"In the mute August afternoon
They trembled to some undertune
Of music in the silver air;
Great pleasure was it to be there
Till green turned duskier and the moon
Coloured the corn-sheaves like gold hair."
The atmosphere of Grace Perivale's life was changed. John Faunce's keen
eye for character had not erred in this particular case. Lady Perivale
at Runnymede Grange was not the same woman the detective had conversed
with in Grosvenor Square.
Happy love leaves no room for troubled thoughts in a woman's mind; and
from the hour when Grace learnt that Arthur Haldane was her trusting
and devoted lover, she began to forget the frivolous friends whose
desertion she had so deeply resented. She forgot to be angry, because
she had ceased to care. That outer world, the world of Mayfair and
Belgravia, with its sordid interests and petty ambitions, the world
of South African millionaires and new-made nobility, the world in
which every smart personage was living in some other smart personage's
house, and everybody who wasn't accredited with millions was suspected
of being on the brink of insolvency; that _élite_, over-civilized and
decadent world--dazzling and alluring in the phosphorescent radiance of
decay--seemed so remote from all that makes happiness, that it could
not be worth thinking about.
Her world now lay within so narrow a circle. Her world began and ended
in a poet, critic, and romancer, whose dreams, thoughts, opinions, and
aspirations, filled her mind to overflowing. He was her world, Arthur
Haldane, the man of letters, to whom she was to be married as soon as
this preposterous scandal was swept into the world's great ragbag of
forgotten things.
The words had been spoken at last, words that had been in his heart
two years ago, when Grace Perivale's beauty first flashed like sudden
sunshine into the level grey of his life, and when he discovered that
behind the beauty there was a brain and a heart.
He had held himself in check then, had courted her society under a mask
of indifference, for more than one reason. First, because she was rich,
and a much-talked-of prize in the matrimonial market; next, because
of his jealous fear that Rannock's showy accomplishments and charm of
manner had won her heart.
"How could I hope to prevail--a dry-as-dust scribbler--against a man
who had been called irresistible?" he asked, when Grace reproached him
for his aloofness in that first year of their acquaintance.
"A dry-as-dust scribbler who had written the most pathetic story of the
last half century. Every tear I shed over 'Mary Deane' was a link that
bound me to the man who wrote the book. Of course I don't pretend that
if the man had been fat and elderly--like Richardson--I should have
fallen in love with him. But even then I should have valued him, as the
young women of those days valued the fat little printer. I should have
courted his society, and hung upon his words."
"It is not every novelist who is so lucky," said Haldane. "I think I am
the first, since Balzac, whose book has won him the love that crowns a
life."
What fairer Eden could there be than that reach of the Thames in a fine
August? Other men were turning their faces northward with dogs and
guns, ready for havoc on "the twelfth," or waiting impatiently for "the
first." But Arthur Haldane, who was no mean shot, and had invitations
to half a dozen country houses, behaved like a man who had never lifted
a gun to his shoulder. The veriest cockney could not have been happier
in that river idlesse, in which a punt-pole was his most strenuous
exertion, and to boil a tea-kettle his most exciting sport. The summer
days, the golden evenings were never too long, and the crimson of the
sunset seemed always a surprise.
"I know you must be wanting to kill things," Grace said one evening;
"and you must hate me keeping you dawdling here. I am glad you are not
grouse-shooting, for I have always dreaded the moors since my poor
Hector caught his death in the ceaseless downpour of one dreadful
August day. But why do you not go to your Norfolk friends for the
partridge-shooting?"
"You are very kind and thoughtful, but my Norfolk friends were always a
trifle boring, and they would be intolerable now, if they kept me away
from you."
"That is very flattering to my vanity. But I will not have you tied to
my apron-string."
"I will tell you if ever the string galls. Come what may, I am not
going to leave the neighbourhood of London till your lawsuit has been
settled."
They hoped that everything would be over before the late autumn, so
that they could start for Cairo at the right season; and from Cairo
they might go on to India. They were of a humour to ramble over the
world together; but in the mean time life was so sweet in the Thames
backwaters, among flowering rushes and under dipping willows, and on
the lawn at Runnymede Grange, that they seldom went as much as a mile
afield. Lovers are like children at play in a garden, who dream of
the days when they will be grown up and sail through blue skies in a
balloon, to find where the world leaves off.
Grace looked back, in many a happy reverie, and recalled that year
before the beginning of the scandal, when the man who was now her
impassioned lover had seemed to her cold and distant. Only by his
seriousness in seeking her society, his grave pleasure in ministering
to her love of books, and bringing her in touch with the choicest
things in contemporary literature, could Lady Perivale discover that
his friendship was any more than the admiring regard which every
intelligent man must needs feel for a young and beautiful woman who is
also intelligent. Much as Haldane admired beauty--from its spiritual
essence in a picture by Burne-Jones, to its earthliest form in a
Roman flower-girl on the steps below the Church of the Trinity--his
affections would never have been taken captive by beauty allied with
silliness. He was a man to whom community of thought was an essential
element in love. And, in Grace Perivale, he had discovered mind and
imagination in sympathy with his own thoughts and dreams; and he was
completely happy in her company, happy to be her friend, yet hesitating
to become her lover, till, in some future day, her intimate knowledge
of his character might make it impossible for her to misread his
motives.
