I saw her after my return from Oxford;
to her subsequent letter, and Jack's fatal silence on the occasion.
The story by which Jack and I strove to account for the facts was
laughed at as a clumsy invention, and my undisguised reluctance in
giving evidence added greatly to its weight against my brother's
character.
"The jury returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, the
result of desertion by her lover. You may imagine how that verdict
was commented upon by every Radical newspaper in the kingdom, and
for once society more than corroborated the opinions of the press.
The larger public regarded the story as an extreme case of the
innocent victim and the cowardly society villain. It was only
among a comparatively small set that Delia's reputation was known,
and there, in view of Jack's notorious and peculiar intimacy, his
repudiation of all relations with her was received with
contemptuous incredulity. That he should have first entered upon
such relations at the very time when he was already courting Lady
Sylvia was regarded even in those circles as a 'strong order,' and
they looked upon his present attitude with great indignation, as a
cowardly attempt to save his own character by casting upon the dead
woman's memory all the odium of a false accusation. With an entire
absence of logic, too, he was made responsible for the suicide
having taken place in Lady Sylvia's presence. She had broken off
the engagement the day after the catastrophe, and her family, a
clan powerful in the London world, furious at the mud through which
her name had been dragged, did all that they could to intensify the
feeling already existing against Jack.
"Not a voice was raised in his defense. He was advised to leave
the army; he was requested to withdraw from some of his clubs,
turned out of others, avoided by his fast acquaintances, cut by his
respectable ones. It was enough to kill a weaker man.
"He showed no resentment at the measure thus dealt out to him.
Indeed, at the first, except for Sylvia's desertion of him, he
seemed dully indifferent to it all. It was as if his soul had been
stunned, from the moment that that wretched woman's blood had
splashed upon his fingers, and her dead eyes had looked up into his
own.
"But it was not long before he realized the full extent of the
social damnation which had been inflicted upon him, and he then
resolved to leave the country and go to America. The night before
he started he came down here to take leave. I was here looking
after my parents--George, whose mind was almost unhinged by the
family disgrace, having gone abroad with his wife. My mother at
the first news of what had happened had taken to her bed, never to
leave it again; and thus it was in my presence alone, up there in
my father's little study, that Jack gave him that night the whole
story. He told it quietly enough; but when he had finished, with a
sudden outburst of feeling he turned upon me. It was I who had
been the cause of it all. My insensate folly had induced him to
make the unhappy woman's acquaintance, to allow and even encourage
her fatal love, to commit all the blunders and sins which had
brought about her miserable ending and his final overthrow. It was
by means of me that she had obtained access to him on that dreadful
night; my evidence which most utterly damned him in public opinion;
through me he had lost his reputation, his friends, his career, his
country, the woman he loved, his hopes for the future; through me,
above all, that the burden of that horrible death would lie for
ever on his soul. He was lashing himself to fury with his own
words as he spoke; and I stood leaning against the wall opposite to
him, cold, dumb, unresisting, when suddenly my father interrupted.
I think that both Jack and I had forgotten his presence; but at the
sound of his voice, changed from what we had ever heard it, we
turned to him, and I then for the first time saw in his face the
death-look which never afterwards quitted it.
"'Stop, Jack,' he said; 'Alan is not to blame; and if it had not
been in this way, it would have been in some other. I only am
guilty, who brought you both into existence with my own hell-
stained blood in your veins. If you wish to curse anyone, curse
your family, your name, me if you will, and may God forgive me that
you were ever born into the world!'"
Alan stopped with a shudder, and then continued, dully, "It was
when I heard those words, the most terrible that a father could
have uttered, that I first understood all that that old sixteenth-
century tale might mean to me and mine,--I have realized it vividly
enough since. Early the next morning, when the dawn was just
breaking, Jack came to the door of my room to bid me good-by. All
his passion was gone. His looks and tones seemed part and parcel
of the dim gray morning light. He freely withdrew all the charges
he had made against me the night before; forgave me all the share
that I had had in his misfortunes; and then begged that I would
never come near him, or let him hear from me again. 'The curse is
heavy upon us both,' he said, 'and it is the only favor which you
can do me.' I have never seen him since."
"But you have heard of him!" I exclaimed; "what has become of him?"
Alan raised himself to a sitting posture. "The last that I heard,"
he said, with a catch in his voice, "was that in his misery and
hopelessness he was taking to drink. George writes to him, and
does what he can; but I--I dare not say a word, for fear it should
turn to poison on my lips,--I dare not lift a hand to help him, for
fear it should have power to strike him to the ground. The worst
may be yet to come; I am still living, still living: there are
depths of shame to which he has not sunk. And oh, Evie, Evie, he
is my own, my best-loved brother!"
All his composure was gone now. His voice rose to a kind of wail
with the last words, and folding his arms on his raised knee, he
let his head fall upon them, while his figure quivered with
scarcely restrained emotion. There was a silence for some moments
while he sat thus, I looking on in wretched helplessness beside
him. Then he raised his head, and, without looking round at me,
went on in a low tone: "And what is in the future? I pray that
death instead of shame may be the portion of the next generation,
and I look at George's boys only to wonder which of them is the
happy one who shall some day lie dead at his brother's feet. Are
you surprised at my resolution never to marry? The fatal prophecy
is rich in its fulfillment; none of our name and blood are safe;
and the day might come when I too should have to call upon my
children to curse me for their birth,--should have to watch while
the burden which I could no longer bear alone pressed the life from
their mother's heart."
Through the tragedy of this speech I was conscious of a faint
suggestion of comfort, a far-off glimmer, as of unseen home-lights
on a midnight sky. I was in no mood then to understand, or to seek
to understand, what it was; but I know now that his words had
removed the weight of helpless banishment from my spirit--that his
heart, speaking through them to my own, had made me for life the
sharer of his grief.