‘Well, I’m quite worn out with all this rumpus! I shall go to bed.
Good-night, Delicia!’
At this she turned and looked at him fully.
‘Good-night!’ she said.
Something in the transparent beauty of her face and the dark tragedy of
her eyes awed him. She looked as if during the past few minutes she had
risen above and beyond him to a purer atmosphere than that of earth. The
majority of men hate women who look so; and Carlyon was painfully
conscious that he had suddenly grown to hate Delicia. She had entirely
changed, he thought. From a loving, tender idolater of his manly graces
and perfections, she had become a proud, cynical, fault-finding,
unforgiving ‘virago.’ This latter term did not suit her at all, but he
considered that it did; for, as usual, by the aid of man’s logic, he
deemed himself the injured party and she the injuring. And irritated
beyond measure at the queenly tranquillity of her demeanour, he muttered
something profane under his breath, and dashing aside the _portière_
with a clatter of its brazen rings and a violence that threatened to
tear its very substance, he left the room.
As soon as he had gone, Delicia moved slowly to the door and shut and
locked it after him; then as slowly returned to her chair, where,
leaning her head back against the carved escutcheon, she quietly
fainted.
*CHAPTER XII*
Next day Delicia was too weak and broken in body and spirit to leave her
bedroom, which she had managed to reach by herself on recovering from
her swoon. Her husband sent her a brief note of farewell by one of the
servants. He was leaving London immediately for Paris, he said, ‘and
when all this nonsense had blown over,’ he would return. Till then he
was ‘hers affectionately.’ She crumpled the note in her hand and lay
still, her fair head fallen wearily back among her pillows, and a great
sense of exhaustion and fatigue numbing all her faculties. A batch of
letters came by the mid-day post, letters from strangers and friends,
all warmly testifying as usual to her genius; and as she read she sighed
heavily and wondered what was the use of it all?
‘They do not know I am dead!’ she said to herself, ‘That all my life is
done with—finished! If I had never known the meaning of love; if I had
never thought and believed that love was truly mine, how much better it
would have been for me! I should have worked on contentedly; I should
not have missed what I had no experience of, and I might—yes, I might
have been really great. Now there is no hope for any more
attainment—Love has murdered me!’
She rested in bed all day, dozing and dreaming and thinking; all night
between the slow-pacing hours she had long waking intervals of strange,
half-troubled, half-mystic musings. She saw herself, so she imagined,
dead;—laid out in her coffin with flowers round her; but as she looked
at her own stiffened corpse she knew it was not herself, she thus saw,
but only the image of what she had been. She, Delicia, was another
being—a being through whose fine essence light and joy were flowing.
She fancied she heard sweet voices murmuring in her ears,—
‘Sorrowful Delicia! Slain Delicia! This is not thine end—work has but
begun for thee, though earth has no more part in either thy toil or
pleasure! Come, Delicia! Love is not dead because of human treachery;
Love is immortal, unconquerable, unchangeable, and waits for thee
elsewhere, Delicia! Come and see!’
And so persistently was she haunted by the impression that something new
and strange awaited her, that almost unconsciously to herself she began
to be expectant of a sudden change in her destinies, though what that
change might be she could not by herself determine.
When she rose from her bed to resume her daily work an idea flashed upon
her,—an idea bold and new, and suggesting itself forcibly for brief and
brilliant literary treatment. Seized by this fresh inspiration, she shut
herself up in her study and worked day after day, forgetting her own
troubles in the fervour of creative energy. She saw no visitors and
went nowhere; her morning ride was all the relaxation she permitted
herself; and she grew paler and paler as she toiled unremittingly with
her pen, and lived a life of almost unbroken solitude all through the
height of the London ‘season.’ The people one calls by courtesy
‘friends,’ grew tired of leaving cards which were not responded to, and
‘society’ began to whisper that ‘it was rather singular, my dear, that
Lord Carlyon should suddenly have left London and gone by himself to
Paris, while that extremely peculiar wife of his remained at home shut
up as closely as if she had the small-pox.’ ‘Perhaps she _had_ the
small-pox,’ suggested the Noodle section of opinion, deeming the remark
witty. Whereupon Lady Brancewith, joining in the general
chitter-chatter, ventured upon the scathing observation that ‘if she
had, it would make her more popular in society, as no one could then be
angry with her for her good looks.’ Which suggestion was voted
‘charming’ of Lady Brancewith; and ‘so generous of Lady Brancewith,
being so lovely herself, to even consider for a moment in a favourable
light the looks of a “female authoress!”—quite too sweet of Lady
Brancewith!’
