Lionel was not listening to his companion any longer; his mind had
wandered from the East-End to the present scene, and gradually losing
sight of his surroundings, his eyes lingered rapturously on a feminine
form of unsurpassed beauty. Her elbow resting on an Etruscan vase, she
leaned her soft cheek on the palm of her hand and looked up inquiringly
at a portrait by Lely, representing the ancestress of one of our
fashionable women. Lionel had never seen such grace, such simplicity—the
word innocence fluttered on his lips, but soon vanished; he had rarely
connected that quality with any of the women of his world. But, innocent
or not, the form before him was faultless; the setting of the head on
the shoulders perfect, the Grecian features radiantly pure. Who could
she be? No matter, she was beauty, womanhood, that was sufficient, and
it filled his heart with beatitude to gaze on such perfection without
having to read the label attached to it. Dick was right, no guide could
enlighten him as to what were his feelings. He had never seen her
before; no doubt, she was a foreigner landed here on the day of the
storm. Greece alone could have given birth to such a symmetric form and
such harmony of movements. He moved away from his porphyry column as in
a trance, leaving Danford to converse with a celebrity who wanted to
know who someone else was; on his approaching the unknown beauty, his
eyes lingered more intently on her exquisite face, and he contemplated
her lovely hazel eyes shaded by long dark eyelashes. It was the only
thing a man could contemplate now—a woman’s face; for, however
demoralised a man might be, he defied him from ever behaving
indelicately to a woman in the state of nature. As he came close to her,
she dropped her eyelids and levelled her gaze to his; they looked into
each other’s eyes—and they loved.
“Allow me to lead you to a lounge,—you seem tired.”
“Thank you, I am not tired,” answered a musical voice; and her velvety
eyes drank deep at the fountain of love that flowed from his eyes. “I
was far away, transported into the world evoked by this picture. I tried
to divine the thoughts of this notorious beauty at the Stuarts’ Court,
and the vision became so vividly real, that I could see her take up her
blue scarf and raise it in front of her face as she blushed in looking
at my nakedness.”
“I should have thought the model who sat for this portrait could have
easily beheld our mythological world without having to lift her scarf to
hide her confusion. I do not think she was renowned for the purity of
her life, nor for the nicety of her language.”
“The more reason for her inability to look nature in the face. Nature is
too amazing to those trained to artifice. The glory of a sunset would be
blinding to those who never had seen its reflection but on houses or
pavements.”
How adorably sensitive was her mouth; he remembered having seen, in
Florence, expressions like hers. The divine Urbinite had excelled in
delineating these touching faces.
“It is getting late. If you are thinking of leaving, will you allow me
to escort you?” She laid her hand on his, and without a word they left
the room.
One by one the guests returned to the secret bower to say a courteous
adieu to the Marquise—a thing which formerly had not been frequently
witnessed—it had been so irritating to see that perpetual grin on her
lips, that incessant fanning, and, above all, to watch her sliding scale
of good-byes, which had become alarmingly tedious.
The Adam and Eve of “London regained” slowly descended the marble
staircase, passed through the hall, out of the front door, and found
themselves on the pavement as unconcerned about their surroundings as if
they had dropped straight from a planet. They gazed at each other, and
in that luminous orb of the visual organ, they discovered the only world
for which it was worth living or dying.
“I do not know who you are, and I do not desire to know, until you have
answered my questions. This I know, that you love me; my love is too
great not to be echoed by yours. What we feel for one another is above
all worldly considerations, what we can give each other is beyond what
the world can give or take away. Will you accept the life devotion of a
man who has never loved until this day? I blush at what I used to call
love—and shall never profane your ears with a recital of what men call
their conquests.”
“I accept the gift of your heart and of your life, and I give you mine
in exchange. I have never loved either.” She lifted her pure face to
his; a cloud rushed across the sky, leaving the pale moon to illumine
the young couple walking in silence in their dreamland. After a long
pause Lionel spoke.
“Where shall I escort you? Where is your home?”
“Will you take me to Hertford Street, No. 110?”
“Gwendolen!”
“Lionel!”
And both looked down, for the first time suffused with shame at
discovering their identity. Confusion overwhelmed him, not at their
present state, but at the sudden thought of their past lives of
indelicacy. He was the first to break the silence, for man, being
essentially practical, must at once know more about what he finds out;
and an Englishman above all must necessarily investigate his
newly-conquered dominion. Perhaps this is the reason for their being
such good colonists; they do not gaze long at the stars and sunsets of a
new Continent, but very promptly turn to business, and to what they can
make out of their discovery.
“What have you been doing all these last weeks, Gwen?”
