PART I

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THE SLANDERERS

_By WARWICK DEEPING_

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS

PUBLISHERS • MCMV

Copyright, 1904, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

Published February, 1905.

TO

MY GOOD FRIEND

JAMES MACARTHUR

Contents

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

THE SLANDERERS

PART I

I

HAD Zeus Gildersedge been a man susceptible to the more beneficent

influences of nature, history might have chronicled him as a man rich in

the finer æstheticisms of the soul.

The Hun was ever a Hun, though he stormed through the Vale of Tempe or

gazed upon Lombardic lakes, splendid under a cloudless sky. Worthy

follower of some commercial Attila was Zeus Gildersedge, a being granite

to all nobler truths, impervious, irresponsive, unimpressionable, mute.

Orpheus would have abandoned him in despair. A fabulist might have

classed him with Lot’s wife petrified in the plain beyond Sodom.

Zeus Gildersedge, misanthrope and consumer of opium, maintained a

monasticism in his vices and kept the world at bay behind the red-brick

wall that bounded his patrimony. Imagine an antique, gabled house

perched on a hill overlooking the sea, a house of quaint archaicness,

warm of bosom, opulent in roof and the glittering lozenges of its

casements, girdled with a belt of cypresses and yews. The place had

derived a profuse and negligent picturesqueness from its master’s

avarice. Roses bloom even for a miser, and Zeus Gildersedge was content

to suffer the magnanimity of nature. Ivy festooned the casements;

wistaria panoplied the porch; roses, red and white, reared the banners

of Junetide on the walls. The garden was a delectable wilderness, a

dusky pleasaunce smothered with flowering shrubs that claimed a lusty

and superabundant liberty. From the garden green downs dipped southward

to black cliffs and an opalescent sea. North, east, and west upland and

wooded valley stretched dim and variable as a region of romance.

Gold, opium, tobacco, and claret—these were the genii who watched over

Zeus Gildersedge’s autumn years. He was mean in a cosmopolitan sense,

save in the satisfying of his especial sins. In his youth and prime he

had been a brisk swashbuckler in the mercenary wars of commerce. He had

lived between the boards of his ledger, had married a wife, and begotten

one child. He had buried the one and stood half in awe of the other.

Now, at sixty, he lurked like a decapod in his solitary den, and

stretched out his lean, hungry tentacles to grip rentals, dividends, and

the like into his mercenary maw. A hard, flint-eyed old ragamuffin,

tough for all his wine-bibbing, with a soul of leather and a heart of

clay, he was never seen abroad save when he trudged five miles down-hill

in his green coat and greasy hat to deposit pelf in the bank at

Rilchester or to collect the rentals of sundry squalid cottages he owned

in that town. You might see him on a Monday morning standing at cottage

doors and ciphering solemnly in a dirty, little, blue-leaved ledger. He

never gave away a halfpenny. If he favored any one with a letter, he

never stamped the envelope. As for charities, he looked on them as the

sentimental hobbies of a fond and spendthrift public. There was no

parson in Christendom who could have wheedled a donation out of him,

pleaded he ever so plausibly.

It would be but a reasonable inference that such a father should possess

something peculiar in the way of a child, and Joan Gildersedge might

have been apostrophized as the supremest possible contrast to her sire.

Under the gray thatch of the one lurked much that was ignoble in the

mind—avarice, an ignorant insolence, a coarse and blasphemous

infidelity. Zeus Gildersedge personified much that was brutally typical

of a British Midas. His daughter, with a strong and innocent perversity

of soul, might have given Shakespeare a Virgilia and to civilization a

star that could have regenerated a decaying chivalry.

The girl had received no education in the scholastic sense. She had

escaped certain of the tawdry and superficial embellishments of

civilization. From her meagre mine of literature—meagre numerically,

but boasting intrinsic opulence—the girl had culled a strange medley of

facts and sentiments. Shakespeare had unbosomed to her a god-man

speaking to a precocious child. She had dreamed through _The Faerie

Queene_ and Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. History had bulked largely in

her calendar. She could have described to you the campaigns of Julian

the Apostate, the Pandects of Justinian, the life of Savonarola, done to

death in Medicean Florence. She was innocently wise, yet supremely

ignorant, nor had she ever entered a church. A pure pagan, religion had

never created in her a false and penitential humility, an erotic

brooding upon the supposed shortcomings of her own nature. She was

cheerfully positive, not a mawkish and emotional negation of sense. With

the ingenious idealism of a child she estimated the world generously and

boasted of no instinctive cynicism. Evil was a quality to be studied

vaguely and dispassionately in books. No harm had touched her heart, nor

had she learned to mistrust others. She had read of murder, adultery,

theft, and the like. She supposed these things to exist, yet even

intuition had not prompted her to project sin into the narrow and

visible world that girded her youth.

Fortunately for Joan Gildersedge, she had arrived at no candid

comprehension of her father’s character. He was the only old man

experience had as yet apportioned to her, and she could claim no

examples to contradict the habitual surliness of age. Zeus Gildersedge’s

perpetual plaint was that of dire poverty, a protestation that his

daughter had come to consider as inevitable as sunrise. True, he was

morose, shabby, hard, reticent, and unlovely. Yet these very

shortcomings had no air of strangeness for the girl. She had grown up

under the shadow of avarice and ethical annihilation, and had come to

consider such things among the natural phenomena of nature. She was

neither particularly happy nor particularly miserable. None of the

common experiences of girlhood had been hers. She had known neither love

nor sympathy, friendship nor pleasure, brimming life nor the lack of it.

And yet in the May of her girlhood she evidenced the example of a soul

evolving within itself, of an individuality bourgeoning spontaneously

under the sun, a stately plant starting into purple and red amid ruins

and solitude. Unconscious of the inevitable law working in her own

being, she followed her fashionless instincts, unknown of others,

unknown even of herself.

Picture a low-ceilinged, mullion-windowed room, hung with faded red

curtains, carpeted with gray drugget, embellished with sundry

oil-paintings of dingy landscapes and impossible rusticities. Four

high-backed oak chairs stood stiffly round the heavy mahogany table. A

tattered rug thresholded the fireless grate. An escritoire stood against

one wall, a melancholy bookcase against another. A cheap French clock on

the mantel-piece chided the prodigal hours. On either side Romanesque

warriors in bronze straddled impetuous chargers.

By a window, whose lozenged panes were swept by festoons of ivy, Zeus

Gildersedge sat in a cane-backed arm-chair. An antique round table stood

beside him, bearing a decanter of claret, a small phial of laudanum, a

couple of glasses, a tobacco-jar, ink-pot, and quill pen. He was a

short, spare man, clad in rusty gray, collarless, dishevelled, unkempt

as to beard and poll. The slant light of the western sun seemed to

impress a peculiar pallor upon his waxen face. There were numberless

wrinkles about his gray eyes, with their minutely contracted pupils. His

mouth ran a hard, tense, anæmic line under his large nose. Eyebrows and

beard were bushy, leonine, barbaric. A lethargic arrogance appeared to

possess the man, a mean, self-centred torpor that seemed in actual

harmony with the atmosphere of the room.

