Maud spent a month with Lady Ramsden--four epoch-making weeks. The note
of change which had been struck in her when she met Violet had expanded
into a harmonious chord. Just as healthy physical surroundings produce
physical health, so intimacy with healthy-minded people produces a
corresponding well-being in the soul. And thus recuperated, she was able
to make the effort she had been unable to make before, and when she
returned to London at the end of July she congratulated herself on the
change that she alone knew of, as much as her friends congratulated her
on the change they could all see.
Parliament was not to rise before the 10th of August, and the Chathams
were to remain in London till then. During that fortnight Maud saw Tom
constantly, often going to see him and May in Bloomsbury, and Tom, with
or without May, more than once coming to see her.
The old _camaraderie_ days of Athens seemed to be renewing themselves.
Tom found Maud stimulating in a way that May could not be, partly
because he loved his wife, partly although he loved her. With May his
responsibility asserted itself; he was always aware of an increasing
anxiety as to what would happen to them all, crouching in his mind,
ready to spring. And he knew--he could not help knowing--that May did
not really understand how essential his art was to him, how inexorable
was his inner need of producing the best he could; how bad, how immoral,
the statuette of the boy with the rifle seemed to him. She had not an
artistic nature, and she had never, except in him, known a man who
served that most exacting of all mistresses, whose service is a passion
to her slaves. For Manvers, as he often said himself, was not like those
poets who sing because they must, but those who sing because they choose
to sing. He was clever, diabolically clever, and he liked to exercise
his intelligence.
With Maud then Tom could both throw off, or at least not be scourged by,
his responsibilities, and also he knew that she understood how terrible
the struggle he might have to go through would be. There was always the
possibility ahead that no one would want to possess any of the shining
gods and goddesses, and if so it was financially impossible for him to
go on producing them.
The three were sitting on the balcony where Manvers and Maud had sat
alone one night only a month or two ago, and, as usual in her presence,
Tom’s Promethean eagle had ceased pecking at him for the time, and had
hopped away out of sight.
May was feeling a little out of it, and a little neglected, for Tom was
talking to Maud in a way he did not talk to her. He was never anything
but kind and considerate to her; but the hurried luncheons which they
ate together in their grilling little flat, were often rather silent
affairs. If the morning’s work had been satisfactory, Tom was only eager
to finish and get to work again; if he had got on badly, the Promethean
eagle always seemed aware of it, and applied its claws and beak to the
tenderest places with the accuracy of experience. But with Maud he was
altogether different, partly, no doubt, for reasons stated above, and
partly also because the most well-mannered and loving husbands do not
trouble themselves to talk, if they are not inclined to talk, in the
privacy of the domestic luncheon-table. Thirdly, as May knew herself,
she was not, as Maud expressed it, a “dialogist,” and it was of
dialogists she and Tom were talking now. Incidentally, they were both
behaving like dialogists.
“I think,” Maud was saying, “that I’m about the best sort of dialogist.
Not only can I talk quite intelligently and agreeably--can’t I,
May?--but I’m a first-rate listener.”
“Good listening is not necessary for a dialogist,” said Tom. “Dialogists
enjoy themselves most when they both talk together, as we used to do at
Athens.”
“Oh, you’re wrong,” said Maud. “Each dialogist must know that the other
is _sympathique_, and the easiest way of conveying that is by listening
well.”
“Yes; but I know you are _sympathique_ to me,” said Tom, “so I don’t
care whether you listen or not. Besides, listening is rather a
despicable quality. I don’t think you’ve got it, you know, so I’m not
being rude.”
May got up.
“Well, we must go,” she said. “I said I’d be back by three to take Mr.
Thomas out.”
“Oh, don’t go yet,” said Maud. “Why, you’ve only just finished lunch!”
“I must; but Tom can stop here.”
May was conscious that it required a little magnanimity to say this, and
at the same time that she threw a pinch of bitterness into her
magnanimity. She wished Maud to know that she knew that it was Tom, not
herself, Maud wanted to talk to; and though she had not spoken with any
idea of her words conveying this, she was not sorry that they might bear
such an interpretation.
But Tom did not dive into such feminine subtleties, though Maud
suspected them.
“I shall stop a bit if I’m not in the way,” he said. “I meant to take a
holiday this afternoon, and I shall take it here.”
Maud stood drumming with her fingers on the balustrade for a moment or
two after May had gone. This was the first time she had been alone with
Tom since her stay in Norfolk, and she revelled in her sense of
security, for she felt all the old _camaraderie_ feeling, and no touch
of any more disturbing results from the companionship, and it was with
the air and the words of a comrade that she spoke.
“I think you ought to have gone with May,” she said. “I can say that to
you, for you know how glad I am personally that you stayed.”
Tom looked up.
“Why?”
“Because she wanted you to go. I am sure of that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But I do,” said Maud. “Don’t be banal, and say you ought to know
because you are her husband. That’s no argument. You are a man, and it
is impossible for you to understand a woman as a woman can.”
“But it’s unreasonable.”
“That, again, is no argument. Oh, good heavens, Tom, if we were all
reasonable, what a simple world it would be! And how dull!”
“I’m not sure I don’t prefer dulness to excitement,” said Tom. “Wait
till you’ve had a fright, and then see how you appreciate
uneventfulness.”
“Ah, but dulness is not a synonym for content,” said Maud, speaking from
her new experiences. “It is a great mistake to suppose that.”
Tom flicked off the end of his cigarette ash. For the last few weeks he
had deliberately stifled certain thoughts, but with Maud there was no
need to stifle them.
“I am not sure,” he said. “Of course one aims at content--one aims at
nothing else. But one aims at it, I think, because one knows it is
unattainable. There is no such thing as content for people who are
alive--you know what I mean by alive. I think we have talked about it
before. For human beings to be content is to be limited.”
“Yes, and to be human is to be limited. I am talking like a maiden aunt,
I know.”
Tom looked up smiling.
“You have the distinction of having invented the least applicable
definition possible of yourself. What’s the opposite to maiden aunt?
Married niece, I suppose. There is your label.”
“But I am not married.”
“No; but you unite qualities which are rarely united. You are
experienced and you are fresh. How do you do it?”
“I might much more reasonably ask you that.”
“Not at all. At present I feel like a _blasé_ baby.”
“You?”
