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_FOURTH EDITION._
THE IRONMASTER;
OR, LOVE AND PRIDE.
BY GEORGES OHNET.
TRANSLATED WITHOUT ABRIDGMENT FROM THE 146TH FRENCH EDITION.
The above work, which may be regarded as the greatest literary success
in any language of recent times, has already yielded its author a profit
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An edition of "The Ironmaster," in large crown 8vo, beautifully printed
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NUMA ROUMESTAN;
OR, JOY ABROAD AND GRIEF AT HOME.
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET.
TRANSLATED BY MRS. J. G. LAYARD.
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has no fault, no weakness. It is a compact and harmonious
whole."--MR. HENRY JAMES.
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seduction."--_Spectator._
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been attained."--_Morning Post._
COUNTESS SARAH.
BY GEORGES OHNET, AUTHOR OF "THE IRONMASTER."
TRANSLATED FROM THE 118TH FRENCH EDITION.
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A MUMMER'S WIFE.
BY GEORGE MOORE, AUTHOR OF "A MODERN LOVER."
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yet good-natured--is probably as good as anything of the kind could
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THE CORSARS;
OR, LOVE AND LUCRE.
BY JOHN HILL, AUTHOR OF "THE WATERS OF MARAH," "SALLY," &c.
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every vote."--_Saturday Review._
"The story is well worked out, and the characters have each and all
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humour."--_Life._
MR. BUTLER'S WARD.
BY F. MABEL ROBINSON.
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PRINCE SERGE PANINE.
BY GEORGES OHNET, AUTHOR OF "THE IRONMASTER."
TRANSLATED FROM THE 110TH FRENCH EDITION.
This is the work that made M. Ohnet's reputation, and was crowned by the
French Academy.
BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN.
BY INA L. CASSILIS, AUTHOR OF "SOCIETY'S QUEEN," "STRANGELY WOOED:
STRANGELY WON," &c.,
THE FORKED TONGUE.
BY R. LANGSTAFF DE HAVILLAND, AUTHOR OF "ENSLAVED."
_VIZETELLY'S ONE-VOLUME NOVELS._
IX.
THE THREATENING EYE.
BY E. F. KNIGHT,
AUTHOR OF "THE CRUISE OF THE FALCON."
... "When Fortune means to men most good,
She looks upon them with a threatening eye."
KING JOHN, Act III., Scene IV.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
_VIZETELLY & CO., 42 CATHERINE ST., STRAND._
1885.
Perth:
S. COWAN AND CO., STRATHMORE PRINTING WORKS.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE EDUCATION OF MARY GRIMM 9
II. ON THE ROAD TO RUIN 17
III. THE SECRET SOCIETY 27
IV. THE FIRST DAY OF LIBERTY 40
V. IN THE TEMPLE 51
VI. FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS 62
VII. THE TENTH PLAGUE OF EGYPT 74
VIII. LIGHT LOVER 89
IX. KILLING NO MURDER 102
X. A LOVE THAT DOES NOT RUN SMOOTHLY 115
XI. A WRECK 128
XII. IN GREAT PERPLEXITY 137
XIII. A SCIENTIFIC MURDER 144
XIV. SUSAN BRINGS MARY TO AN OLD LOVER 157
XV. IN THE LAND OF PHANTOMS 166
XVI. SUSAN GOES TO CHURCH 179
XVII. A DARKENED MIND 188
XVIII. AMONG THE GREEN LEAVES 200
XIX. CATHERINE KING VISITS MARY IN THE COUNTRY 211
XX. CATHERINE'S DISCOVERY 221
XXI. CONDEMNED TO DEATH 228
XXII. AN EVENTFUL DAY 238
XXIII. THE TAKING AWAY OF THE SHADOW 248
XXIV. DESPAIR 259
XXV. THE FIRST WARNING 268
XXVI. SHATTERED IDOLS 278
XXVII. THE SECOND WARNING 288
XXVIII. AGAIN THE SHADOW 299
XXIX. THE THIRD WARNING 307
XXX. THE LAST OF SUSAN RILEY 317
XXXI. PEACE 325
THE THREATENING EYE.