Zeus Gildersedge was figuring lazily on the back of a dirty envelope,

the cuffs of his gray shirt hanging unbuttoned over his bony wrists. A

financial journal lay open on his knees. Now and again he would yawn

soundlessly, and sip the glass that held the brown-red Lethe that he

loved. As he scribbled, his hands quivered slightly. Hunched in his

chair he looked like some sinister troll concocting mischief over his

cups.

On a sudden some subtle savor assailed his nostrils, a steaming scent of

sacrifice that caused Zeus Gildersedge to straighten alertly in his

chair. He sniffed the air with his big, carnivorous nose. The paper,

with an expostulatory murmur, slipped from his knees to the floor.

“Onions, is it!”

A more vigorous investigation approved the villany.

“Damn that woman! She’s always cooking two vegetables, the glutton!”

He rose and rang the bell, and stood listening to the solitary clangor

that came echoing through the silent house. The sordid minutiæ of his

avaricious household were ever weighing on the man’s mind. Zeus

Gildersedge could break his heart, or his apology for that organ, over

the untimely disappearance of a pound of butter.

A stout wench answered the bell, a loosely ample person, with red

cheeks, glossy jet hair, and scintillant brown eyes. Her hair was

fringed about a sensual face; she wore a red-flannel blouse, a black

skirt, and certain tawdry fripperies that denounced the donor. She was

Zeus Gildersedge’s only servant, and might indeed have been included

with his opium and his claret as an especial luxury selfishly cherished

for the sake of avarice.

“What d’yer want?”

There was a familiar and insolent frankness in the voice that seemed to

imply that no very abundant respect was wasted between master and

servant.

“What are you cooking onions for?”

“To eat, of course.”

“Pah! you cook enough for a tavern. What’s the use of talking to you of

economy. I’ll take it out of your wages.”

“No, you won’t,” said the woman by the doorway, pouting out her lips.

“I’m not here to starve.”

Zeus Gildersedge turned his back on her.

“Bring in supper,” he snarled.

“You’re crusty to-night, master.”

“Don’t answer me, woman. Bring in supper.”

“Miss Joan ain’t in.”

“Bring in supper.”

“Taters and sheeps’ ribs. I hope that’ll suit. Wouldn’t ruin a pauper.

Have any cheese?”

“Bread’s enough for a Christian.”

“It’s stale; but you’ll eat less. Ain’t we economic!”

Zeus Gildersedge returned to his chair and his paper, muttering under

his breath. He had not been seated five minutes when a young girl

entered the room, an old sun-hat trimmed with red roses in one hand, a

basket of primroses in the other. She set the basket on the table and

seated herself down in a window-seat with the air of one who has learned

the wisdom of self-repression in her intercourse with her father. Joan

Gildersedge could read the man’s humor as fairly as she could decipher

the face of the sky. His prevailing mood in her presence was gray,

northerly, and cheerless. She knew that it was useless to approach him

when the cloud of avaricious calculation hung low over his brain.

Considered feature by feature, Joan Gildersedge escaped the vulgar

charge of being declared pretty. Considered as an individual creation,

as a woman, she possessed a charm that was inevitable and unique. She

had great, gray eyes, a large chin, a clear, satiny complexion, and

delicate coloring. Her hair was abundant, glossed with a golden tinge,

drawn back loosely and knotted low upon her neck. Her neck, indeed, was

the most lovely portion of her figure—long, graceful, with a perfect

sweep from her shoulders, smooth, stately as a gracious tower. She had

long limbs, a big yet somewhat bony frame, a bosom girlish and hollowed

under the shoulders. There was a rich and generous amplitude about her

face and figure that made her appear womanly beyond her years.

Zeus Gildersedge thrust the envelope on which he had been scribbling

into his breast coat-pocket. He turned and looked at the girl over his

shoulder with a blank apathy that was scarcely parental. Joan

Gildersedge had always been an inexplicable phenomenon to her father.

Strangely enough, he stood in certain awe of her, having conceived

against his will a species of wintry respect for the strong and

mysterious magic of her youth. Her simple serenity baffled his

Philistian prejudices. Her very obedience seemed the calm wisdom of one

who humors the moods of a comrade deserving more of pity than contempt.

Probably Zeus Gildersedge guessed shrewdly in his heart that he had

begotten a being whose star dwarfed his petty, trafficking, miserable

world. The girl’s soulful superiority often angered Zeus Gildersedge,

exaggerating his rough and rugged mannerisms towards his child.

“You’re late,” was his salutation.

For answer she lifted her basket of golden blooms, like a child who

offers an oblation to some god.

“But I have gathered all these flowers.”

Zeus Gildersedge sniffed and rustled the pages of his paper. Nothing was

beautiful to him that did not proffer profitable barter.

“Can’t feed on primroses. You’ve got a new dress on—eh?”

“Not very new, father.”

“The more reason you should be careful. My bills for finery are big

enough in the year. I can do with a suit of clothes for three years; a

woman grumbles if she has only three dresses in twelve months.

Superlative vanity. Pity we are not born with fur.”

The girl laughed, a laugh devoid of malice or of self-justification. She

took the flowers from her basket and began to bind them into posies, her

large hands looking very white in the light of the sun. She was unvexed

by such economical tirades, having grown as accustomed to her father’s

grumblings as to the growling of the sea.

“You ought to be grateful for having only one daughter,” she said,

“since I am such a burden.”

“I am,” retorted the man, surlily, burying his face behind the pages of

finance.

Supper was laid on the heavy mahogany table by the woman Rebecca. Zeus

Gildersedge drew his cane-backed chair before the steaming dish of stew.

He ate meagrely himself, but watched his daughter’s plate with a species

of perpetual dissatisfaction. Her healthy appetite irritated his more

ascetic instincts. It even grieved him to see the last crust filched

from the trencher.

It had grown dusk by the time the table had been cleared, and Rebecca,

lighting a single candle, set it on Zeus Gildersedge’s table by the

window. She was bidden to close the casement lest the draught should

waste the wax. The girl Joan was hovering between the bookcase and the

door. Her restless vacillation brought a characteristic rebuke from the

man by the table.

“Sit down, sit down.”

The girl caught up her hat.

“I’m for the garden.”

“Get out, then, and don’t fuss. What the devil are you going to do out

there in the dark?”

Joan Gildersedge was kneeling on the window-seat, peering up through the

casement, the candle-light glimmering on the gold in her hair.

“The sky streams stars,” she said.

“Damn the stars!”

“They are splendid.”

“The sun’s a useful fellow; the stars, idle devils, a pack of loafers

debauching round the moon. They don’t ripen the crops or fruit. Talk

common-sense.”

“The moon’s better than candle-light, father.”

“Rot! you can’t tote up figures by moonlight.”

Joan Gildersedge abandoned the philosopher to his ledger and took refuge

amid the yew-trees, sombre under the stars. The trees seemed to whisper

to her cheering natural lore, a calm optimism that baffled care. Before

her stretched an unkempt, dusky lawn, rank grass running riot to the

very curb of a low, red-brick wall. Beyond, the dark swell of a hill

leaped southward to the cliffs, and below shone the subastral silver of

the sea.