Tom suddenly became overwhelmingly conscious of all he had stifled so
long. His anxieties over petty money matters, the sordidness of the life
in the little flat in Bloomsbury--all these were trifles; but there were
other things which were not trifles. He and May loved each other--that
he believed; but apart from their love to each other their passions lay
as far sundered as the two poles. Each was invisible and
incomprehensible to the other.
“It is this,” he said. “I have felt and feel a passion for something
which I shall, I am afraid, have to abandon. I am telling you things I
have told to no one, hardly to myself. But, as you know, art is a
passion to me. There is one art, so I think, and I am trying to realize
it. But I have to face the probability that it will not be
appreciated--already I call it a probability--and if so, I shall have to
abandon it because I have other ties, and the need for bread and butter
rightly outweighs all else. Not that I am less enthusiastic; but one can
neither live nor triumph by enthusiasm. There are claims which outweigh
all enthusiasms or artistic convictions.”
“Oh, but the two could not actually come in conflict,” said Maud. “It is
absurd to suppose that you will have to abandon your ideas of art at the
very outset because they are not marketable. Besides, most purchasers
are Philistines.”
“That is exactly what I fear,” said Tom. “Of course I don’t say for a
moment that I can produce good things, but I have an idea of beauty, and
I must work for that as long as I can. Perhaps great encouragement from
any one would mend my case, but the world regards me with disconcerting
indifference. Manvers thinks me a delver after uninteresting survivals.
He may be right, but again I may be. That the majority of purchasers
think Manvers right is of course indisputable.”
“But all this need not make you _blasé_,” said Maud.
Tom was silent. What he hungered for was active, sincere sympathy from
May, but that was not to be had. She seemed to regard the possible
abandonment of his practice of art as she would regard any other change
of employment, as if, for instance, Tom was a butcher and found it
necessary to become a baker. He had, as he acknowledged to himself,
taken an impossible view of all she might be to him. He was in love with
her still, as much as, or even more than when they married, but he had
realized that she did not and could not sympathize fully with his aims.
At first it had seemed as if there was nothing she could not do for him,
as if they two were wholly and inevitably one. But, without loving her
the less, he had learned that it was not so. She had one passion, he
another, and they had to support their passions singly. But the most
rudimentary code of loyalty forbade his saying anything of the kind to
Maud.
“No; you are right,” he said. “I have a great many illusions left, and
one can’t be _blasé_ if one has illusions. Of course I still have the
illusion that the Demeter is going to be a masterpiece. But the
necessity of wondering whether the masterpiece is marketable clouds the
illusion a little.”
“Oh, you are certainly not _blasé_,” said Maud, with conviction. “How
can a man married to a woman he loves, working at what he loves, not
only for its sake but to supply her actual needs, be _blasé_. You ought
to keep young for ever.”
“I am a quarter of a century old,” said Tom, “and I should like to live
till a hundred. It’s a good thing to be alive. Do you know that line of
Whitman’s?--I can’t quote it exactly--‘Let us take hands and help each
other to-day, because we are alive together.’”
Maud’s eye kindled.
“I like great big common ideas like that,” she said. “Mr. Manvers would
think it was a sign of approaching _bourgeoisie_ or old age. After all
we are alive, and who is to help us except--except each other?” she
added, with a fine superiority to grammar, and holding out her hand to
Tom.
Tom smiled, and the dimples came. Just now it struck Maud that he was so
like his cousin, instead of the other way about.
“I believe you understand me,” he said. “And to understand any one is
the greatest benefit you can do him!”
Lady Chatham returned before long from an unnecessary call, undertaken
chiefly because the carriage had to go that way, and it was the most
convenient thing in the world. She urged Tom to stop for tea, and it was
consequently nearly six when he left the house.
His way lay across the park from the Albert Gate to the Marble Arch, and
he loitered, for Maud had replenished his serenity, and when we are
serene we are not in a hurry. It was a hot afternoon, and by the time he
got to the Serpentine the banks were crowded with bathers. The grass
underneath the big elm trees on the side of the Row was covered with
heaps of clothes, and multitudes of boys and young men were standing
about on the bank, or swimming. The soft persuasive colour of an English
evening was there, and the warm languor of the south, and Tom stood
watching them for some time, feeling rather as if a gallery of antique
statues had come to life. Some of the bathers were very well made, one
particularly, a boy of about eighteen, who was standing on the bank
resting on his foremost foot, the other just touching the ground with
the toes, his hands clasped behind his head. He was long in the leg,
short and slight in the body, and his hair curled crisply on his
forehead as in a Greek bronze. Tom told himself that he was Lysippian,
and went on his way thinking what a fine subject for a statue Isaac
would make--Isaac waiting with the faggots of wood on his shoulder,
standing gracefully, unthinkingly, like the boy he had just seen, not
knowing who the victim should be.
May meanwhile had taken Mr. Thomas out for his airing, had had tea
alone, and was feeling a little ill-used. Maud had been quite right.
Tom, she thought, ought to have come away with her. Why? Well, for no
reason except the very important one that he wanted to stop. Then it
occurred to her that a candid enemy might say she was in danger of
becoming jealous of Maud, and the thought of that made her quite angry.
But no one had suggested it except herself.
In Tom’s mind the vision of Isaac was supplanted by other thoughts. He
wondered whether he had said too much, whether by any chance Maud could
guess his trouble, for he knew she was skilful at reading between the
lines, and on his way down Oxford Street he determined to write her a
line in order to counteract any such undesirable possibility.
May was not in the drawing-room when he got in, and taking up a
postcard--for there was nothing private in what he meant to say--he
wrote: “I am not _blasé_ at all. Don’t think I am.”
He directed it, and leaving it with two or three others for the post,
went to see if May was in yet. He found her with Mr. Thomas, who was a
little fractious, and who, on Tom’s entrance, began yelling in a way
that shouted volumes for his lungs and larynx. Tom bore it for a minute
or two, but as it did not subside he shouted out to May across the
tumult--
“I’ve only just come in, and if I stop here I shall be deafened. I shall
be in the studio till dinner.”
Mr. Thomas condescended to go to sleep after a quarter of an hour or so,
and May went to the drawing-room. Tom’s post-card was lying address
downwards, and not thinking what she was doing she read it. It was quite
natural and innocent to see to whom he was writing, but when she saw the
address she felt a little more ill-used than before.
About a week after this, Maud Wrexham came to see them in Bloomsbury.
May was out, and Tom was in despair because the breezy model had taken
it into her head to demand a higher wage for standing, and Tom could not
afford either to pay her more, or to part with her. He had engaged her
till the end of the week at the higher rate, but he knew he could not
continue to do so indefinitely. He was walking up and down the studio
when Maud was sloppily announced by the slip-shod maid--wondering what
on earth was to be done.