* * * * *
And then had come the bitter blow, when he, who had tortured himself
with jealous apprehensions of her liking for Colonel Rannock, heard the
story of those chance meetings in the South.
He had been vehement in his denunciation of the slander. If the story
were so far true that she was the person who had been seen with
Rannock, could any one who knew her doubt for a moment that he had a
legal right to her company, that they had been quietly married, and,
for some reason of their own, chose to delay the publication of their
marriage.
He was laughed at for his vehemence, and for his simplicity.
"Did you never hear of a woman throwing her cap over the mill?" asked
his friend. "Have you lived so long in a civilized world, and don't
you know that women are always doing the most unexpected things? Have
you known no delicately-reared woman take to the gin-bottle and drink
herself to death? Have you never heard of the household angel--the
devoted wife and mother--who, after twenty years of honourable wedlock,
went off with her daughter's Italian singing-master? And these rich
women are the very sort who go wrong. Their opulence demoralizes them.
They are petty Cleopatras, and pine for the fierce passion of a Cæsar
or a Marc Antony."
There was not much stirring in London in the early part of that season,
and the scandal about Lady Perivale was dinned into Haldane's ears
wherever he went. Young women talked about it, in allusive speech, with
a pretence of _naïveté_. What was the story? They pretended not to know
what it all meant; but they knew their mothers were not going to call
upon her ever again; so they opined that it must be something very
dreadful, considering the sort of people their mothers went on visiting
and entertaining season after season. It must be something worse than
the things that were said about Lady Such-and-Such, or even about Mrs.
So-and-So.
Haldane heard, and the iron entered into his soul; and he held himself
aloof from the woman he loved, fearing, doubting, waiting.
"If that man appears upon the scene I shall know it's all over," he
thought.
He walked from his rooms in Jermyn Street to Grosvenor Square every
night, and paced the pavements within view of Lady Perivale's windows,
steering clear of the houses where there were parties, with awnings,
and blocks of bystanders, and policemen, and linkmen. He saw the
lighted windows of the morning-room, and sometimes saw a graceful
shadow flit across the blind, and knew that she was there, and alone.
No masculine form ever passed between the lamp and the windows. Susan
Rodney appeared there once or twice a week, and he sometimes saw her
driven away in a humble four-wheeler, on the stroke of eleven. But the
figure he feared to see never crossed the threshold.
And then a man at his club told him that Rannock had not been in London
that season. He had gone under. He was said to be in America, but that
was as might be. He had come to the end of his tether.
It had been a time of agonizing doubt, expiated by almost as agonizing
remorse. But it was over now, and life was a dream of bliss--a dream of
the fast coming days when Grace Perivale would be his wife, when the
evening shadows would bring no parting, the night no loneliness.
Susan Rodney was an ideal third for a pair of lovers, as she had plenty
of interests and occupations of her own, spending all her leisure in
the composition of a light opera which she had been engaged upon for
years, with only a faint hope of ever getting it produced; perhaps in
Brussels, perhaps in Frankfort, she dared hardly think of London.
Absorbed in the thrilling delight of a quintette, or a chorus, Sue
only gave the lovers her company when they wanted it, which they very
often did, as her bright and cheerful spirit harmonized with their own
happiness. They both liked her, and were both very sure of her sympathy.
In one of their garden _têtes-à-tête_, their talk having drifted on
to Haldane's famous novel, the one work of fiction which had made his
reputation with the general reader, he confessed to having nearly
finished a second story.
"I only began it in May," he said, "during a fit of insomnia. My mind
was full of scorpions, like Macbeth's, and I think I should have gone
mad if I had not summoned those shadows from the unseen world, and set
myself to anatomize them. It is a bitter book, a story of Fate's worst
irony; and in a better period of English literature--in the day of
Scott, or Dickens and Thackeray--it would have stood no chance of being
widely read. But we have changed all that. This is the day of cruel
books. Most of us have turned our pens into scalpels. And I think this
story of mine is cruel enough to hit the public taste."
"There is nothing that touches your life or mine in it?" Grace asked,
with a touch of alarm.
"No, no, no; not one thought. I wrote it while I was trying to forget
you--and trying still harder to forget myself. The shadows that move
in it bear not the faintest resemblance to you or me. It is a sordid
book, a study of human meanness, and the misery that dull minds make
for themselves: pale-grey miseries that gradually draw to a focus and
deepen to blood-red tragedy. But it has one redeeming feature--one
really good man--a city missionary, humbly born, plain, self-educated,
but a Christ-like character. I should have burnt the book unfinished
but for him. He came to my relief when my story and I were sinking into
a slough of despond."
"You talk as if the web were not of your weaving, as if you had no
power over the figures that move in it."