The girl leaned against a great pine whose boughs arabesqued the sky. A

quiet breeze came, sighed, and played about her face. She stood there

motionless in the half-gloom, her hands hanging listless, her eyes

glimmering under the dusky coronal that swept her forehead. The solitude

seemed to symbolize the solemn calm of the Universal Spirit, a soundless

sympathy that enveloped the world.

The stars, the sea, the night breeze, and a woman’s soul! Eternal tones

evolving harmony from chaotic discords! Avarice, brutality, unlovely

ignorance, and lust! Joan Gildersedge was Joan Gildersedge despite these

excrescences of a debased progenitor. They touched her no more than clay

can scratch a diamond. Though they enveloped her external being, they

could not transform her soul. She lived within herself, conscious,

spontaneous, inevitable. Her desires were spreading in prophetic dreams

over a more magnanimous horizon. She was a gem hid in a casket, waiting

for the lifting of the lid that she might shine.

Behind the casement the candle had completed its limitation of liberty.

A hand rattled on the window-frame. Zeus Gildersedge’s nightly luxury

had flickered to its socket, measured by two inches of wax nicked off

neatly with an avaricious thumb-nail. His daughter, obeying the tyranny

of greed, went slowly from under the starlight to bed.

II

THE village of Saltire straggled red-roofed up a green valley that

branched northward from the shimmering ringlets of the Mallan. It was a

sensuous patch of color, smothered up in woodland, warm and sun-steeped,

overrun with roses. On either flank hills ascended, barriering the

Saltire homesteads with tiers of trees. Sun and moon climbed over

nebulous pines and larches to shine on red roof and flower-enamelled

garden. Southward, moorland and meadow stretched towards the port of

Rilchester and the sea.

Antiquarians had found in Saltire relics of considerable archæological

interest. The guide-books expatiated sentimentally upon the wonders of

St. Winifred’s Well, and on the church whose Norman nave had attached

unto itself an Early English choir. Saltire was one of the wondrous few

churches of repute where Cromwell had not stabled his horses. Sundry

fine brasses blazoned the walls. Two crusaders slept cross-kneed in the

chancel. Even a poet of distinction had written an ode under the

patriarchal yew-tree in the churchyard. As for the cottages huddled

under the benediction of the tower, they were as varied in humor as the

centuries that had given them birth. Elizabethan, Jacobite, Georgian, a

museum of British bourgeois architecture. There were only two new

buildings in the village—a bald, blatant, granite-eyed chapel and a

tavern, florid and cheerful. At the two village shops you could purchase

all manner of merchandise, teething-powders and stationery, boot-polish

and bacon.

Though the woodland valley above the Mallan burned a glorious Arcady,

worthy of the glimmering armor of Arthurian princes, its inhabitants

could hardly boast much kinship with such æsthetic surroundings. The

Saltire folk, big-wigs and boors alike, were far from being Utopian

either in morality or in creed. An oppressive narrowness took its text

from the pulpit. For the Saltire sinners hell flamed with all its

puerile and astounding fury. An atmosphere of stolid self-satisfaction

pervaded the social ethics of the place. The philosophy of the local

potentates smacked of vinegar; the average intelligence recalled the

biblical “needle’s eye,” since nothing bulky could pass through it.

There were clerical sermons on a Sunday and clerical arrogances during

the week, flavored with an apathetic egotism and sour charity. The

ladies of the village indulged largely in sundry Christian

philanthropies, and yet were consistently unchristian in every larger

sense. The laboring folk toiled, drank, and begot children. Suns came

and went, but Saltire endured in pristine narrowness of soul.

The local celebrities were well differentiated and quaintly

characteristic. There was the Reverend Jacob Mince, the vicar, lean,

complacent, uxorious, and parsonic, a man who intoned through his nose,

patronized creation, and was very wise concerning cabbages. Mrs. Mince,

the vicaress, big, pallid, with a melancholy air of dilapidated

Protestantism, contrasted with Mrs. Marjoy, the doctor’s wife, whose red

face tilted its spectacles in the defence of virtue. Then there were the

three Misses Snodley, maiden ladies of irreproachable morals, who drove

a donkey chaise, delighted in scandal, and indulged in missionary work

at a discreet distance. Lastly stood Mrs. Jumble, the intellectual light

of the village, a most precise and pompous person, who read Shakespeare

and delivered decretals on the conduct of life generally. In truth,

there were numberless folk whose virtues it would be wearisome to

chronicle and whose vices were inevitable and commonplace. Saltire was

an orthodox and Christian village. It knew not Spinoza and would have

martyred Kant.

Saltire Hall stood on a bluff, oak-girdled hill-side that sloped

southward towards the water-meadows of the Mallan. Elizabethan in mood

and feature, its tall chimney-stacks towered above the trees, its

casements glimmered silver through the green. A rose-flecked terrace,

archaic gardens, fish-ponds, and a wild fragment of park-land maintained

a sympathetic setting to the house, over whose eaves a quaint melancholy

brooded, as though the old manor found the Victorian present

incompatible with the past.

There was a considerable gradation between bewigged and dark-featured

Jacobites and the person of John Strong, Esq., a brazen bullionist,

plump with the prosperity of a successful mercantile career. Saltire

Hall—armor, ancestors, memories included—had fallen into the callous

hands of a nineteenth-century tea merchant. John Strong, Esq., in the

plenitude of years had gotten unto himself a picturesque and peaceful

habitation. He had embarked his family upon the duck-pond of county

society. He had become a power in Christendom, a ponderous autocrat

heading the notabilities of an English village. He was a great man so

long as he remained within two leagues of the village pump.

John Strong lived a British patriarch in his own household. His

philosophy bulwarked itself upon solid state principles. He was orthodox

to the backbone, a discreet and conventional Christian, an upholder of

the monarchy, and a most punctilious church-warden. He possessed the

arrogance of conviction begotten of long success. He could forgive a

debt, but could not pardon any impropriety that based its being upon

original intuition. His prejudices were like caltrops strewn before the

advance of any unfamiliar philosophy. Question his convictions and he

would vote you a fool or a prig, according to your age. He was as

incapable of stomaching argument as a Jew of breakfasting off bacon.

John Strong numbered among his household chattels a daughter and a son.

Twenty years had elapsed since their mother had been clamped down under

a marble slab in a suburban cemetery. Judith, the daughter, mistressed

the house Martha-like under her father’s supervision. Gabriel, the son,

basked in the sunshine of parental favor and accepted with indolent

resignation the somewhat enervating ease of fatherly patronage.