CHAPTER I.
THE EDUCATION OF MARY GRIMM.
A street in Brixton--one of those dreary streets of what the house-agent
calls eligible eight-roomed residences, in which all the houses are as
like each other as so many peas out of one pod: each two-storied; each
looking out on the street through six windows; each with its little
flight of stone steps leading up to the front door; each with its garden
just six yards square; each with its severe respectability of
expression. For houses, like men, have their expressions which reflect
the characters of their inmates. There is the prim Puritanical house;
the dissipated villa with its neglected gate; the ostentatious _nouveau
riche_ mansion, turning up its nose at its neighbours; the well-kept
pretty cottage, looking contented with itself and all the world,
containing as it does the newly-married couple; the cynical abode of
crusty old bachelorhood surrounded by whims and fads; and so on, each
from palace to slum with a face the meaning of which he who knows how
may read.
Now the houses of this Brixton Street were of the respectable-genteel
class of houses, not over-wealthy, but very respectable; possibly come
down in the world some of them, but all essentially genteel.
Married clerks in banks and merchants' offices, with small salaries and
large families, formed the bulk of the occupants of these dwellings.
Besides these there were generally one or two retired military men in
the street; they also with encumbrances, wives and families, that were
rather slip-shod, whereas the military men themselves preserved a
certain amount of fashion in their attire. These gallant officers and
their belongings were wont, however, to encamp for a while only as it
were in the street. They never stayed long, but would vanish
unostentatiously without fuss of any kind, leaving behind painful
regrets in the memories of sundry rate-collectors and tradesmen. These
nomadic warriors alone of all that street's inhabitants were not quite
respectable, though distinctly genteel.
It was, in short, a dull Brixton street such as our London suburbs have
hundreds of, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all, for
it terminated at its further end in a wilderness of "eligible building
land," a desert of mud and broken crockery that was only awaiting the
advent of the speculative builder to become yet one more excrescence of
this swollen metropolis.
Of all the respectable houses of this highly respectable street none
were more respectable than No. 22. No grocer hesitated before he
permitted Mrs. Grimm to run up a three months' account at his shop; for
was not Mr. Grimm known to be a man of substance? He was a lawyer in the
city, a solicitor in fair but not clean practice: a Perpetual
Commissioner of Oaths too, it was whispered, and to the outside world
such a title could not but imply more than respectability, it even
savoured of dignity. Again he was wont to come punctually home to his
dinner every evening at seven; he had been five years at No. 22, and had
always paid his way; and finally, what established his credit more than
all else, he was known to own no less than three houses in the street,
bringing him in some thirty pounds a year each.
The household of No. 22 consisted of this gentleman, his daughter, who
was sixteen years old at the period this story opens, and his second
wife.
One maid-servant "did" for the family with the assistance of the
daughter. Mrs. Grimm did not condescend to work, but she _superintended_
energetically. Thus it will be seen that though Mr. Grimm was fairly
well off he did not waste his means in ostentation, and kept up his
establishment on an economical footing.
One of our most distinguished novelists started life as a gambler. He
was remarkably successful at play, and was rapidly amassing a fortune;
but one day, we are told, he happened to perceive the reflection of his
face in a mirror, when he was so horrified at the haggard appearance it
presented, that he incontinently threw up his destructive pursuit for
that of literature, in which he became even more successful than at the
green table.
Even as wise as this great author was Mr. Grimm. At the commencement of
his career he too had been a gambler, a dabbler on the stock
exchange--with clients' money sometimes; but perceiving that the fierce
anxiety was turning his hair grey, he forswore gambling: not for
literature though, but for quiet safe swindling. Swindling doesn't age
one like play, and so far as results to oneself are concerned, is the
most innocent vice of the two. A thief is as often as not a dear amiable
fat jovial fellow, with the lightest of consciences. Is your gambler
ever anything but the reverse?
