A Fool's Paradise.
At Ashbourne preparations had already begun for the wedding in August.
It was to be a wedding worthy of a duke's only daughter, the well-beloved
and cherished child of an adoring father and mother. Kinsfolk and old
friends were coming from far and wide to assist at the ceremony, for
whom temporary rooms were to be arranged in all manner of places. The
Duchess's exquisite dairy was to be transformed into a bachelor
dormitory. Lodges and gamekeepers' cottages were utilised. Every nook
and corner in the ducal mansion would be full.
"Why not rig up a few hammocks in the nearest pine plantation?" Rorie
asked, laughing, when he heard of all these doings. "One couldn't have
a better place to sleep on a sultry summer night."
There was to be a ball for the tenantry in the evening of the
wedding-day, in a marquee on the lawn. The gardens were to be
illuminated in a style worthy of the château of Vaux, when Fouquet was
squandering a nation's revenues on lamps and fountains and venal
friends. Lady Mabel protested against all this fuss.
"Dear mamma, I would so much rather have been married quietly,' she
said.
"My dearest, it is all your papa's doing. He is so proud of you. And
then we have only one daughter; and she is not likely to be married
more than once, I hope. Why should we not have all our friends round us
at such a time?"
Mabel shrugged her shoulders, with an air of repugnance to all the
friends and all the fuss.
"Marriage is such a solemn act of one's life," she said. "It seems
dreadful that it should be performed in the midst of a gaping,
indifferent crowd."
"My love, there will not be a creature present who can feel indifferent
about your welfare," protested the devoted mother. "If our dear
Roderick had been a more distinguished person, your papa would have had
you married in Westminster Abbey. There of course there would have been
a crowd of idle spectators."
"Poor Roderick," sighed Mabel. "It is a pity he is so utterly aimless.
He might have made a career for himself by this time, if he had chosen."
"He will do something by-and-by, I daresay," said the Duchess,
excusingly. "You will be able to mould him as you like, pet."
"I have not found him particularly malleable hitherto," said Mabel.
The bride elect was out of spirits, and inclined to look despondently
upon life. She was suffering the bitter pain of disappointed hopes.
"The Tragedy of a Sceptic Soul," despite its depth of thought, its
exquisite typography and vellum-like paper, had been a dire and
irredeemable failure. The reviewers had ground the poor little
aristocratic butterfly to powder upon the wheel of ridicule. They had
anatomised Lady Mabel's involved sentences, and laughed at her erudite
phrases. Her mild adaptations of Greek thought and fancy had been found
out, and held up to contempt. Her petty plagiarisms from French and
German poets had been traced to their source. The whole work, so smooth
and neatly polished on the outside, had been turned the seamy side
without, and the knots and flaws and ravelled threads had been exposed
without pity.
Happily the book was anonymous: but Mabel writhed under the criticism.
There was the crushing disappointment of expectations that had soared
high as the topmost throne on Parnassus. She had a long way to descend.
And then there was the sickening certainty that in the eyes of her own
small circle she had made herself ridiculous. Her mother took those
cruel reviews to heart, and wept over them. The Duke, a coarse-minded
man, at best, with a soul hardly above guano and chemical composts,
laughed aloud at his poor little girl's failure.
"It's a sad disappointment, I daresay," he said, "but never mind, my
pet, you'll do better next time, I've no doubt. Or if you don't, it
doesn't much matter. Other people have fancied themselves poets, and
have been deceived, before to-day."
"Those horrid reviewers don't understand her poetry," protested the
Duchess, who would have been hard pushed to comprehend it herself, but
who thought it was a critic's business to understand everything.
"I'm afraid I have written above their heads," Lady Mabel said
piteously.
Roderick Vawdrey was worst of all.
"Didn't I tell you 'The Sceptic Soul' was too fine for ordinary
intellects, Mab?" he said. "You lost yourself in an ocean of obscurity.