Gabriel Strong had emerged from a university circle when a certain

sensuous æstheticism had claimed many disciples from the ripening

generation. He had imbibed certain fine sentimentalities, some

affectations, much psychical color, and not a little genuine idealism. A

contemplative and somewhat lazy youth, he was a member of the romantic

school, a man tinged with a tender Celtic melancholy, something of a

fatalist regarding the materialisms of life, and not very fervent over

any particular creed. His father, who believed in culture without

comprehending its significance, simultaneously admired and patronized

his son. John Strong had received his education at a third-rate

boarding-school, and yet appreciated in an obtuse and mercenary manner

the social advantages of Eton and Oxford. He had considered culture as a

creditable investment in the person of his heir. He intended him to be a

gentleman of independence, singularity, and distinction. Strangely

enough, he had no desire to make a mercantile Stylites of him on an

office-stool.

Now Gabriel Strong had eccentricities; and he was something of a poet.

Not that a poetic inclination can be considered as an eccentricity in

these days when the knack is too universal to be genuine. Gabriel had

much of the Maurice de Guérin about him. He would trudge miles to see

the sea on a moonlight night, or tumble up at dawn to watch the sun rise

over the woods. He was mobile, impressionable, sensitive as dew swinging

on the gossamer of a spider’s web. This very sensitiveness tempted to

make him weak and pusillanimous in the minor affairs of life. Living

largely in his own mental atmosphere, he approached actual existence

with a listless apathy born of contempt. The past with its golden

pageantry of splendor and romance alone inspired in him the desire of

being.

On a certain April morning the master of Saltire Hall stood watching

several workmen who were laying the foundations of a new cow-house at

the home farm attached to the estate. The local bailiff had been

listening with discreet reverence to the tea merchant’s views on certain

agricultural technicalities. John Strong delighted in Arcadian hobbies

and devoured much scientific literature on the subject. He had his own

beasts, pigs, and poultry; his own crops; his own dairy; his own

drainage system, septic tank included. Possibly he lost some hundreds a

year in his farming, but that was a detail in his expenditure that gave

him no qualms of conscience.

Having meditated sufficiently over the new cow-house walls, Squire

Strong, as he loved to be called, plodded back alone over the meadows

towards the oak-trees dewing the park. John Strong was in an ambitious

mood. His cogitations rose from the contemplation of liquid manure to

the consideration of matrimony as a social investment. John Strong had

many choice schemes—agricultural, matrimonial, ethical: he had promised

a new vestry to the Reverend Jacob Mince. He had purchased sundry prize

bullocks for the improvement of his stock. Moreover, he had cast an eye

upon the luxurious comeliness of the Honorable Ophelia Gusset, and was

inclined to purchase her as a mate for Gabriel, his son.

John Strong, threading the rose-garden and passing betwixt high hedges

of yew, climbed the western stairway that led to the terrace fronting

the house. The morning rejoiced in mild heat, and John Strong was

corpulent and somewhat asthmatic. As he stood wiping his forehead with a

red silk handkerchief his son Gabriel emerged from the French window of

the library, the pockets of his Norfolk jacket padded with a

sketch-book, a paint-box, matches and tobacco, and a volume of

Swinburne’s poems. Tall and slim as a cypress, with a finely chiselled

face, a sallow yet bronzed complexion, Gabriel Strong won admiration

even from the dispassionate glance of a father. A red scarf was knotted

under the collar of his flannel shirt. There was a certain Dantesque air

about him. He reminded one of some slim and romantic figure taken from a

pre-Raphaelite wood-cut.

“Off sketching, eh?”

“To Cambron Head.”

“A ten-mile walk. Young blood runs brisk. I suppose the Saltire bounds

are too narrow for the new generation. You young folk are too damned

expansive, too sentimental. No man ever earned good dollars by

sentiment. You’ll be back to dinner?”

“Perhaps.”

The elder gentleman, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, had

established himself against the balustrading of the southern stairway of

the terrace. Sentiment did not express itself vividly upon his

countenance. He had a big, clean-shaven jaw, a thick, protuberant lower

lip, a somewhat Semitic nose, and gray, lustreless eyes. A rough tweed

suit, a soft felt hat, and buck-skin gaiters constituted an attire that

John Strong deemed in keeping with his rustic habits. He was a short

man, thick-set, with a certain solid arrogance of demeanor. His keen

northern nature took life prosaically upon business principles.

“Stent’s getting on fast with the cow-house,” he remarked. “I’m having

twenty stalls, each to hold a couple of beasts. The drinking-troughs are

to be on the self-replenishing system. Stent advises a ‘Stafford-brick’

floor. I think they’re going to overstep the estimate. Still, I sha’n’t

worry about fifty pounds or so. Work well done is worth cash.”

Gabriel Strong received the news with an air of languid and exotic

enthusiasm. His father’s farming ventures did not interest him vastly;

even the excellences of artificial manure awoke no joy in him. Father

and son were always colliding dismally on such topics. Gabriel found it

a perpetual trial of filial respect to escape from appearing bored by

his father’s hobbies.

“Those heifers are to come from Heatherstoke at the end of the week,”

the elder man continued. “I shall drive into Rilchester and take you

with me. I want to see Murchison about that fencing. And, by-the-way, I

heard from the major by the morning’s post. He sent me Mold & Company’s

price-list; I have been looking it over; their prices are ten per cent.

more reasonable than those of that London firm. These Americans bust our

manufacturers. Be back to dinner, now.”

Thirty years of tyranny over his commercial minions had developed in

John Strong a certain abrupt and peremptory method of address. He often

spoke to his son with something of the air he would unconsciously have

adopted to his office-boy. It was unintentional, but it often irritated.

“I may be late,” quoth Gabriel, looking out over wood, hill, and meadow

towards the sea.

“The Gussets and Colonel Delaware are dining with us at seven. Don’t

forget it.”

“I had, as a matter of fact.”

“What a memory you have for actualities. I believe you’d let this place

go to rack and ruin in six months.”

“Bad farming produces artistic effects. I should as a matter of

principle let my thorn hedges grow as they liked, and I should welcome

red poppies into my fields of wheat.”

“And grow beans for the scent, I suppose. Reserve your eccentricities

for dinner-time; Ophelia Gusset will expect to be entertained.”

John Strong scrutinized his son’s face for any confession of color or

confusion.

“I have a great admiration for Ophelia,” he suggested. “Really fine

women are rare in the country—women of style and spirit. A smart girl

is a relief after giggling children bred in parsonages and flouncing

hoydens fit only for milk-pans.”

Gabriel retorted monosyllabically. He rarely indulged in filial

confidences.

“Ophelia Gusset won’t be a spinster long,” resumed the pandar. “If I

were a youngster, by George! I’d make a bid for the girl. Don’t fag

yourself or you’ll be sleepy to-night. You must talk, you know; girls

don’t like a dull dog, and the Gussets are up to date.”

Gabriel moved slowly down the steps.

“I shall be back by six,” he said.

“Very good. Don’t go and break your neck on those damned cliffs.”

The day was lusty with the red sap of youth. A myriad shafts of gold

streamed upon the bourgeoning woods. The earth piled flowers in her

green lap and gemmed her bosom glorious with many colors. Poplars waved

their stately towers of amber athwart the blue. Wind flowers shivered in

the breeze. Nature seemed a Greek girl flashing a primrose kirtle over

emerald lawns. Flowers, purple and red, burned where her white feet had

smitten the earth with desire.