And the inane whispering of such tongues as wag without any brains to
guide them went on and on, and Delicia never heard them. Her old
friends, the Cavendishes, had left London for Scotland—they hated the
‘season’ with all the monotony of its joyless round—so that there was no
one in town whom she particularly cared to see, And, like the enchanted
‘Lady of Shalott,’ she sat in her own small study weaving her web of
thought, or, as her husband had once put it, ‘spinning cocoons.’
Only on one special day was there a break in her self-imposed routine.
This occurred when two elderly gentlemen of business-like demeanour
arrived carrying small black bags. They were lawyers, and were shown up
to the famous author’s study at once, where they remained in private
converse with her for the greater part of the afternoon.
When they came down again to the dining-room, where wine and biscuits
were prepared for their refreshment, Delicia accompanied them; her face
was very pale, yet calm, and she had the look of one whose mind has been
relieved of an oppressive burden.
‘You have made everything quite clear now, have you not?’ she asked
gently, as she dispensed the wine to her visitors with her usual
hospitable forethought and care.
‘Perfectly so,’ responded the elder of the two legal men; ‘And if you
will permit me to say so, I congratulate you, Lady Carlyon, on your
strength of mind. Had the other will remained in force, your
hardly-earned fortune would have soon been squandered.’
She answered nothing. After a little pause she spoke again.
‘You quite understand that, in the event of my death, you yourself take
possession of my last manuscript, and place it personally in the hands
of my publishers?’
‘Quite so. Everything shall be carried out in exact accordance with
your instructions.’
‘You think,’ she went on hesitatingly—‘that I have given him enough to
live upon?’
‘More than enough—more than he deserves, said the lawyer. ‘To be the
possessor of two hundred and fifty a year for life is a great advantage
in these days. Of course,’ and he laughed a little, ‘he’ll not be able
to afford tandem-driving and the rest of his various amusements, but he
can live comfortably and respectably if he likes. That is quite
sufficient for him.’
‘He has already a sum in his own private bank, which, if placed at
interest, will bring him in more than another hundred,’ said Delicia,
meditatively. ‘Yes, I think it is sufficient. He cannot starve, and he
is sure to marry again.’
‘But you talk as if you were going to leave us at once and for ever,
Lady Carlyon,’ and the old lawyer looked somewhat concerned as he
observed the extreme pallor of her face and the feverish splendour of
her eyes. ‘You will live for many and many a long day yet to enjoy the
fruit of your own intellectual labours—’
‘My dear sir, pray do not talk of my “intellectual labours!” In the
opinion of my husband and of men generally, especially unsuccessful men,
these very labours have rendered me “unsexed.” I am not a woman at all,
according to their idea! I have neither heart nor feeling. I am simply
a money-making machine, grinding out gold for my “lord and master” to
spend.’
Her lawyer looked distressed.
‘If you remember, I told you some time back that I thought you were
unaware of your husband’s extravagance,’ he said. ‘I put it as
“extravagance,”—because I was unwilling to convey to you all the rumours
I had actually heard. Men are naturally fickle; and my experience is
that they always take benefits badly, thinking all good fortune their
right. You made a mistake, I consider, to trust Lord Carlyon so
completely.’
‘What would you have of me?’ asked Delicia, simply. ‘I loved him!’
There followed a silence. Nothing could be said to this, and the two
men of the law munched their biscuits and drank their wine hastily,
conscious of a sudden excitement stirring in them,—a strange impulse,
moving them both to the desire of thrashing Lord Carlyon, which would be
an action totally inconsistent with legal custom and procedure. But the
sight of the fair, grave, patient woman who had worked so hard, who held
such a high position of fame, and who was so grievously wronged in her
private life, had a powerful effect upon even the practical and prosaic
disposition of the two men born to considerations of red tape and wordy
documents; and when they took their leave of her it was with a profound
deference and sympathy which she did not fail to notice. Another time
their evident interest and kindliness would have moved her, but now she
was so strung up with feverish excitement and eagerness to finish the
work she had begun, that external things made very little impression
upon her.
She returned to her writing with renewed zest; Spartan was her chief
companion; and only her maid Emily began to notice how ill she was
looking. She had intended to consult a doctor about her health; but,
absorbed in her work, she put it off from day to day, promising herself
that she would do so when her book was finished. She received no news
whatever from her husband; he was trying the effect of a lengthy absence
and sustained silence on her always sensitive mind.