“May not here,” she said, “and you be-thunder-clouded! What’s the
matter?”
Tom related the woes of the afternoon, and commented bitterly on the
rapacity of the human race.
“I really don’t know what to do,” he said. “I can’t possibly keep her on
at this rate. It’s hard enough as it is.”
Maud flushed suddenly, and seemed to have something to say.
“We are old friends,” she began at length, “and I don’t think you will
be offended at what I am going to say. Will you do me a favour? Will you
let me lend you some money?”
Tom stopped suddenly in his walk.
“How could I be offended?” he asked. “It is awfully kind of you. For
myself I should say ‘Yes’ at once. Why not? But there is May.”
Maud was silent a moment. A vague impatience came over her, for she had
understood rather more than Tom had meant her to understand a week ago.
“Why should she know?” she asked at length. “It is a matter between you
and me. I know some people would refuse such a thing at once. It is such
a comfort that you are sensible. I have too much money, you have too
little. There can be no reason why I should not lend you some.”
Despite herself she felt a great anxiety that Tom should acquiesce. The
thing was of no importance, but she could not help longing that Tom
should take her offer, and not let May know. The feeling in her mind
was too undefined to lend itself to analysis, but she was conscious of
desiring this in some subtle manner beyond her control.
But Tom answered her at once.
“No, I must tell May. It would be out of the question not to tell her.
You see that surely. But I thank you again for your offer. I will tell
her to-night. Perhaps she will not object; on the other hand, I am
afraid she may. I have no such feelings about it. Of course we can go on
for a month or so, but what is to happen then? If I could get Demeter
finished, and the clay sketch of the other done, I shall have done my
best, and if no one buys them----”
Maud looked up inquiringly.
“God knows what next,” said Tom. “If May and the baby keep well I can’t
bring myself to feel desperate. But if anything demanding expense
happens to either of them I don’t know what we shall do.”
“You’re fussed and worried this afternoon,” said Maud, sympathetically.
“It’s this bother about the model, and the heat, and so on. This room is
awfully hot. Why don’t you have a new blind up?”
Tom laughed rather bitterly.
“New blinds!” he said. “I’m thankful we’ve got some old ones. Thank God
May doesn’t know about it all, how near we are to actual want! But I lie
awake at night wondering if I ought to tell her. I am worried, I confess
it; and I thought I was so sure of myself. I aim at what I believe to be
best. I would sooner have produced that”--and he pointed to the
Demeter--“than all Manvers’ things, for which he gets what he asks. It
will be finished next week, and two or three dealers are coming here to
look at it. They bought those miserable statuettes of mine readily
enough.”
“Of course you can’t make any more of those,” said Maud. “I understand
that.”
Tom flushed with pleasure.
“I believe you do,” he said, “though I don’t think any one else does.
Manvers and Wallingthorpe think it is half out of sheer perversity that
I make what they call heathen goddesses. But they are wrong. I do it
because I must. I may be quite wrong about myself, but I believe I am an
artist. If I didn’t think that I should have taken to the statuettes
again the moment we lost all our money. They might as well tell me to
make plush brackets--which I could probably do tolerably well. If I am
not an artist, of course I am wasting my time when I might be earning
money, but I can’t sterilize that possibility just yet. When you have a
passion for a thing, it is not easy to give it all up because you have
no bank-notes.”
“It’s hard,” said Maud.
“I cannot serve two masters,” continued Tom, earnestly. “I cannot use
the gifts I believe I may possess in any other way than the way I
believe to be best. If the worst comes to the worst, if I cannot get my
living by--oh, it’s impossible, impossible!” he cried.
Before Maud had time to reply the door opened, and May came in. She,
too, saw by Tom’s face that something had happened.
“Why, what’s the matter, Tom?” she asked quickly.
“Nothing, dear,” said he, getting up and recovering himself with an
effort. “I have had a row with a model, and she says she won’t sit for
me any more at the present terms; and so we parted. May, give us some
tea, dear, will you? I want tea badly, and so does Miss Wrexham.”
May looked a little vexed; she felt she had not been told all. She shook
hands with Maud, and remarked, a little curtly, that she did not know
the Chathams were still in London.
“Only a few days more,” said Maud. “How splendidly the Demeter has got
on.”
May was a little mollified.
“Yes, Tom’s been working very hard--too hard, I think. He doesn’t take
enough exercise.”
“Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that when she’s finished,” said Tom;
“and it’s exercise enough chipping away at that stone.”
“I saw Mr. Holders this afternoon,” said May. “Mr. Holders bought one of
Tom’s things last winter,” she explained to Maud, “and he wants to know
if you have anything else for him. I said there was one unfinished
statuette, but I couldn’t get you to finish it. Besides, you’d given it
me.”
Tom grinned and stirred his tea.
“No, dear, I should just think you couldn’t get me to finish it,” he
said. “May means that little abortion on the chimney-piece in the
sitting-room, you know. There’s a horror for you!”
Maud Wrexham soon went away, and the two were left together. May’s
thoughts went back to the trouble she had seen on Tom’s face when she
entered, and presently she said--
“Tom, what was the matter when I came in?”
“We had been talking about what I told you,” he said. “I can’t possibly
afford to give more than I do for models, and I am rather in a hole.”
“Poor old boy!” said she. “But what can we do? You must have a model,
you say, and you have to pay her.”
“Unfortunately I have very little to pay her with. We must make the
little we have last as long as possible.”
“What did Maud Wrexham say?”
“She offered to lend me some.”
May got up from where she had been sitting next to him with her cheeks
blazing. The idea of borrowing at all had been distasteful to her, and
the idea that Maud should have offered it was intolerable.
“She offered to lend you money--you? And you--what did you say to her?”
“May dear, don’t behave like that. I said, of course, that I must ask
you.”
May was all on fire with indignation. The offer appeared to her an
insult, and she smarted under it as a horse under a lash. She felt that
her vague disquietude for the last week or so was explained and
justified. What business had Tom to be on such terms with another? Her
anger included Tom too. He had not rejected it with surprise and scorn.
“You said you would consult me?” she asked. “And what answer did you
suppose I should give you? Did you think I should say, ‘Take it’? Tom,
you know me very little.”