Mr. Grimm was not a lovable man. He was that perhaps lowest of all
creatures that crawl the earth--a pettifogging attorney, capable of any
meanness, any dishonesty, any cruel robbery of orphan and widow, and
just sharp enough to know where to draw the line between _moral_ crime
and _legal_ crime. He had, it is true, on two occasions run rather close
risks of being scratched off the rolls, and had received many a
well-earned rebuke from judge in open Court or Master in Chambers; but
this "gentleman by Act of Parliament," knew what he was about, and so
far had not overreached himself to ruin as do so many of his class,
when long impunity has made them careless in their knavery.
Mr. Grimm's first wife was a foolish weak woman of the pale eyes, pale
hair, and washed-out complexion type.
She had been sold to the attorney by her father. The poor creature
herself, too feeble of will to offer resistance, was led submissively to
the altar.
The father, one of those retired officers of the selfish, disreputable,
hard-up, red-nosed class, being well entangled in Mr. Grimm's toils, had
handed over his daughter to him in discharge of an old debt connected
with bill-discounting.
The attractions of the said daughter consisted of an absolute reversion
that would some day fall into her possession.
To recite the main points of the transaction, in consideration of the
tearing up of the captain's bit of paper, the marriage settlement, which
referred solely to the reversion, was drawn up in a way satisfactory to
Mr. Grimm, and the aforesaid virgin was duly conveyed to the aforesaid
Mr. Grimm, according to the forms which are sanctioned by the Church and
the Law.
One daughter, Mary, was the sole child of this marriage.
The unfortunate mother, after a two years' not very agreeable experience
of married life, died off, in the quiet uncomplaining manner which had
characterised her life, before anyone even realised that she was
seriously ill.
From very early youth the life of poor little Mary was rendered
miserable. It seemed that her father was incapable of any touch of
parental affection; such characters are rare, but his character was a
rare one for its unredeemable meanness.
He looked on his child as a nuisance--an expensive interloper in his
house that the law obliged him to clothe and feed. He did feed
her--badly, and clothed her somewhat better, for the sake of
appearances, having a regard for his respectability.
He was cruel as well as mean. When he went down to the city he would
lock up his infant child, keeping her a pallid prisoner within doors,
all through the long summer day.
But meanness as well as cruelty prompted this treatment. He would not go
to the expense of engaging a nurse for his daughter, and the little
maid-of-all-work, as she said herself, had "quite enough to do without
lugging that child out for an airing." Again it would not at all do for
the child of respectable Mr. Grimm to be seen by the neighbours playing
about the streets by herself like any little street arab--the street
arabs whom she so soon learned to envy; for though starved, cold, beaten
by drunken parents, they were free, free to romp about the gutters with
other children, having luckily parents who had no respectability to keep
up.
I do not know how Mary learned to read and write: in after years she
could not say herself; but, at any rate, before she was seven, her
father found that he could make his daughter useful. Her small hands,
far whiter and thinner, alas! than they should have been, were employed
all day in copying deeds and legal documents for him, in the round hand
of a solicitor's clerk.
In the bright summer afternoons, while other children played, her little
brown head was bowed over the dismal folios of chicanery.
When Mary was about ten years old a stepmother was introduced into the
establishment. Why Grimm married her, what pecuniary or other inducement
was present on this occasion, I do not know.
But now it came to pass that he--the mean, cowardly, foxy, little man
with the red hair and the shifty eyes--met his match. The second Mrs.
Grimm was a big woman with a purple face, a loud voice, and an almost
Papuan mop of faded-straw coloured hair, a woman who ever overawed the
solicitor. In this couple the offensive qualities of the two sexes were
reversed. She was the more masculine of the two. The little man's
readiest weapon was the feminine needle of nagging; hers the male
bludgeon of blustering brutality.
Mrs. Grimm number two, without delay, conceived a violent dislike for
her husband's little girl.
It was on this second marriage that the highly respectable family moved
to No. 22 in the genteel street in Brixton.