You knew what you meant, but there's no man alive who could follow you.
You ought to have remembered Voltaire's definition of a metaphysical
discussion, a conversation in which the man who is talked to doesn't
understand the man who talks, and the man who talks doesn't understand
himself. You must take a simpler subject and use plainer English if you
want to please the multitude."
Mabel had told her lover before that she did not aspire to please the
multitude, that she would have esteemed such cheap and tawdry success a
humiliating failure. It was almost better not to be read at all than to
be appreciated only by the average Mudie subscriber. But she would have
liked someone to read her poems. She would have liked critics to praise
and understand her. She would have liked to have her own small world of
admirers, an esoteric few, the salt of the earth, literary Essenes,
holding themselves apart from the vulgar herd. It was dreadful to find
herself on a height as lonely as one of those plateaux in the Tyrolean
Alps where the cattle crop a scanty herbage in summer, and where the
Ice King reigns alone through the long winter.
"You are mistaken, Roderick," Mabel said with chilling dignity; "I have
friends who can understand and admire my poetry, incomprehensible and
uninteresting as it may be to you."
"Dear Mabel, I never said it was uninteresting," Roderick cried humbly;
"everything you do must be interesting to me. But I frankly own I do
not understand your verses as clearly as I think all verse should be
understood. Why should I keep all my frankness till after the first of
August? Why should the lover be less sincere than the husband? I will
be truthful even at the risk of offending you."
"Pray do," cried Mabel, with ill-suppressed irritation. "Sincerity is
such a delightful thing. No doubt my critics are sincere. They give me
the honest undisguised truth."
Rorie saw that his betrothed's literary failure was a subject to be
carefully avoided in future.
"My poor Vixen," he said to himself, with oh! what deep regret,
"perhaps it was not one of the least of your charms that you never
wrote poetry."
Lord Mallow was coming to Ashbourne for the fortnight before the
wedding. He had made himself wondrously agreeable to the Duke, and the
Duke had invited him. The House would be up by that time. It was a
delightful season for the Forest. The heather would be in bloom on all
the open heights, the glades of Mark Ash would be a solemn world of
greenery and shadow, a delicious place for picnics, flirtation, and
gipsy tea-drinkings. Lord Mallow had only seen the Forest in the
winter. It would be a grand opportunity for him.
He came, and Lady Mabel received him with a sad sweet smile. The
reviews had all appeared by this time: and, except in the _West
Dulmarsh Gazette_ and the _Ratdiff Highway Register_, there had not
been one favourable notice.
"There is a dreadful unanimity about my critics, is there not?" said
the stricken poetess, when she and Lord Mallow found themselves alone
together in one of the orchid-houses, breathing a perfumed atmosphere
at eighty degrees, vaporous, balmy, slumberous.
"You have made a tremendous mistake, Lady Mabel," said Lord Mallow.
"How do you mean?"
"You have given the world your great book without first educating your
public to receive and understand it. If Browning had done the same
thing--if Browning had burst at once upon the world with 'The Ring and
the Book' he would have been as great a failure as--as--you at present
imagine yourself to be. You should have sent forth something smaller.
You should have made the reading world familiar with a style, too
original, and of too large a power and scope, to please quickly. A
volume of ballads and idyls--a short story in simple verse--would have
prepared the way for your dramatic poem. Suppose Goethe had begun his
literary career with the second part of 'Faust'! He was too wise for
that, and wrote himself into popularity with a claptrap novel."
"I could not write a claptrap novel, or claptrap verses," sighed Lady
Mabel. "If I cannot soar above the clouds, I will never spread my poor
little wings again."
"Then you must be content to accept your failure as an evidence of the
tendencies of an essentially Philistine age--an age in which people
admire Brown, and Jones, and Robinson."
Here Lord Mallow gave a string of names, sacrificing the most famous
reputations of the age to Mabel Ashbourne's vanity.