Gabriel Strong strode on towards the sea, a young Paris red and radiant

from the solemn sigh of Ida’s pines. It was the man now who wandered

through the meadows, threaded the woods, and climbed gaunt moorland

smiting into a golden south—the man of fire and fibre, the passionate

pilgrim following the wild torch of desire. Legend lore and love were

brilliant in his being. In solitude he found his own strength, his own

soul. Elsewhere, like the damsel in some ancient fable, it changed

suddenly into a withered, morose, and quaking hag.

As a man of leisure, Gabriel Strong had suffered in strength from the

enervation of parental patronage. Like many men of considerable mental

culture, he was content to endure the small tryannies of life, not

troubling to assert his individuality against people by whom he was

misunderstood. Silence is the best harness to baffle fools. He was free

in his own world of thought, a serf in the domain of domestic trifles.

He was amiable, somewhat indolent, a detester of argument. His father’s

platitudes bored but did not rouse him. He was sleepily indifferent to

trivial criticism. Consequently he had earned in the domestic circle a

reputation for docility which was undeserved. The parental prejudices

were beneath his horizon. He ignored them by being reservedly amiable.

It was not in his nature to quarrel about the number of pips in an

orange.

A two hours’ pilgrimage, and the cliffs rose solemn and stupendous above

the azured silver of the sea. Sinuously strong the waves rolled with

lambent thunder upon the black bosoms of the rocks. Gulls winged

pearl-bright over the blue. Arcs of smooth greensward cut the heavens. A

solemn noise, like the superstitious murmurs of a world, rose with a

multitudinous monotony from the strand.

Gabriel, weary yet exultant, stretched himself on a hillock that verged

the cliff. To the east dense banks of gorse were bursting into flame. To

the west a deep indenture in the rocks crescented a bay whose threshold

of foam and pavement of gilded sand stretched solemn under the

adamantine shadows of the cliffs. Bulwarked by great buttresses of

stone, a small lagoon lay sheltered from the waves. Amber, purple, and

green, it glimmered in the manifold lights and shadows of the place. At

flood the sea poured strife into its calm; at ebb, a fathom deep, it

took its temper from the sky.

Gabriel Strong lay and stared at the clouds in a stupor of sensuous

delight. The sun beat upon him warm and beneficent, a guerdon of gold.

The sea sang like a Norse giant; the wind tossed the torches of the

gorse upon the downs. Liberty seemed to tread the waves; her feet smote

foam from the green, brilliant billows.

The heart of the man upon the cliff expanded in the sunshine; his soul

awoke in the wind and pinioned through a more splendid atmosphere. He

read lyrics, sang, shouted to the sea, saw gulls wheeling at the sound

of his voice. Snatches of Shakespearian verse, stately and tender, moved

in his brain. He could fancy Tristram’s sails rising out of the west or

Spanish galleons ploughing solemn under the sun.

Possibly he had never comprehended to the full the prophetic pain of his

own emotions. As yet he had suffered no bruising by the world; nor had

he learned the ignominies that assail a generous instinct and sentiment

too rich for barter. Sad are the revelations that meet the idealist in

the Gehenna of actuality. Like Dante, he will often discover himself an

exile wandering through the world with eyes fixed on a dream face

cloistered in heaven.

Coincidences astonish us; we smite our breasts and call upon that

mysterious genius named of men Providence. Gabriel, turning upon his

elbow and resting his head on his palm, gazed absorbedly at the sea and

sand clasped by the black crescent of the rocks. As from the illumined

pages of a book, a poem in the flesh gleamed out to confront his

philosophy.

The bay shone solitary as some inlet echoing to a primeval sea. Yet

sudden from behind a giant bowlder stranded under the umbrage of the

cliff a white figure came pillaring the yellow sand. With hair blowing

over bosom, stringing the breeze with golden scourges, a girl ran

towards the margin of the lagoon. Her limbs gleamed snowy in the sun.

The waters received her with a gush of foam, and a myriad dimples

tonguing diamond-like over the pool. White arms glimmered amid a wheel

of streaming hair. The man on the cliff crouched low and crimsoned like

one caught in the act of theft.

Again, bewildered as a mortal who had seen Diana bathing in some forest

mere, he watched the girl rise pure and radiant from the waters. He saw

her wring the salt sea from her streaming hair, her large, fair face

turned wistfully towards the south. He saw all this, conceived great awe

and sudden sanctity of soul. And when the rocks had hidden her from

sight, he arose and turned homeward towards Saltire and the woods, a

strange melancholy, an indefinite sadness burdening his being.

III

FIVE miles from Saltire Hall stood Gabingly Castle, a modern “mediæval”

structure, devoted to the fortunes of Lord Gerald Gusset, a Georgian

peer. The Gussets of Gabingly were the social autocrats of the

neighborhood, dispensing fame from their crested card-cases. It had been

a great day for John Strong of Saltire when the Honorable Misses Gusset

had partaken of tea in the “red drawing-room” of the hall. Mincing Lane

and the City had faded into an irreferable past.

At Saltire that night the panelled dining-room was lit by lamps hung

with crimson lace. The table was scintillant with silver, decorated with

luxurious flowers and broad-leafed palms.

Dinner-tables often resemble a suburban street where every person prays

to be preserved from his neighbor. And Gabriel Strong was in no mood for

word-fencing that evening. Preoccupied with his own thoughts, he

surveyed his partner with a melancholy reserve that was eminently

Byronic.

“Sherry, please,” said the Honorable Miss Gusset, crumbling bread with

her plump pink fingers and casting an amused smile at the reticent being

at her elbow. “I had always heard, Mr. Strong, that you were such a

garrulous and enlightened person!”

Gabriel looked into the woman’s brown eyes.

“Apparently my reputation has been assailed,” he said; “consider me a

dullard; I deserve the taunt.”

Miss Blanche Gusset reprimanded him with playful scorn.

“Young man,” she said, “have you reflected that it is rude to seem bored

over the soup? I must ask you to consider my reputation.”

The rebuked one smiled.

“Who could imperil the treasure?” he asked.

“You forget, sir, that Mrs. Marjoy, with her quince-jelly eyes and her

peony complexion, considers herself the one fascinating woman in

Saltire. When I tell you that she has been squinting at us venomously

through her spectacles you should be able to foresee the future.”

“Need you dread the lady?”

“My dear Gabriel, Mrs. Marjoy will relate to all her friends how bored

you were by me at your father’s dinner-table. Remember that I am still

in the marriage market and must defend myself against the calumnies of

my fellow-shes.”

“Hence my responsibility.”

“To aid me in maintaining an eligible exterior.”

Blanche Gusset, Gabriel’s neighbor, was a pert, plump, and slangy young

person, very rubicund and very pushful. Her vitality was phenomenal, her

vigor Amazonian. She feared neither sun nor freckles, frumps nor

fashions. Moreover, she was the one woman in the neighborhood who could

attack and rout the redoubtable Mrs. Marjoy, that most Christian Medusa,

who attended the eucharist fasting and concocted malignities an hour

later over the breakfast-table.