“May, do be reasonable,” said Tom. “Perhaps I ought to have told you
sooner, but the state is this: if no one offers to buy the Demeter, we
have to face the fact that in a limited time we shall have no money
left. What am I to do?”
But May hardly seemed to hear what he said.
“You accepted her offer provisionally!” she exclaimed. “Tom, how could
you do it? And you said you would consult me? you told her that? And she
knows that you and I are talking the matter over, discussing whether we
should be her pensioners!”
Tom grew impatient.
“My dear, you really are talking nonsense,” he said; “there is no
question of being anybody’s pensioners. It is to a certain extent always
a matter of time before one is recognized. If I can manage to work on at
the things I think worth doing, good. If not, what is to happen to us?
Maud Wrexham is an old and great friend of mine. But you are
unreasonable. Do not be unreasonable. It is not like you. You have given
me your answer, and of course I accept your decision. Don’t let us
discuss it any more. It is no manner of use.”
He walked to the door and paused, looking at her. But she made no sign,
and he left the room.
Tom stood still for a moment on the narrow landing outside the room. A
patch of ruddy sunlight came through the window which lit the stairs and
struck on the narrow strip of oilcloth which did duty for a carpet. The
window was bordered with hideous orange-coloured glass, and a ray
through it fell on Tom’s foot as he stood there, and the orange on the
blacking made an abhorrent tone. He felt beaten and dispirited, and the
whole place suddenly seemed intolerably sordid. The narrow strip of
oilcloth was continued along the landing, and was bordered on each side
by a foot or two of imperfectly stained board. The banisters were of
that particularly flimsy build which is characteristic of cheap
lodgings. There were two bad prints on the walls, one of King Alfred and
the cakes, the other of the Duke of Wellington with an impressionist
background of the battle of Waterloo. To Tom in his present mood the
whole scene seemed to him to be a sort of spectre reflected on to space
from his own mind. Everything was unlovely and impossible.
He felt sore and angry with May. She did not understand what his art was
to him. She did not understand Maud Wrexham’s offer. She did not
understand him. More than once the impulse came on him to go back into
the room and try to explain, but it seemed useless. She was angry and
indignant, and anger is a bandage over our eyes. And he knew, and was
honest enough to confess, that he was angry too, disappointed chiefly,
but also angry. Maud’s offer had come to him like manna. For himself he
would as soon have thought of not drinking of a spring that suddenly
welled up in a desert when he was dying of thirst, as of not accepting
it. But May could not understand that. She felt it as an insult to him
and to herself, and to disregard May’s feelings was impossible.
He took his hat and went downstairs. It was a broiling August afternoon,
and the world seemed dying of heat-apoplexy. The streets were
breathless and baked, and the sky was brass. At the corner of the
street a watercart had just passed, and Tom stood still a moment
inhaling a whiff of air which had a certain freshness in it. It reminded
him of the smell of a morning in the country, after a rainy night. He
knew that he ought to go back and work, but it was not to be done. His
heart was heavy and his eye was dull. Well, there was the British Museum
only a hundred yards off, and a man must be in a very bad state, he
reflected, if the Elgin marbles have nothing to say to him. The place
was nearly empty, and he sat down in front of the eternal figures from
the Parthenon pediments with a little sigh of relief.
He had made up accounts that morning with infinite difficulty, for it
was an operation to which he was not accustomed. The rapidity with which
twos and threes added up into tens and twenties seemed to him simply
amazing. And really it was absurd that there should only be twenty
shillings in a pound. There ought to have been at least twenty-five or
thirty. And the net result had been that at their present rate of living
they could go on for three weeks more, still leaving the bill for the
piece of Carrara unpaid. He had faced the situation manfully. He had
determined to go on for three weeks more, giving his heart and soul to
what he thought best in art. But at the end of those three weeks there
stood a blank wall, separating him completely and irrevocably from those
shining gods and goddesses who were of the golden age. May’s five
hundred pounds he had determined quite definitely he could not touch.
More than once she had wanted him to let her sell out, and though he had
thrilled all over with pleasure that she should make the offer, it was
impossible to say yes. There was too much at stake; he might die and
leave her alone with the baby. Mr. Markham’s tithes had been falling off
lately, and if she went to live with him, as she would have to do, she
must be able to help in household expenses.
But for the half-hour that he sat before the marbles he forgot it all.
What did it matter after all if _he_ produced beautiful things or not?
Beautiful things had been produced; the high-water mark of art had been
touched. A race of men had produced a race of gods, and he felt himself
becoming sanely and healthily small in his own eyes. Meantime May was at
home; they had parted in anger and indignation. Poor darling! perhaps
she was unhappy, perhaps she thought he did not care--that he was angry
with her. Tom smiled inwardly at the absurdity of the thought, and half
unconsciously took off his hat as he looked his last at the still marble
figures and thanked them for what they had taught him.
But into May’s mind there had definitely entered that afternoon a
certain subtle poison. For such a poison there is one unfailing antidote
which Tom held, and it is pure love. But when that poison, which is as
minute in dose as a drop of morphia injected from a silver syringe, has
once entered the system, however plentifully the antidote is
administered the body is never quite as healthy again as it was before.
Where the syringe has pricked the skin there is a little sore spot, and
now and again the nerves shrink instinctively at the thought that
perhaps it may be introduced again. And the clear drop which it holds is
called jealousy. For the last week, and once before that--one night soon
after they had come up to London for the first time, when she and Maud
and Manvers and Tom had dined together--she had seen the little
green-eyed fiend hovering round her, and been vaguely disquieted at him.
She thought that Tom felt more interest in Maud than he did in her. She
could not talk smartly, she could not say those rather amusing things,
which meant nothing, with which Maud was so glib, and which Tom
apparently enjoyed hearing. But after that the baby had been born, and
the little green-eyed fiend had put his syringe in his pocket and gone
away. But for the last week he had been about, and this afternoon he had
come again, and had said, “Allow me--or would you rather do it for
yourself?” and had just pricked her with that fine point, and the poison
was coursing through her veins.
Anger is blinding, but jealousy is blind: she could not be reasonable,
and she would not. Tom had disgraced himself and degraded her, and his
step was on the stairs. Her anger would have allowed her to throw
herself into his arms, and say, “Forgive me, Tom, I was angry,” but her
jealousy forbade her. So she stood where she was with her back to the
window, so that her face was in shadow, and when he came in she neither
spoke nor gave any sign.
He sat down near her, and after a moment’s silence held out his hand to
her. May had long white fingers, and they often sat together talking,
she twining her fingers into his, and the action was common with him.