And so the days went on, through all bright June and the warm beginning
of July, till one morning she entered her room prepared to write the
last portion of what she instinctively felt and knew would lift her
higher among the cold pinnacles of fame than she had ever been. She was
aware of a soft lassitude upon her,—a sense of languor that was more
delightful than unpleasing; the beautiful repose that distinguishes a
studious and deeply-thinking mind, which had been hers in a very great
degree before her marriage, when, as single-hearted Delicia Vaughan, she
had astonished the world by her genius, came back to her now, and the
clouds of trouble and perplexity seemed suddenly to clear and leave her
life as blank and calm and pure as though the shadow of a false love had
never darkened it. The sun fell warmly across her desk, flickering over
the pens and paper; and Spartan stretched himself full length in his
usual place in the window-nook with a deep sigh of absolute content.
And with radiance in her eyes and a smile on her lips, Delicia sat down
and wrote her ‘conclusion.’ Her brain had never been clearer,—thoughts
came quickly, and with the thoughts were evoked new and felicitous modes
of expression, which wrote themselves, as it were, without an effort on
her own part.
Suddenly she started to her feet;—a great and solemn sound was in her
ears, like the stormy murmur of a distant sea, or the beginning of a
grand organ chant, gravely sustained. Listening, she looked wildly up
at the dazzling sunlight streaming through her window pane. What
strange, what distant Glory did she see, that all the light and all the
splendour of the summer day should seem, for that one moment, to be
mirrored in her eyes? Then—she gave a sharp, choking cry, ...
‘Spartan! Spartan!’
With one bound the great dog obeyed the call, and sprang up against her,
putting his huge, soft paws upon her breast. Convulsively she clasped
them close,—as she would have clasped the hands of an only friend,—and
fell back heavily in her chair—dead!
* * * * *
So they found her an hour later,—her cold hands still holding Spartan’s
rough paws to her bosom,—while he, poor faithful beast, imprisoned in
that death-grip, sat patiently watching his mistress with anxious and
loving eyes, waiting till she should wake. For she looked as if she had
merely fallen asleep for a few minutes; a smile was on her lips,—the
colour had not quite left her face,—and her body was yet warm. For some
time no one dared touch the dog, and only at last by dint of sheer force
and close muzzling could they drag him away and lock him up in the yard,
where he filled the surrounding neighbourhood with his desolate howling.
He was ‘only a dog;’ he had not the beautiful reasoning ability of a
man, who is able to console himself easily for the death of friends by
making new ones. He had a true heart, poor Spartan! It is an
unfashionable commodity, and useless, too, since it cannot be bought or
sold. And when all the newspapers had headings—‘Death of Delicia
Vaughan,’ with accounts of the ‘sudden heart failure,’ which had been
the cause of her unexpected end, Lord Carlyon returned in haste to town
to attend the funeral and to hear the will. But he found his presence
scarcely needed,—for the great public, seized by a passionate grief for
the loss of one of its favourite authors, took it upon itself to make
the obsequies of this ‘unsexed’ woman as imposing as any that ever
attended king or emperor. Thousands followed the coffin to the quiet
Mortlake cemetery, where Delicia had long ago purchased her own grave;
hundreds among these thousands wept, and reminded each other of the good
actions, the many kindnesses that had made her suddenly-ended life a
blessing and consolation to the sick and the afflicted, and many
wondered where they should again find so true and sympathetic a friend.
And when it came to be publicly known that all her fortune, together
with all future royalties to be obtained from her books, was left in
equal shares among the poverty-stricken of certain miserable London
districts, with full and concise instructions as to how it was to be
paid and when,—then callous hearts melted at the sound of her name, and
eyes unaccustomed to weeping shed soft tears of gratitude and spoke of
her with a wondering tenderness of worship and reverence as though she
had been a saint. The Press made light of her work, and had scarce a
word of sympathy for her untimely demise; their general ‘tone’ being
that adopted by the late Edward Fitzgerald, who wrote of one of
England’s greatest poets thus:—‘Mrs Barrett Browning is dead. Thank God
we shall have no more “Aurora Leighs!”’ It is the usual manner assumed
by men who have neither the brain nor the feeling to write an ‘Aurora
Leigh’ themselves. All the same, the public ‘rushed,’ in its usual
impulsive fashion, for the last book Delicia had written, and when they
got it, such a chorus of enthusiasm arose as entirely overwhelmed the
ordinary press cackle and brought down the applauding verdict of such
reasoning readers and sober judges who did not waste their time in
writing newspaper paragraphs. Delicia’s name became greater in death
than in life; and only one person spoke of her with flippant ease and
light disparagement; this was her husband. His indignation at finding
her fortune entirely disposed of among ‘charities’ was too deep and
genuine to be concealed. He considered his allowance of two hundred and
fifty a year an ‘insult,’ and he became an ardent supporter of the
tyrannic theories of the would-be little Nero of Germany, who permits a
law to be in active force which unjustly provides that all the earnings
of wives shall belong to their husbands. He considered the
painter-poet-composer-autocrat of the Fatherland an extremely sensible
person, and wished such a law might be carried into effect in England.