"I have no such power, Grace. They come to me as mysteriously as the
shadows in a dream, and their spell is strong. I cannot create them;
and I cannot change them."
She wanted him to read his story to her before it was printed; but this
was just the one thing he could not do. He could not imagine himself
reading his own words.
"It would make me hate my work," he said. "Every clumsy phrase, every
banal word, would leap out of the page and gibber at me as I read. I
will bring you the first copy fresh from the press, and when you have
read it you shall tell me afterwards whether I am ever to write another
story."
"You shall write another, and another, and go on writing," she answered
gaily. "You will give me a second world, a world peopled with strange
or lovely creatures--villains as colossal as Milton's Satan, heroines
as innocent as his Eve. My life in the world of your imagining
will be almost as intense as your own. You will give me a second
existence, better than the everyday world. You will tell me about your
dream-people, won't you, Arthur, as they spring into life?"
"The fear is that I shan't be able to refrain from talking of them, to
the other half of my soul."
"You cannot weary the other half by much talking."
"Do you think not? I can imagine a husband's art becoming an
unspeakable bore to his wife."
"Not if she loves him and loves his art."
"Ah, there's the rub."
Lady Perivale was recalled from the shadow-world of the novelist by the
substantial apparition of John Faunce, who arrived unannounced on a
sultry afternoon, and found her sitting in the garden with Mr. Haldane
and Miss Rodney, at a table strewn with all the new magazines and some
of the old poets, in those miniature editions that so lend themselves
to being carried about and not read.
"I thought I might venture to call without notice," said Faunce, "as I
have some rather important news for your ladyship."
"Indeed!"
"A libel--a most audacious libel," said Faunce, taking a paper from his
pocket.
"Where? where? What paper?" Grace and Sue exclaimed excitedly.
"Strange to say, in a society paper of most respectable character,
though of a somewhat limited circulation," replied Faunce; "a paper
which, to my knowledge, has never offended in this manner until
now--the _Bon Ton and Cricket Review_, a journal printed at Kennington,
and mostly circulated in the South of London."
He handed the paper to Lady Perivale, who turned the leaves hurriedly,
too agitated to read a line for the first few minutes.
It was an eminently proper paper--a paper that told of dances at
Tooting, private theatricals at Norwood, and At Homes at Tulse Hill,
a paper that described dresses and millinery, and gave receipts for
cornflower creams and jellies made without wine, for cleaning kid
gloves and making golden hair-dye. Pages were devoted to the Oval,
and other pages to school cricket. There was the usual short story of
the ultra-smart world. There was a Denmark Hill celebrity at home.
There was everything nice and proper that a Society paper should
have; and there, amidst all this respectability--like a hideous wen
upon a handsome face--appeared three atrocious paragraphs about Lady
Perivale's _tête-à-tête_ tour with Colonel Rannock; the first setting
forth the surprise of the lady's friends on meeting her travelling
alone with a man of dubious character; the second debating whether
the freedom of _fin-de-siècle_ manners would not permit of any lady
travelling with any gentleman without causing scandal; the third, of a
somewhat grosser tone, winding up with a couplet from Pope:
"Nor Cæsar's empress would I deign to prove,
No, make me mistress to the man I love."
"It's abominable!" cried Grace, flushing crimson, and throwing down the
paper in a rage.
"And you tell me I'm not to horsewhip the scoundrel who wrote that!"
said Haldane, who had read the paragraphs over her shoulder.
"I do--most decidedly," answered Faunce, edging away from him with an
involuntary movement. "We wanted a libel--a gross libel--and we've got
it. We are going to bring an action against the proprietor of the _Bon
Ton_, but we are not going to put ourselves in the wrong by assaulting
him first. No, sir, we shall proceed against the proprietor, editor,
and printer of the _Bon Ton_, and we shall ask for exemplary damages."
"Damages!" exclaimed Grace. "Do you suppose I want the loathsome
creature's money?"
"Why not make it a criminal suit, and send him to prison?" asked
Haldane.
"I think not, sir. Her ladyship's solicitors, Messrs. Harding, have
gone into the matter with me, and we are agreed that a criminal action
is not advisable."
"How does this thing happen to appear so long after the circulation of
the scandal?"
"Ah! that's the question," said Faunce, blandly. "You see, fashionable
gossip takes a considerable time to cross the Thames and filter down to
Tooting. The proprietor--and editor--lives at Tooting, and I dare say,
to his mind, the slander appeared a novelty. I'm glad he didn't get
hold of it sooner, for we should not have been prepared to deal with
the case as we are now."
Miss Rodney had picked up the _Bon Ton_, and was reading the paragraphs
with a frowning brow.
"How can you look at that atrocious stuff?" cried Grace, snatching the
paper from her and rolling it into a ball for her poodle, who rushed
across the lawn with it and then laid himself down and proceeded to
tear it into shreds with his paws and teeth.
"It's lucky that isn't the only copy in existence, Lady Perivale," said
Faunce.