But she stood quite still, and his hand dropped again to his side. At
length he spoke.
“May, how can you treat me like this?” he said. “What have I not done
that I can do? It was not very pleasant to have you speak to me as you
spoke this afternoon; but I accepted your decision at once; I did not
attempt to persuade you?”
“It would not have been much use trying,” said May in a high cool voice.
“I should not have tried in any case,” said he. “I only wished to know
what you thought, and I was content to abide absolutely by your
decision.”
“Why did you open the subject again, then,” said she with a sudden spasm
of jealousy, “unless it was to try to persuade me?”
Tom thought of the marble figures he had been looking at, and remembered
what they had taught him.
“May dear, please don’t speak to me like that,” he said quietly. “You
know--you know that was not the reason.”
“Then what was the reason?”
“The look of your face and the tone of your voice was the reason. You
are not generous to me; you will not meet me halfway or go a step
towards me.”
“No, you are right. Do you expect me to come towards you on that road?”
“On what road?” asked Tom, wonderingly.
Then quite suddenly and for the first time the real reason for his
wife’s attitude struck him. He got up and stood before her, and at that
moment she was desperately afraid of him. The anger which had possessed
her seemed to have transferred itself to him.
“May, how dare you think that?” he asked. “Are you not ashamed of
yourself?”
The least tremor passed through her, and she stood there not daring to
meet his eyes. The next moment he had turned from her and was walking
towards the door. Once she tried to find her voice and failed, but
before he had left the room she managed to speak.
“Tom, wait a minute,” she said.
He turned at once. He had been longing with all his soul that she should
say just that one word. He had been horribly wounded by her. Yet he felt
that he had never cared for her before as he cared now. He crossed the
room, sat down where he had sat before, and waited. The next moment she
had flung herself on her knees by him, and her face was buried on his
shoulder.
“My poor darling! what is it?” whispered Tom. “No, dear, don’t tell me
yet; wait a moment--yes, wait so. Come closer to me, May, closer. Your
place is here.”
In a few minutes her wild sobbing had become less passionate, and she
raised her face to his.
“I want to tell you,” she said. “I could never look you in the face
again unless I told you. You know, but I must tell you. I thought--oh,
Tom, Tom, what a brute I have been--I thought you cared for her, that
she amused you, when I didn’t. I can’t amuse you, I know. I’m not
amusing by nature, dear. And--and I thought your being willing to accept
money from her, when you wouldn’t let me sell out mine and give it you,
meant just that. I wish you would take it, Tom. Tom, I can’t tell you
how I want to do something for you. Or take hers--that would be better.
It will show that I know what a brute I have been, if I ask you to.
Please do, Tom. But say you forgive me first. Oh, I have spoiled it
all--it can never be the same again!”
She spoke with the fatal conviction of experience. She had felt
poisonous jealousy run through her veins--a poison that cannot but leave
some trace behind. But of that Tom knew nothing.
And Tom forgave her from the fulness of his heart, and he believed that
he could forget what had passed, hoping an impossible thing. All events
and memories, as scientists tell us, write their record on our brains,
as the sea writes its ripples on the sand, and there they remain till
the sweet hand of death smooths the wrinkles out.
That evening Tom wrote to Maud, thanking her again for her offer, but
refusing it. On that point he could not give way. He himself felt as
acutely, or more acutely than May had done that afternoon, that to
accept it now was impossible. And he began to learn at once that bitter
lesson, even in the first glow of their reconciliation, the
impossibility of forgetting. The thing had been like a thunderstorm
which had passed over and left the air fresh and cool, but in the
foreground stood the tree stripped and split by the lightning.
All that week Tom worked as he had never worked before. Doubts, fears,
and disappointments left him when he took up his chisel. The statue was
approaching completion, he had finished with the claw chisel, and was
working only with the fine point. Sometimes as he entered the studio,
his heart gave a sudden throb. Was his dream really coming true? Was the
Demeter really good--of the best? An artist’s conceptions are his
religion, and when he sees his religion becoming incarnate before him
how can he but be filled with joy and trembling? He knew that he saw
before him his conception. The thing was as he had meant it to be. He
had realized his best.
And when she stood there finished, artists and others came and looked
and admired, and went away again. The Academy, they thought, would be
sure to take it; it was admirably conceived and wonderfully executed.
But how on earth would Tom get it down those little front stairs? Ha,
ha! he would have to take the roof off, or break off Demeter’s arm and
say she was an antique.
But Tom felt singularly content. It was done: he had touched his own
high-water mark, and if no one else cared what cause was there for blame
or regret? The moment which he had feared and dreaded had come and
passed. Manvers was quite right; no one wanted the Demeter. They said it
was beautiful; some one had said it was Praxitelean, and that was
enough. And for the next three or four days he waited, doing nothing,
walking out with May when the day grew cooler, going through any amount
of baby cult, serene and content, knowing that in a little while the
pause would inevitably be over, and that he would have to do
something--what he knew not. He spent two days in shaping a little wax
model of Persephone, which was to have been his next statue,
lingeringly, lovingly, regretfully, knowing he would never make it.
About a week after Demeter had been finished, the end came. The baby had
not been well, and May, who was not usually anxious, had sent for the
doctor. Tom was out when he came, and she sat alone in the gathering
dusk waiting for him to come in. The room was nearly dark, and her chair
was in the shadow, so that when Tom entered the room he did not see her
at once.
“May, are you there?” he said.
May’s voice answered him, and he sat down beside her.
“I sent for the doctor this evening, Tom,” she said; “baby’s not well.”
“What did he say?”
“He said there was nothing really wrong, but that we ought to leave
town--to take baby to the seaside or somewhere. It’s this heat and
stuffy air. The nursery is terribly hot, you know; and I have to shut
the window, or the noise in the streets wakes him.”
Tom got up and walked up and down the room.
“There’s hardly any money,” he said. “I don’t see how we can manage it.”
“Mr. Holders was here again this afternoon,” she said, “and he saw the
statuette--that little half-finished one you gave me. He said it was so
good, and told me to ask you to finish it at once for him. He said it
was the best thing you had ever done.”
There was a long pause. Tom stopped in his walk and stood with his
forehead pressed against the window. The sun had just gone down, but the
west was still luminous.
“She cannot understand,” he thought to himself. “She will never
understand.”
And to confirm his thought, after a few moments May spoke again.