Her sister Ophelia, who faced her over the silver and the flowers,

proffered a contrast that was peculiar and piquant. The elder sister, a

tall and supersensuous blonde, listened with languid frigidity to the

banalities of the Reverend Jacob Mince. She was a large woman with eyes

of a brilliant blue, supercilious yet pleasurable lips, and a Circassian

countenance. A chain of amethysts glittered over the fulness of her

broad bosom. Her fair hair was coiled in masses above her forehead,

overshadowing her eyes and throwing into evidence the somewhat heavy

sensuousness of her face. She talked little, and with an air of

luxurious slothfulness that seemed in keeping with her expression of

delectable and Lilith-like torpor.

Above the blaze of hot-house flowers the eyes of this complacent beauty

met those of Gabriel Strong. The pair had seen much of each other that

winter in an incidental and desultory fashion. Castle Gabingly had been

something of a hermitage, and a Greek-faced youth such as Gabriel had

more vivid interest for the lady Ophelia than monotonous novels and the

society of Lord Gerald her father. Gabriel Strong had fine eyes, a quick

tongue, and a certain cynical quaintness in his attitude towards women.

Miss Blanche Gusset reverted to the silent being at her elbow.

“Are you asleep yet, Moses?”

“Why a Semitic title?”

“I often call people by the name that slips first off my tongue.”

“A dangerous habit.”

“Explain.”

“For instance, you might greet Mr. Mince as Beelzebub.”

“And not a bad thrust either. Gabriel, you are waking up. Please

continue to preserve me from Mrs. Marjoy.”

“Ophelia is looking well to-night,” said the man.

Miss Blanche Gusset’s brown eyes sparkled. She popped an olive between

her lips and descended once more to personal topics.

“What an arrant humbug you are,” she said. “If I had Mrs. Marjoy’s

temper I should conceive some diabolical revenge. Must I apologize for

not being my sister?”

“On the contrary, I am excellently placed.”

“An ambiguous compliment, my dear archangel.”

“Flattery is always ambiguous, Miss Gusset. I feel in a sympathetic

mood. Please tell me how those fox cubs of yours are progressing.”

His neighbor retorted with an ironical twinkle.

“You may continue your meditations,” she said; “I shall reserve my

remarks on cubs till Mrs. Marjoy begins gabbling in the drawing-room

about that dear child of hers.”

When the more spiritual element had departed Gabriel discovered himself

partnered by that inestimable worthy Jacob Mince. The churchman,

unctuously freighted, smacked his lips over a fat Havana. Mr. Mince was

a tall and complacent person, with a bald pate, a watery eye, and a

receding chin. He was a species of petty pope in his own parish,

dogmatizing over pond and pigsty, ploughed fields, and the village pump.

There was no imaginative or expansive breadth in Mr. Mince’s opinions.

Yet he was nothing of an ascetic, and was wholly Christian towards his

own stomach.

Gabriel, by way of bestirring the churchman’s ardor, referred to certain

political questions that were agitating the country. Sectarian squabbles

amused Gabriel as a philosopher; they did not inspire him as a partisan.

Dissent was an infallible red rag wherewith to inspire Mr. Mince’s

temper. Like many sectarians, he was utterly intolerant of adverse

criticism.

“My dear sir,” he said, in his consequential and litanical tenor, “you

will hardly credit it, but I am being bothered most abominably in my own

village by a certain vagrant tub-thumper, who has had the insolence to

hold open-air services under my very nose.”

Gabriel professed a somewhat cynical sympathy.

“Such a reflection on your ministrations,” he observed; “as though you

neglected your parish! I suppose the man is an agnostic.”

Mr. Mince frowned and puffed irritably at his cigar. He did not

appreciate such suggestive sympathy.

“Not a bit of it,” he retorted; “the fellow is a mere ignorant mechanic

who comes over every Sunday from Rilchester to instruct ignorant people

in Christian ethics. The fellow has even had the insolence to choose the

very hour of even-song for his bawling. I was discussing the matter with

your father before dinner.”

Apparently Mr. Mince would have preferred rank infidelity in such a

rival to the honest profession of Christian principles. In such

competition a fellow-believer was more nauseous to him than the blackest

atheist who ever blasphemed the Trinity. There was a certain element of

personal glory in combating the malignities of a spiritual opponent. Mr.

Mince desired to propound the Bible to his own credit.

“I suppose it does not matter vastly,” said Gabriel, with tactless

magnanimity, “what a man is so long as he preaches Christ in the right

spirit.”

Mr. Mince elevated his eyebrows.

“Not matter?”

“No.”

“My dear fellow, you do not realize the pressing peril of this

astounding phenomenon of dissent. It is the most calamitous development

arising from the abuse of this modern spirit of socialism.”

The topic interested Gabriel enough to inspire in him a mild antagonism.

“The very movement would suggest to me,” he said, “that the laboring

classes need a living exposition of the creed and that the Church has

proved inadequate to the occasion. Am I to understand that you consider

a university education essential to those who desire to be the religious

instructors of others?”

“Most certainly education is essential.”

“That depends, sir, does it not, upon what people call education.

Classics and theology are out of date; science and the study of human

nature are to the fore.”

Mr. Mince knocked the ash from his cigar and seemed displeased.

“What is science, sir,” he said, “but a blind man grubbing in a ditch.

There is no hope in science. You must really rely on me as an expert in

these matters. More experience is granted to those whose studies have

extended through many years. We churchmen are specialists on religious

education.”

Gabriel, like many enlightened mortals, demurred at subjecting reason to

the dogmas of a clique. He preferred to drink of the cup of spirituality

without receiving it from the hands of another. He did not believe that

the Light of the World descended only upon those who knelt in a

particular pew.

“I have a shrewd notion,” he said to Mr. Mince, “that these poor, as we

call them, often come nearer the elemental truth than wiseacres steeped

in theological learning. The nursing of a sick neighbor is a better

thing than the discovering of twenty metaphorical meanings in a single

text. A man is wise in proportion to the breadth and sincerity of his

beliefs. Nor can I see that it requires much erudition to expound

faithfully the philosophy contained in the Sermon on the Mount.”

“That does not satisfy the question,” retorted the clergyman. “Ask Dr.

Marjoy what he thinks of quacks who profess to practise medicine. The

analogy is admirable.”

“There—I cannot agree with you.”

Mr. Mince withdrew behind his ecclesiastical dignity.

“You are young yet, Mr. Strong,” he said, “and young men are zealots,

youth itself too Utopian. Let me advise you not to take your notions

from silly novels and superficial magazines. At all events, sir, I

caught William Blunt, my gardener, attending one of these outdoor

meetings. The man had been my gardener ten years.”

“I suppose you reprimanded him.”

Mr. Mince’s righteous anger kindled.

“Reprimand him, by Jove! I pointed out to the fellow the outrageous

ingratitude of his conduct, and discharged him promptly from my

service.”

“A decisive protest!”

“A well-merited lesson.”

Gabriel smiled at the blooms of a pink azalea.

“Possibly this apostle preaches powerfully,” he said.

“The usual jargon, I believe.”