She told him what her occupations had been; they were limited, it was
true, but they had helped to open her eyes on a few of life’s problems.
“Have you been shut up in your room ever since the storm?”
“Nearly, with the exception of the day of the first exodus, when I felt
I must either have some air, or die. I have been out once or twice
since, at unearthly hours of the morning; but this is the first party I
have been at—I could not risk meeting you. I had pictured our meeting
very differently from what it has been; I dreaded it, and little
imagined this would be the end of it.”
“No, sweetheart,” interrupted her lover, “you mean, the beginning of our
life. Tell me all you did at home.”
“I have studied more, my dear Lionel, in these last weeks than in all my
life before, including my school days. My books have been the sun rising
and setting, the stars and the birds’ twitterings; I have thought of
poetry, philosophy, and history—”
“Poor Gwen, how dull it must have been! Fancy you studying the works of
nature, and imagining that you are a philosopher!”
“You are cruel, Lionel.”
“Forgive me, Gwen. I am more than cruel, I am unjust, for I am the last
who ought to scoff or reprove. I stand here as a repentant sinner, only
begging to kiss your hand and to be allowed to gaze on your beauty.”
“Lionel, believe me, I thought a great deal.”
“Could you not telephone to your friends?”
“Telephone! What for, and to whom? When I think of the bundle of wires I
used to despatch, and of the trayful of cards and notes the footman was
wont to hand to me; each one in view of some Ranelagh meeting, a box for
a first night, a Saturday to Monday invitation, and many more important
nothings which formed the _epopée_ of my London life! But who would have
cared to know of my inner thoughts, of my heart’s desires? We shall have
to learn a new language before we can write again, Lionel; for the
phraseology that suited the shams of our past life would be
inappropriate in our Paradise regained.”
“Did you see your father?”
“Ah! Lionel, he is the very last one I could have set eyes on! I have
not seen him since the Islington Tournament. How long ago that seems. I
heard a fortnight ago, through my guide, Nettie Collins, that he only
came home on the day of the first exodus!”
“Perhaps you have seen him, Gwen, but not known him again. Guides are no
good in these family relationships.”
“I must say candidly that philosophy was too much for me. I can, as yet,
only grasp what touches my heart. We shall talk much, think deeply, you
and I, my dearest Ly.”
“Not that name, dearest! It burns your sweet lips. It was the synthesis
of the false life you and I lived.”
“Then it shall be, Lion. My Lion will you be?”
“Yes, your Lion, my beautiful Una.”
“Tell me; why have you never loved? A man is free, and has every
opportunity to choose; it is not like us women, who are told from
infancy what we are worth and what kind of market the world is.”
“Love did not enter into the programme of my school life, Gwen. Had love
been part of education, I doubt whether our old world would have lasted
as long as it did. It is because love has had no fair play for centuries
that injustice, hypocrisy and tyranny have ruled unmolested. Love may
be, in words, the principle by which all things are ordained, but hatred
is the real password, and we are so accustomed to the clever trickery
that we do not detect the fraud.”
“But was not your father fond of you?”
“He took me to Italy several times during my long vacations. I remember
being taken by him to the Uffizi Gallery and being told to look at the
pictures;—I used to stand transfixed in front of Raphael’s Madonnas.
Then dad would turn up—too soon—with some Italian lady whom he had no
doubt picked up—by appointment—and my dream was over.”
“And your mother, Lion, was she pleased when you came home? You must
have been such a dear boy!”
“Home! Mother! I can hardly articulate the sacred words.”
“Tell me about her; for of course I have only heard what the world had
to say of her, of her reckless life and tragic death in the
hunting-field; but I want you to tell me, for between us there can never
be any secret, nor any subterfuge.”
“Tell you, Gwen; there is so little to tell. The lives of fashionable
women are not so full of adventures as the lower classes seem to think.
It is not for the things they do they should be blamed, but for all they
do not do. There are a great many legends about Society women that are,
in fact, but twaddly prose; there is a great deal of fuss all round a
fashionable beauty, and very little worth fussing about. Spite and
vanity are at the root of many rotten homes. I know my home was an arid
desert, because my father never forgave my mother for having brought him
to the altar; and she vented her spite on him by compromising herself
with every man available or unavailable. The more my father showed his
contempt to her, the more she threw herself into a vortex of frivolity.
Her vanity could only equal her coldness. Her curse was to be incapable
of any love. She never for one instant loved the man she inveigled into
matrimony; she never cared a jot for her children, and she certainly had
no passion, however ephemeral it might have been, for any of the men
with whom she compromised herself. In this lies the ghastliness of such
lives. Were there more _bona-fide_ passion, there would be less cruelty
and less levity.”