“I know how distasteful it will be to you, dear, because of course the
other style is what you really like. But we must have money. Even if
baby was quite well we should only be putting it off a little longer.
And then if you will do that, and perhaps do one or two more, you will
have money enough to go on with what you like. Mr. Holders admired it so
awfully. He said it was the best thing you had ever done, and he is a
very good critic, isn’t he?”
But still Tom did not answer. His time had come, and he knew it, but he
lingered a moment more by the window looking at the red colour in the
west. At last he turned and sat down by her. She took his hand and
twined her fingers into his.
“Yes, darling, you are quite right,” he said. “I will finish it at once;
and then we’ll take baby off to some seaside place, and--and build
sand-castles, and have a little jaunt generally.”
* * * * *
May went to bed early that night, and when the house was still Tom took
up the little rough sketch of Persephone, and with a candle in his hand
went into the studio. Demeter stood shining there, her head bent in
sorrow for her child. Tom looked at her long and steadily. The candle
threw her shadow vaguely and distortedly on to the walls and ceiling,
but the statue itself stood out radiantly from the obscurity round. He
took hold of the cold marble hand and stood there looking up to the
down-bent face.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. “You are not wanted. And I--I have another
goddess and another child.”
EPILOGUE.
Tom and Manvers were sitting at the bottom of a punt in one of the upper
reaches of the Thames on a September afternoon. Tom had taken out a
fishing-rod, but it was too hot to do more than smoke. Smoke produces
silence, and neither had spoken for some time. Manvers had arrived ten
days ago, and was staying with Tom in a small house he had lately
bought, in which he spent the summer months.
“It’s only three years since I saw you last,” he said at length, “but
you look more than three years older.”
Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and blew away a cloud of blue smoke.
“I feel eighty-four,” he said. “Prosperity isn’t so soothing as I was
led to believe. I think worrying and fighting would have kept me young.
You are the only person who always remains twenty-five. How have you
managed it?”
“Growing old is absolutely a matter of will,” said Manvers. “It is like
Alice eating the mushroom to make her grow tall or short. You can eat
which side of it you like: one side makes you old, the other keeps you
young. No one need grow old unless he likes. The secret is to take
nothing seriously. I only once took anything seriously, and it made me
three years older in a single night. Consequently I am twenty-eight, not
twenty-five.”
“What was that?” asked Tom, listlessly.
“I took Miss Wrexham seriously. I asked her to marry me. That was just
three years ago.”
“Poor old boy! Why didn’t you tell me? Are you going to try your fate
again? She is coming down here in a week.”
Manvers looked up.
“The deuce she is! No; the incident is closed.”
“Were you badly hurt?”
“I found everything distasteful for a time, but I recovered. Life is so
amusingly improbable. Fancy my doing that sort of thing! However, it was
very useful; I learned several lessons.”
“What did you learn?”
“I learned that nothing can really damage one’s capacity for enjoyment.
Don’t think I wasn’t in earnest about it; I was in deadly earnest. The
second was that _homme propose_. It is a truism, of course, but it is
useful to find by experience that a truism is true. I have yet to learn
who disposes,” he added. “I must say I have never personally experienced
the last part of the proverb. By the way, I was talking to an old model
the other day who was sitting to me for my ‘Fourth Act’--the thing of
the woman with the fan--and she said, ‘Man appoints, God disappoints.’
But woman usually disappoints. And the third thing I learned was that
the most foolish thing in the world is to be serious. While one can
certainly amuse one’s self it is idle to forego that bird in the hand
for a problematic bird in the bush.”
“I wish I could learn one thing a year,” said Tom, “as you have been
doing. I should be getting confoundedly wise by now.”
“You always used to be learning things,” remarked the other. “I remember
you used to discover the secret of life about every other day.”
“I have unlearned a good many things, unfortunately.”
“It’s my turn to catechise. What have you unlearned?”
“I have unlearned my theory that I could do all I wanted. I have
unlearned my conviction that one made one’s own limitations--that one
could ever be certain about anything. In a way, I have all a reasonable
man could want. I have May, I have three healthy children, I have
fame--fame of a damnable kind, it is true--but there was a time when I
shouldn’t have been satisfied with anything. I longed to stretch out my
arms round the whole world, to take the whole world into my grasp. But
now I know I cannot do it, and, what is worse, I do not want to do it. I
acquiesce in my own limitations. What can be sadder than that?”
“If you are happy nothing matters.”
“I might once have been happier. I gave up what I believed I could do,
and what I believed was supremely well worth doing. I am an apostate.
Apostates may be very happy--they are rid of the thumbscrew and the
boiling lead--but I wonder if they ever lose that little cankerworm of
shame.”
“My dear Tom, what nonsense! You tried to fly, and before you had
succeeded some one took your apparatus away. Of course it is only
natural for you to think that you might have flown if you had been left
with your apparatus, but you never could have. Besides, you are rich
now; you have your apparatus again.”
Tom frowned.
“Cannot you understand?” he said, impatiently. “Good God, it is so
simple! Stevenson says somewhere that three pot-boilers will destroy any
talent. I must have made twenty pot-boilers at least. Don’t you see that
what I am regretting is that I no longer want to fly? The chances are a
thousand to one that I never could have. But that blessed illusion that
I could fly has gone.”
“You took it too seriously.”
“I did, much too seriously. I don’t take things seriously now; I have
lost the trick. But how I long to be able to! I was mad, no doubt: you
often told me so. But it was a very sweet madness. All enthusiasm is
madness according to you. But according to enthusiasts, enthusiasm is
the only sanity. I oughtn’t to complain. I sail closer to the shore. It
is really much safer and pleasanter. Indeed, we are thinking of taking a
house at Cambridge. It will be nice to have Ted near. If one wants to be
happy, one ought to have no ill-balanced enthusiasms. They are very
disturbing while they last, and they leave one as flat as a pancake. But
when you have once tasted them, though you may have lost them entirely,
you can never wholly forget their wonderful intoxication. One of those
French enthusiasts says that one must be drunk on something--on life or
love, or virtue or vice, it does not matter which.”
“I, too, am very catholic,” murmured Manvers, “I appreciate virtue as
little as I dislike vice. It is all a question of temperament.”
“Yes, temperament. That is another thing I have unlearned. There was a
time when I was convinced that no man need be in the clutch of his
temperament. I believed that one was free. One is not. One is in
endless, hopeless bondage to one’s temperament.”
“You are pessimistic this afternoon.”