“I feel inspired to hear him myself.”

Mr. Mince removed his cigar from between his lips, and stared

open-mouthed.

“My dear sir, as a gentleman, and as a member of my congregation, you

will not countenance such an impostor within the bounds of my parish.”

Gabriel laughed good-naturedly.

“It would be a great breach of etiquette, I suppose,” he said. “Hallo, I

see the others are rising. I think it is time we joined the ladies.”

In the drawing-room Judith was at the piano, accompanying herself to the

quaint measure of an old song. After the gentleman had entered her place

was usurped by Miss Blanche Gusset, who dashed volubly into the

strenuous sentiment of a plantation ditty. In a panelled “cosey corner”

Mrs. Marjoy and Mrs. Mince sat in neighborly isolation, comparing

feminine criticisms. Mrs. Marjoy was a lady who possessed no single

talent herself and always sneered at the accomplishments of others.

Gabriel surrendered himself to Ophelia Gusset. She was seated alone on a

sofa to the left of the fire. Ophelia was not a woman’s woman in the

social sense; her virtues were egotistical and unexpansive. She found

men more appreciative, less critical, more sympathetic.

“What selfish beings you men are,” she observed.

“Why such cynicism?”

“You abandon us for tobacco. I am sure you have been talking for forty

minutes.”

“Politics proved powerful.”

“I did not know you were a politician.”

“No, I am not patriotic with my tongue. Mr. Mince and I had an argument

on street-preaching. How easy it is to offend some people.”

Gabriel seated himself on the sofa beside Ophelia Gusset.

She was shading her face from the fire with her fan, her shoulders

gleaming white through a web of lace. The red flowers at her breast

shone like stars to pilot desire. A mesmeric atmosphere seemed to

encircle her; her large eyes were languorous and alluring.

“You seem in queenly isolation,” said the man, noting almost

unconsciously the white sweep of her shoulders. She smiled at him, and

seemed none too sorry to surrender her solitude into his keeping.

“Elderly ladies are really too trying,” she said to him. “I never met

such extraordinary rustics as Saltire produces.”

“Mrs. Mince and Mrs. Marjoy have been conversing for your benefit? A

lecture on infant underclothing or the darning of stockings?”

“Far worse, I assure you. Missionary incidents from _The Reaper_; a

dissertation on pickling onions; certain remarks from Mr. Mince’s last

sermon.”

“And Mrs. Marjoy?”

“What does Mrs. Marjoy usually talk about?”

“Herself and her children and the vices of her friends.”

“Dear creature! Blanche had a thrust at her before you joined us.”

“Your sister is a brave woman.”

“It was really quite epigrammatic. Blanche declared that a spoiled child

was like a spinster’s poodle—an animal that always had the best chair,

clawed the visitor’s clothes, and yelped eternally for cake.”

“Excellent! excellent!”

“Mrs. Marjoy glared.”

“Heaven be thanked! I am not the doctor.”

They wandered out into the conservatory together, where tulips, red,

purple, and gold, blazoned the benches. Azaleas stood starred with color

amid the ascetic snow of lilies. Bowls of mignonette and violet dowered

the air with odors. Many rich plants were brilliant with bloom.

The girl drew her bare arm gently from Gabriel’s. Her movements were

sinuous and graceful, mesmeric as a Circe’s. He marked the rare curves

of her neck and shoulders, her delicate coloring, the golden profusion

of her luxurious hair. The vision of the girl bathing in the pool still

burned and glimmered in his brain. He was susceptible to sensations for

the moment, too prone to pander to the sensuous in art.

“Mrs. Marjoy is a great gardener,” he said, reverting to mundane malice

to restrain his thoughts.

“If I were Hamlet’s Ophelia,” she answered him, “I should give her a

posy of nettles.”

The man laughed and touched her hand.

“And to me?”

She pouted out her lips with a mischievous stare.

“Laurel leaves, perhaps, to wear when you are laureate.”

“Sarcasm.”

“Retort at your leisure.”

The sound of music came to them, for Judith was playing one of

Schubert’s songs. Gabriel thrust his hand into a bowl of violets and

proffered them in his palm.

“To be sure, I am modest enough,” she said, setting several in her

bosom.

IV

AZURE and white shone the liveries of heaven. The sun, that

gold-tabarded trumpeter, had pealed out the brazen clarion-cry of

summer. The pavilions were spread in the woods. The fields bristled

their myriad spears, still green and virgin with desirous sap. Rose had

clasped rose. The meadows had unfurled their cloth of gold. The red may

had bloomed and the lilac had kissed the yew.

A punctilious regularity ordered the daily details of the domestic

régime. No stranger ever ventured through the rusty gates to disturb the

sordid asceticism of Zeus Gildersedge’s privacy. A neighborly anathema

had long ago gone forth against the house. Nor had its master troubled

to appease the orthodox wrath of a society that he despised. There is a

species of vanity of disfavor, and Zeus Gildersedge was a man who could

chuckle over public obloquy with a heathenish pride.

The miser sat in the garden under the shadow of two yews, whose

sculptured boughs arched a natural recess. A table stood before him

bearing claret, a phial of opium, a ledger, and a jar of tobacco. The

grass grew in feathery rankness wellnigh to Zeus Gildersedge’s knees.

Foxgloves purpled the lawns. Roses ran adventurously in red riot over a

rotting trellis that was half smothered in the grass. It was a tranquil

refuge enough, full of greenness and the calm, clamorless quiet of the

trees.

Zeus Gildersedge set his pipe aside, gulped down half a glass of claret,

covered his face with a red handkerchief, and prepared for sleep. Every

afternoon between two and six he would doze away the hours, his brain

drugged to a sensuous slumber. Even for this miser opulent visions

gleamed through the portals of sleep. His dreams partook of opiated

poetry. Mountains of gold poured torrents of jacinth, chrysolite, and

sardonyx into an emerald sea. Great trees bore gems for fruit, purple,

vermilion, and green. Fountains tossed diamonds like spray to a

glittering zenith. Each flower of the field had a pearl or a ruby

betwixt its lips.

A streak of scarlet showed suddenly between the trees. A woman’s figure

threaded through the green, passing the lawns knee-deep in grass,

brushing the foxgloves with the swing of her coarse, black skirt. The

loose strings of her lilac sun-bonnet trailed upon her shoulders. She

moved slouchingly, yet with a certain loose-jointed vigor that suggested

strength.

Coming to the fringe of the lawn where an old dial stood in the sun, she

scanned the stretch of grass under a coarse, red hand. Zeus Gildersedge

was asleep with his handkerchief over his eyes. She moved silently

towards the yews and stood by the table, watching with a grin the man

dozing in the chair. As he snored on obliviously she reached for the

claret jug, put it to her lips, took a long draught, wiped her mouth on

the back of her hand. She returned the jug noiselessly to its place,

plucked a long spear of grass, and tickled the sleeping man’s chin.

Zeus Gildersedge grunted, smote the air, and clawed the handkerchief

from his face. He stared about him, saw Rebecca laughing by the table,

and promptly swore at her.

“What the devil do you want now?”