“Go on, Lionel.”
“I never once saw my mother lean over the cot of her child; she rarely
entered the nursery, and we only came down at stated hours to be looked
at by visitors. These ordeals were painful. To appear motherly, my
mother occasionally laid her hand on my curly head. Ah! those fingers
scintillating with diamonds and precious stones; those hard bracelets
penetrating into my delicate skin! How I loathed that hand on my head—it
was such a hard hand.”
“Poor Lionel, but you do not say how your little sister died.”
“The least said about it the better. There are noble griefs, and there
are ugly sorrows: mine was of the latter order. When Cicely died, my
mother was at a State Ball. She knew the child was hopelessly ill before
she went, but a dress had arrived that morning from Paris, and a State
Ball is a duty; in fact, all social functions are duties which come
before mere human feelings. After so many years, I can still see that
gorgeous apparition as she came into the room to speak to the hospital
nurse. I did not understand the meaning of it all, but felt awed by the
soft murmurs of the nurse, the dim light, and the haughty manner of my
mother. Next day the nursery was closed; I was kept in the room of the
head nurse to play with my toys, and told severely not to make a noise.
I asked for Cicely. The under-housemaid, a good sort of a country girl,
took me by the hand and led me into the room where little Cicely was
laid out. One bunch of narcissus was lying on her feet; they were the
nurse’s last tribute to her little dead patient. And that was all. I
realised nothing, I was seven years old. The days that followed were
miserable; I missed my playmate and was daily brought down to my
mother’s boudoir, to be interviewed by simpering old dowagers who gave
me a cold kiss, and waggish young men who shook hands with me and called
me “old fellow,” as if I had already entered some crack regiment, or won
the Derby. My mother, in her diaphanous black chiffon, distributed cups
of tea right and left, while she related in short sentences the end of
little Cicely and the brilliancy of the State Ball.”
“When I think, Lionel, that you and I were on the eve of repeating that
same lamentable story—”
“Enough of this horrid past, my beautiful Una; let us forget that it
ever existed, and let us think of the present, of you, and of our
future.”
They had reached Hyde Park Corner. Gwendolen gave a circuitous glance on
the scene that surrounded them, and remarked that the Duke of
Wellington’s statue had disappeared.
“Where has the statue gone to, Lion?”
“Oh! Did you not know that it had been removed yesterday? You will never
any more see Nelson on his column, Gordon holding his Bible, Napier with
his gilded spurs, nor Canning, Disraeli, and so many others, on their
pedestals—they have all been taken to South Kensington, for the present.
The idea is to build a new hall outside London for all these relics of
the past, where they may be viewed by the very few who are anxious to
study the curios of an old worn-out civilisation. The Committee has come
to the conclusion that our newly-revealed sense of modesty must
inevitably be shocked by these indecorous memorials to our great men;
and it has decided that the education of the masses must at once begin
by the removal of objects more fit for a chamber of horrors than for the
contemplation of pure-minded citizens.”
“But what will they put on the pedestals and columns?”
“I heard the curator of Walsingham House say last evening that he meant
to suggest a new departure in monument erection. Instead of paying a
tribute to the man who, as a soldier, a poet, or a statesman, had but
done his duty during his short visit to this planet, he advised that
monuments should be raised to abstract principles, and enjoined the
Committee to start by replacing the equestrian Duke of Wellington with
the detruncated statue of Victory in the Elgin Marbles collection. Gwen,
we are at your door, and we must part. When shall I see you again,
dearest?”
“To-morrow in the Kensington Gardens, under the shady trees, we shall be
able to talk of all the problems we must solve together.”
“Good-night, my Una. How lovely you are, thus caressed by the soft rays
of the moon. Have I never gazed into a woman’s face before, that I seem
to see your eyes for the first time? I have now discovered the secret of
inward beauty, and wherever you are, however surrounded you may be, I
shall know you, for I have seen your soul. My whole life will be too
short in which to express my rapturous admiration. Forgive me for the
past years of blindness.”
“Lion, it is I who have to beg your forgiveness. I never knew you—I
never knew my own self. Was it our fault after all? It had never been
our lot to meet as two free citizens of the Universe; but, like two
miserable slaves of Society, we were trained to trick each other, and to
play a blasphemous parody of love, while malice all the time was master
of our fettered beings.”
The door of No. 110 opened and closed on the vision of purity. Lionel
walked up Park Lane and soon reached his home; he entered the library,
and once more looked up at his father’s portrait. Was it fancy? But he
thought he saw the face smile superciliously, and heard these cold words
fall from the thin lips: “My poor fellow, beware of sentimentality. As I
told you, I preferred being killed to being bored.”