“It is a relative term. I am really optimistic, though I allow my
optimism would have seemed pessimism to me three years ago.”
“I don’t quite see from what standpoint you can be considered
optimistic,” remarked Manvers.
“I appreciate fully all I have got. I think the lines are laid for me in
pleasant places. That is surely the whole essence of optimism. I believe
that everything is for the best, and that if the best seems second-rate
to me, it is I who am wrong. I love May more than I love any one in this
world, and she is my wife. I have money, which is a hateful necessity,
but as necessary as it is hateful. And I have a good digestion.”
Tom leant back and beat out the ashes from his pipe against the side of
the boat. They would not come out at first, but eventually the whole
dottel of the pipe fell into the water with a subdued hiss. Some vague
note of thought twanged in his brain, and he paused for a moment,
frowning slightly, and trying to catch the remembrance which the sound
had stirred. After a little he smiled rather sadly, and not with the
completeness which a smile of pure amusement or of pure happiness has in
it.
“I used to do that over King’s bridge at Cambridge,” he said
irrelevantly; “and I thought it seemed so like what I was going to do
myself. I meant to go through darkness, and then make a splash.”
“The end of your pipe made a very little splash,” said Manvers.
“Oh yes, a very little splash. All splashes are little; but splashes are
rare. Most people slide into the water anyhow, and are content to be
seen swimming.”
“The world would count you singularly happy.”
“Of course it would; it would be wrong if it did not. But--but what I
mean is that I might have been happier, and May might have been
happier.”
Manvers looked up in surprise.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Tom sat up and played rather nervously with the tassel of the cushion on
which he was sitting.
“Surely it is simple enough,” he said. “I have acquiesced in
limitations. May is devoted to me--as much devoted to me as I am to her,
I think. But don’t you see there is less of me than there might have
been. There is less of me to love and to be loved--God knows, it is all
perfect enough in its own scale. But there might have been another
scale. And now”--he dropped his hands and sat upright, looking at
Manvers--“and now we are measured by yards, not by metres.”
A little wind stirred suddenly in the elm trees by the bank and ruffled
the surface of the water. A fish rose in mid-stream beyond the boat, and
the current carried the concentric ripples down with it. Behind, the
little rambling red-brick house stood sunning its southern front, and on
the lawn, in the shadow of a tall copper beech, they could see the
glimmer of a figure in a white dress sitting in a low basket chair. Tom
turned as he spoke and looked half involuntarily at it.
“Come,” he said; “May will be waiting for us. We are going to have tea
early, and then go for a row up the river. We are going to do many
pleasant things.”
The boat was anchored among some flowering rushes; a few strokes of the
punt pole sent it back to the bottom of the lawn. They strolled up
together to where May was sitting, and she welcomed them with that
brilliant smile which was so natural to her.
“Tom has been so sombre this last day or two,” she said to Manvers. “I
hope you have been cheering him up.”
“I don’t think there is much the matter with him,” said Manvers. “He
says he feels optimistic.”
“Manvers called me pessimistic,” remarked Tom; “but that is only a most
flagrant instance of his own pessimism. He sees everything through his
own spectacles.”
May raised her eyebrows.
“What frightfully contradictory accounts,” she said. “Oh, Tom, by the
way, there is a man here who has come from the station to have the
carriage of the Demeter paid. It is fifteen pounds. Surely that is an
awful lot. I thought I had better ask you before I paid it.”
Manvers looked inquiringly at Tom.
“Have you the Demeter here?” he asked.
“Yes; I bought it back from Lord Henderson. He was very nice about it.
He saw I really wanted it, and he let me have it for what he had paid
for it. He bought it, you know, as a piece of cultured lumber, perhaps
also as a species of charity, and he has sold it for charity. It came
two days ago. I told them to unpack it this morning. Where have you had
it put, May?”
“In your study, dear, where you said you wanted it. They unpacked it
to-day. But surely fifteen pounds is too much for the carriage, Tom?”
Tom’s eyes wandered over the lawn, but came back to May.
“Yes, it seems a good deal. But I wanted it, you know, and one pays
anything for what one wants; in fact, one often pays a good deal for
what one doesn’t want.”
“You can’t say that that speech is optimistic,” said Manvers,
triumphantly.
“No, I don’t defend it,” said Tom. “May dear, let’s come in and have tea
now. It is getting much cooler, and then we can start in half an hour.”
May rose and walked with Manvers towards the house. Tom strolled on a
few steps ahead of them. As they reached the terrace which ran along the
front of the house he turned.
“I don’t think you ever saw the Demeter finished,” he said to Manvers.
“Come with me and look at it.”
“Yes, let’s all go and see it,” said May. “It looks so nice in that
corner, with the dark red paper behind, Tom. I went to see it just
before I came out.”
Tom’s room opened out of the hall, opposite the drawing-room. Just as
they got to the door he stopped and spoke to May without looking at her.
“Then will you have us told when tea is ready, dear?” he said.
May had intended to come in with them, but something in Tom’s voice made
her hesitate.
“Yes; don’t be long,” she said; “and don’t get to talking shop about it.
We shall never start if you do.”
Tom opened the door for Manvers and shut it again after they had
entered. The sun was already getting low, and a great blaze of light
came in almost horizontally through the open window and shone full on
the statue. Tom sat down opposite it, and Manvers stood near him. In the
ruddy glow of the evening the white marble was flushed with delicate
red, and for the first time Manvers really appreciated the noble
conception of it--about the execution he had never had any doubt.
They sat there in silence for some time, and then Tom got up.
“Do you see,” he said rather huskily, “do you see what I mean when I say
that I might have--might have----”
He turned abruptly. On the floor was lying the sheet in which the
statue had been wrapped. He took it up quickly and flung it over it.
“We all have ghosts in our houses,” he said; “but we can at least veil
them a little. Besides,” he added, “to go back to what I was
saying about my optimism, I have had three crises, three
revelations--unimportant little revelations no doubt--in my life. I
think I told you and Maud Wrexham about them one evening, oh, ever so
long ago!”
“I remember,” said Manvers.
“Well, to have had a crisis is in itself a most delightful experience,
but if your crisis remains, so to speak, critical, you ought to be
perfectly happy. Two of my crises were still-born. The crisis I had when
I saw the Hermes at Olympia has come to nothing.”
“Do you call that nothing?” said Manvers, pointing to the shrouded
Demeter.