He forgot all Delicia’s tenderness, all her beauty, all her
intelligence, all her thoughtfulness and consideration for his personal
comfort; and all her love counted as nothing when set against the manner
in which he considered he had been ‘done’ in the results of his marriage
with an ‘unsexed’ woman of genius. But gradually, very gradually, by
some mysterious means, probably best known to Lady Brancewith, who had
never forgiven the slight inflicted on her by his look and manner when
he suddenly refused to drive home with her after promising to do so,
rumour began to whisper the story of his selfishness, and to comment
upon it.
‘He had committed no crime. Oh, no,’ said society, beginning to waver
in its former adoration of his manly perfections, ‘but he broke his
wife’s heart! Yes, that was it! How he did it nobody quite knew; there
was something about the “Marina” woman at the “Empire,” but nothing was
quite certain. Anyhow, she died very suddenly, and Lord Carlyon was
away at the time.’
And as people nowadays hardly ever express regret for a person’s death,
but immediately ask ‘What money has been left behind?’ the gossips had
ample food for reflection, in the fact that nearly forty thousand pounds
was Delicia’s legacy to the poor.
‘She must have had a very noble nature,’ said the world at last, when
the shrieking pipe of irritated criticism had died away, and when from
the dark vista of death Delicia’s star of fame shone clear, ‘Her husband
was not worthy of her!’
And Paul Valdis, stricken to the soul with a grief beyond expression,
heard this great verdict of the world finally pronounced, with an
anguish of mind, and a despair as tragic as that of Romeo when he found
his lady in her death-like sleep.
‘Too late, too late! My love, my darling!’ he groaned in bitterness of
spirit. ‘What is it worth, all this shouting of praise over your silent
grave? Oh, my Delicia! All you sought was love; so little to ask, my
darling, so little in return for all the generous overflow of your
gifted soul! If you could have loved me; but no! I would not have had
you change your nature; you would not have been Delicia had you loved
more than once!’
And his eyes rested tenderly on the wistful companion of his musing,
Spartan, who had been left to his care in a very special manner, with a
little note from Delicia herself, which was delivered to him by her
lawyers and which ran thus:—
‘DEAR FRIEND,—Take care of Spartan. He will be contented with you, for
he loves you. Please console him and make him happy for my sake.
DELICIA.’
Valdis knew that little letter by heart; it was more priceless to him
than any other worldly possession.
‘Spartan,’ he said now, calling the faithful animal to his side and
taking his shaggy, massive head between his hands, ‘Out of the whole
world that calls our Delicia “famous,” the world that has gained new
beauty, hope and joy from the blossoming of her genius,—only you and I
loved her!’
Spartan sighed. He had become a melancholy, meditative creature, and
his great brown eyes were often suffused with tears. Had he been able
to answer his new master then, he might have said,—
‘Honesty is an ordinary quality in dogs, but it is exceptional in men.
Dogs love and are faithful; men desire, and with possession are
faithless! Yet men, so they say, are higher in the scale of creation
than dogs. I do not understand this. If truth, fidelity and devotion
are virtues, then dogs are superior to men; if selfishness, cunning and
hypocrisy are virtues, then men are certainly superior to dogs! I
cannot argue it out, being only a dog myself; but to me it seems a
strange world!’
And truly it is a strange world to many of us, though perhaps the
strangest and most incomprehensible part of the whole mystery is the
perpetual sacrifice of the good to the bad, and the seeming continual
triumph of conventional lies over central truths. But, after all, that
triumph is only ‘seeming’; and the martyrdom of life and love endured by
thousands of patiently-working, self-denying women will bring its own
reward in the Hereafter, as well as its own terrific vengeance on the
heads of the callous egotists among men who have tortured tender souls
on the rack, or burnt them in the fire, making ‘living torches’ of them,
to throw light upon the wicked deeds done in the vast arena of
Sensualism and Materialism. Not a tear, not a heart-throb of one pure
woman wronged shall escape the eyes of Eternal Justice, or fail to bring
punishment upon the wrong-doer! This we may believe,—this we MUST
believe,—else God Himself would be a demon and the world His Hell!