And now the child's position was a more unhappy one than ever; and her
inner life became one of hate, a terrible hate--and children can hate
even more bitterly than their elders--against her father and
step-mother, a hate ever aggravated by the abominable treatment she
received at the hands of both.
Hers indeed was a miserable childhood, made up of blows, imprisonment,
hard work, no play, no sunshine, no companion, and worse than all,
taunts and insults that made her writhe--hasty words of that description
which rankle deeply in an infant's heart, and are remembered through
life in some cases: a fact some parents do not seem to realize.
So it was that all childishness was being driven out of the child and
all womanliness out of the woman.
Before her father's second marriage she had sometimes made friends of
the maids-of-all-work of the house, but now this was no longer to be.
The stepmother not approving of such association was ever on the watch
for it, and on any signs of intimacy between the daughter and the drudge
declaring themselves, the latter was immediately packed off and some
stern and quite unsympathetic person substituted.
The little girl toiled on at the law-copying and the domestic work,
silent, moody, with a stern expression gathering on her face that made
it look so old for her age. She became--who would not?--a liar and a
hater. But she was brave, she could hate, she could not fear; she gave
up crying before she was twelve years old.
Her only pleasure, her sole consolation after the blows and insults, was
to lie awake at night and brood revenge. Child-like, she would build
castles in the air, complicated little stories of which she herself was
the central figure; but not the castles in the air of other children,
dreams of fairy-land and happy adventure. No; the plot of all her
fancies was revenge, punishment of her father and stepmother.
These were her day-dreams too when she sat mechanically copying the
deeds--dreams always of hatred, of torturing her torturers; and at times
she would smile, oh! so strange a smile for a child! when some more
ingeniously terrible mode of repaying that debt of ill would occur to
her infant mind.
HATE, suppressed but intense HATE! such was the education of Mary Grimm;
so things went on until the period at which this story opens, when Mary
was sixteen.
She looked a few years older than her age. In spite of her unwholesome
training she was beautiful. She was tall and graceful. Her small head
was well-set on her shoulders. Her features were regular--too regular
perhaps if anything.
When she went out on an errand, wrapped in her faded shawl, walking
fast, looking neither to the right nor to the left, meeting with cold
and impassive glance, the stare of the passing stranger, how many men,
and women too, would turn and look after the girl, struck by her pale
quiet face.
It was a face that haunted one. There was something in it that puzzled,
something mysterious in the expression that one could not explain at
first, something inconsistent.
Inconsistent--that was it. For in the first place her brown hair was out
in a fringe over her forehead. The vulgar boldness of that objectionable
fashion, though it could not make her ugly, was singularly inappropriate
to that Grecian face and head.
But that was not all: even had her hair been tied up, as it should have
been, in the classic knot, the something inconsistent would still have
been present. It lay in the strange difference of expression between the
eyes and mouth. Looking into her eyes, those large violet long-lashed
eyes that are perhaps the most beautiful of all, one could read in them
delightful possibilities of love, womanly tenderness, the desire for
sympathy, indeed the look that attracts man to woman.
But looking from the eyes to the mouth a chill would come over the
observer, a disappointment, a feeling as if a barrier were set up
between him and her, an obstacle that kept off love and sympathy.
For that mouth, beautiful in its moulding, was yet so firm, so hard, not
a sad mouth in any way, but stern, almost cruel.
It was on the mouth that the demon of strong hate, which the father had
conjured up to his daughter, had placed his mark.
The woman, the angel in her, looked out of those pathetic eyes.
One could easily foretell that hers would be a life of suffering--the
suffering of the strong, of fierce conflict between good and evil.
The signs of battle were already on that young face. Would the tender
eyes come to look cold and hard, and the mouth wax firmer and wickeder,
or would the good angel win the day? would the eyes become tenderer
still, and the mouth soften to lines of sweetness and womanly kindness?
As with women from the beginning, so with her--the victory depended upon
the MAN; upon whether when he came he threw his strong alliance with the
powers of good or evil.
So far it was an equal battle. Mary at sixteen wanted but little to make
of her either a devil as only woman can be, or an angel as only woman
can be--which would she become?