“Worse than nothing. It is a dead child. It had better never have been
born. And the crisis I had, or thought I had, when the baby was born
is--is yet unfulfilled. But my third crisis remains critical. I met May,
I loved her, I love her. But the ghosts, the ghosts----”
They left the room. In the hall was the three-year-old Thomas, being
towed sideways across the hall by his nurse, going out for a walk. Tom
took the youngster up in his arms and turned to Manvers with a smile.
“I am a fool if I cannot lay my ghosts,” he said.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
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“Undeniably ingenious--full of power and interest.”--_Daily Telegraph._
By LESLIE KEITH, Author of “The Chilcotes,” “Lisbeth,” etc.
=For Love of Prue.=
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._
“Plot and incident in this present story are alike remarkable....
Altogether we heartily commend ‘For Love of Prue’ as a sensible,
humorous, and thoroughly wholesome book.”--_Speaker._
“Some words of appreciative and cordial praise must be accorded to
Leslie Keith’s new story ‘For Love of Prue,’ which is fresh and
wholesome throughout, and teems with charming contrasts of pathos and
humour.”--_Daily Telegraph._
By DOROTHEA GERARD.
=Lot 13.=
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._
“A bright, buoyant, and bustling story, with plenty of local colour
derived from the scenery and the society, black and white, of a West
Indian plantation.”--_Times._
“Delightfully fresh and original in plot, character, and incident, and
it has the charm that Miss Gerard’s work never lacks of an atmosphere of
imagination and poetry.”--_Guardian._
By the late Mrs. J. K. SPENDER, Author of “Thirteen Doctors,” etc.
=The Wooing of Doris.=
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._
“Has much to commend it to novel readers. A clever plot; well-drawn
characters--such are the leading features of a novel by which the
reputation of its much regretted writer is fully sustained to the
last.”--_World._
“A charming and wholesome story, it is full of human
interest.”--_Sheffield Daily Telegraph._
* * * * *
_THREE SUCCESSFUL ROMANCES._
By J. C. SNAITH.
=Mistress Dorothy Marvin.=
A tale of the Seventeenth Century. Being Excerpta from the Memoirs of
Sir Edward Armstrong, Baronet, of Copeland Hall, in the County of
Somerset.
With Illustrations by S. COWELL. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6_s._
“The author has succeeded in making his story intensely interesting....
One of the very best adventure stories we have had for a long time
past.”--_Speaker._
“Full of the most thrilling adventures and terrific fights.... But
through the story there runs the thread of as tender and rare a love
between man and maid as the most romantic reader could desire.... A
story intensely interesting and powerfully exciting. It cannot be put
down when once taken up till it has been read from cover to
cover.”--_Church Times._
“‘Mistress Dorothy Marvin,’ most delightful and winsome of women, and
one of the freshest and most unhackneyed heroines whose acquaintance we
have had the pleasure of making for a very considerable period.... Mr.
Snaith has a great gift of observation, and his book is a remarkable
picture of the age it is intended to depict.”--_World._
By FRANK BARRETT, Author of “The Admirable Lady Biddy Fane.”
=A Set of Rogues=: Namely, Christopher Sutton, John Dawson, the Señor don
Sanchez del Castillo de Castelaña, and Moll Dawson. Their Wicked
Conspiracy, and a True Account of their Travels and Adventures.
With Illustrations by S. COWELL. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6_s._
“He has related the adventures of a set of rogues ... with so pleasant a
tongue and in such attractive fashion that it is impossible for mere
flesh and blood to resist them. His set of rogues have won our entire
sympathy, and his narrative our hearty approval.”--_Pall Mall Gazette._
“Another capital story.... Strongly recommended. Stirring tale this,
without a dull chapter in it, and just enough human sentiment in it to
soften down the roguery.... Let the honest reader procure the
book.”--_Punch._
“Most excellent story.... In the whole book there are no dull pages, and
the plot is worked out with a care that leaves nothing to be desired....
We can only recommend the book to our readers as being in all respects a
most satisfactory and admirable bit of work.”--_Speaker._
By STANLEY WEYMAN.
=My Lady Rotha.=
A Romance of the Thirty Years’ War. With 8 Illustrations by JOHN
WILLIAMSON. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6_s._
“No one who begins will lay it down before the end, it is so extremely
well carried on from adventure to adventure.”--_Saturday Review._
“A novel which everybody must read and enjoy as such books are meant to
be read and enjoyed.”--_Speaker._
“Exhibits in high degree and ample abundance the qualities which have so
certainly and so fast brought Mr. Weyman to the front; the excellence of
the narrative style, the skill with which the historical element is
introduced, the adequacy for romantic purposes of the character drawing,
and above all the quick invention in incident and situation.”--_St
James’s Gazette._
SCARLET NOVELS.
A SERIES OF POPULAR NOVELS BY WELL-KNOWN AUTHORS.
_Crown 8vo, uniform scarlet cloth, 3s. 6d. each Volume._
By ANTHONY HOPE.
=Comedies of Courtship.=
[_Just added._
“He is undeniably gay in the best sense of the word, now and then almost
rollicking. An admirable example of what we mean by gaiety in fictional
literature.”--_Daily Telegraph._
=Half a Hero.=
“The book is delightful to read, and an excellent piece of
work.”--_Standard._
=Mr. Witt’s Widow.= A Frivolous Tale.
“A brilliant little tale.... Exhibits unborrowed ingenuity,
plausibility, and fertility in surprises.”--_Times._
“Excellent fooling. From first to last the story is keenly and quietly
amusing.”--_Scotsman._
By MAX PEMBERTON.
=A Gentleman’s Gentleman.=
[_Just added._
“This is very much the best book that Mr. Max Pemberton has so far given
us.”--_Daily Chronicle._
By RICHARD PRYCE.
=The Burden of a Woman.=
“Mr. Richard Pryce has worked a fresh vein of realistic romance, and has
done so with eminent success. The story which the author has here
presented so artistically is both a powerful and a beautiful one, told
with mingled strength and delicacy, enriched with admirable
character-drawing, and marked by real distinction of tone and style. Mr.
Pryce has conferred a benefit upon novel readers by the production of so
noble and interesting a book as ‘The Burden of a Woman.’”--_Speaker._
By C. R. COLERIDGE.
=Amethyst.= The Story of a Beauty.
“Extremely amusing, interesting, and brightly written.”--_Guardian._
By F. FRANKFORT MOORE.
=Two in the Bush and Others elsewhere.=
“Carry the reader on from page to page till criticism is forgotten in
enjoyment.”--_Daily Graphic._