This brief conversation in the orchid-house was the first healing balm
that had been applied to the bleeding heart of the poetess. She was
deeply grateful to Lord Mallow. This was indeed sympathy. How different
from Roderick's clumsy advice and obtrusive affectation of candour.
Mabel determined that she would do her best to make Lord Mallow's visit
pleasant. She gave him a good deal of her society, in fact all she
could spare from Roderick, who was not an exacting lover. They were so
soon to be married that really there was no occasion for them to be
greedy of _tête-à-tête_ companionship. They would have enough of each
other's company among the Norwegian fjords.
Lord Mallow did not care about riding under an almost tropical sun, nor
did he care to expose his horse to the exasperating attacks of
forest-flies; so he went about with the Duchess and her daughter in
Lady Mabel's pony carriage--he saw schools and cottages--and told the
two ladies all the grand things he meant to do on his Irish estate when
he had leisure to do them.
"You must wait till you are married," said the Duchess good-naturedly.
"Ladies understand these details so much better than gentlemen. Mabel
more than half planned those cottages you admired just now. She took
the drawings out of the architect's hands, and altered them according
to her own taste."
"And as a natural result, the cottages are perfection!" exclaimed Lord
Mallow.
That visit to Ashbourne was one of the most memorable periods in Lord
Mallow's life. He was an impressible young man, and he had been
unconsciously falling deeper in love with Lady Mabel every day during
the last three months. Her delicate beauty, her culture, her elegance,
her rank, all charmed and fascinated him; but her sympathy with Erin
was irresistible. It was not the first time that he had been in love,
by a great many times. The list of the idols he had worshipped
stretched backwards to the dim remoteness of boyhood. But to-day,
awakening all at once to a keen perception of his hapless state, he
told himself that he had never loved before as he loved now.
He had been hard hit by Miss Tempest. Yes, he acknowledged that past
weakness. He had thought her fairest and most delightful among women,
and he had left the Abbey House dejected and undone. But he had quickly
recovered from the brief fever: and now, reverentially admiring Lady
Mabel's prim propriety, he wondered that he could have ever seriously
offered himself to a girl of Vixen's undisciplined and unbroken
character.
"I should have been a miserable man by this time if she had accepted
me," he thought. "She did not care a straw about the People of Ireland."
He was deeply, hopelessly, irrecoverably in love; and the lady he loved
was to be married to another man in less than a week. The situation was
too awful. What could such a woman as Mabel Ashbourne see in such a man
as Roderick Vawdrey. That is a kind of question which has been asked
very often in the history of men and women. Lord Mallow could find no
satisfactory answer thereto. Mr. Vawdrey was well enough in his way--he
was good-looking, sufficiently well-bred; he rode well, was a
first-rate shot, and could give an average player odds at billiards.
Surely these were small claims to the love of a tenth muse, a rarely
accomplished and perfect woman. If Lord Mallow, in his heart of hearts,
thought no great things of Lady Mabel's poetic effusions, he not the
less respected her for the effort, the high-souled endeavour. A woman
who could read Euripides, who knew all that was best in modern
literature, was a woman for a husband to be proud of.
In this desperate and for the most part unsuspected condition of mind,
Lord Mallow hung upon Lady Mabel's footsteps during the days
immediately before the wedding. Roderick was superintending the
alterations at Briarwood, which were being carried on upon rather an
extravagant scale, to make the mansion worthy of the bride. Lord Mallow
was always at hand, in the orchid-houses, carrying scissors and
adjusting the hose, in the library, in the gardens, in the boudoir. He
was drinking greedily of the sweet poison. This fool's paradise of a
few days must end in darkness, desolation, despair--everything dreadful
beginning with _d;_ but the paradise was so delicious an abode that
although an angel with a flaming sword, in the shape of conscience, was
always standing at the gate, Lord Mallow would not be thrust out. He
remained; in defiance of conscience, and honour, and all those good
sentiments that should have counselled his speedy departure.