“Tuppence.”

“What for?”

“The tinker.”

“Let him wait for it.”

“He ain’t here yet; he’ll call this evening with a saucepan he’s been

soldering. Thought I’d get the money while there was a chance of you

being sober.”

Zeus Gildersedge straightened in his chair, fumbled in his pocket, and

produced two coins. He laid them on the table with a melancholy and

grudging deliberation as though he were disbursing thousands.

“Damn your insolence,” he said.

“Be civil yourself, master.”

The man’s eyes scanned the glass jug. He gripped it with one claw of a

hand and stared at the woman blurred in the sunlight.

“You’ve been at the claret.”

The girl laughed a loud, quaking laugh of coarse merriment. She jerked

forward, subsided on the man’s knees, poked her face into his.

“Taste my breath—now.”

“Get up with you.”

“Sha’n’t.”

He pushed her away from him, and she slid to the grass at his feet and

lay there giggling, with her sun-bonnet fallen back from her hair. Zeus

Gildersedge eyed her with mingled approbation and disfavor. He had

bartered his dignity long ago, for the woman had made him her equal in

dragging him to her own level. They understood each other in a coarse,

abusive fashion, and were comrades of a common cult.

“Where’s Joan?” said the man, fingering his chin, while his colorless

eyes shone out from his bloodless face.

“Don’t know. ’Tain’t no business of mine, though you let her gad over

the country like a gypsy. You’re a fool, Zeus Gildersedge. Nice sort of

father you make.”

“Joan can look after herself.”

“So can every woman till she lights on a man.”

Zeus Gildersedge shifted in his chair.

“Balderdash!” he said, with tightened lips. “The girl has pride enough

to choke most men. She’s no bib-and-tucker baby.”

“A woman’s a woman, bib or no bib,” retorted the servant.

Zeus Gildersedge took ten drops of opium in a tumbler of claret,

frowning as he sipped it down.

“You’re a nice bit of goods to lecture me on education.”

Rebecca plucked up a handful of grass and threw it into the man’s lap.

“There’s hay for you,” she said, grimacing. “Miss Joan’s worth twenty of

me and you. Pity you don’t treat her better. I wouldn’t stand all the

grubbing she stands—no, not for nothing. I wouldn’t be your daughter,

neither; a fine girl like she is shut up with an old goat to feed on

thistles in a tumble-down shanty. You’re too mean to have a daughter.

There’s the truth for you.”

She laughed a reckless, barbaric expression of superabundant vigor, a

challenge to the thin, sallow being squatting under the yews. Zeus

Gildersedge regarded her with his small, calculating eyes. A slight

color had crept into his cheeks. The fingers of his right hand fidgeted

the buttons of his coat.

“I should like to know why I don’t pack you out of my house with an

hour’s notice,” he observed, in tones that were whimsically

contemplative.

The girl’s eyes glistened; her full lips parted over her large, strong

teeth. She was handsome in a coarse, physical fashion. Her hair was

black as a raven’s wing, her cheeks red as sun-mellowed apples, her

figure profusely Rubenesque in outline. She made a broad furrow in the

tall grass where she lay, supporting herself on one arm, with the

sunlight glancing on her hair.

“Say the word—I’m off,” she said.

“Pack your box, then.”

“Six months’ wages.”

“And a deuced fine character.”

They both laughed. The girl gave a pouting smile, reached up, and

gripped the man’s knee. Zeus Gildersedge stared into her eyes with a

glance that was half critical, half human. They remained so for half a

minute before the man swore and dropped back into his chair with a

contemptuous chuckle.

“Threescore years and yet a fool,” he said.

“The carrier will pass at eight.”

“Shut up.”

The girl wriggled nearer in the grass, looking in the man’s face with a

mischievous simper.

“I want two new dresses, and—”

“You bet.”

“I’m going to Rilchester market-day.”

“Who’s to stop you?”

“And in that little cash-box in the cupboard—”

“Hist!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Get up; she’s coming.”

“Who?”

“Joan.”

The girl Rebecca bit her lip, scrambled up, and started away some paces.

“I’ll give the tinker tuppence for mending that pan,” she said, with an

intentional strenuousness. “Mutton and potatoes at eight, sharp.”

Joan Gildersedge drew near under the snow-starred vaults of a tall

acacia. Her hair flashed about her shoulders magic gold; her face shone

white under the dense, green boughs. A pillar of pure womanliness,

pearl-bright and lovely, she moved through the deep ecstasy of the

summer silence. Her eyes shone large and lucid as fine glass. An

infinite wistfulness dwelt upon her mouth like moonlight on a rose.

Divinely human, radiant with an incomprehensible mystery of soul, she

stood before her father.

Zeus Gildersedge regarded her with a species of unwilling awe. He was

man enough to realize the strange charm of this rare being who called

him father. To him she was in large measure unintelligible, a denizen of

an atmosphere impenetrable to his meagre, goatish vision. Her very

unapproachableness, her serene temper, often created in him a rough and

petulant antagonism, a strong sense of inferiority that nudged his

starved and decrepit pride. She was of him, yet not his, an elusive and

scintillant soul, who suffered his interdictions and his barbarisms in

silence, retaining beyond his ken a species of intangible freedom that

defied his power.

“You’re late,” quoth the man in the chair, filling a long, clay pipe and

preparing to smoke.

“I had forgotten how the hours passed.”

Zeus Gildersedge stretched himself in his chair and yawned. He

habitually felt ill at ease in his daughter’s presence. She had a queer

knack of upsetting the equanimity of his avarice and jarring the mean

structure he called his soul. They had nothing in common. Even on the

tritest subjects they were out of sympathy.

“You seem to be away a good deal,” said the man, remembering the words

Rebecca had thrown up at him from the grass.

“Am I?”

“What do you do with yourself all day?”

“Wander in the woods, watch the birds, collect flowers, bathe in the

sea.”

“Bathe—do you!”

“Every day.”

“Beginning to find your father a dull dog, eh? We don’t do a vast amount

of entertaining. Rather a quiet place this,” and he laughed.

Joan dangled her hat by the strings and watched her father with a

supreme and unconscious gravity. She was ever attempting to understand

his mental condition; she had never yet succeeded.

“I often wonder why we have no friends,” she said.

Zeus Gildersedge enveloped himself in an atmosphere of smoke. He

distrusted in particular the developing instincts of this queen,

realizing that she had little cause to recompense his authority with any

great degree of gratitude. He had begotten and reared her, given her the

fundamental necessities of life, but little else. She never displayed

discontent in his presence, never reproached his niggard régime. Zeus

Gildersedge did not expect love from her, seeing that he was barren of

that sentiment himself.

“Friendship is an expensive commodity,” he observed, with a sullen yet

hypocritical earnestness. “We have to pay for affection in this world;

one can get plenty of sympathy by giving dinner-parties. Spend money and

people will welcome you. Poverty means isolation and contempt.”

The girl’s eyes were still fixed imperturbably upon his face. She seemed

to weigh his words upon the balance of a virgin intuition and to find

them inadequate.

“Are we so poor?” she asked.

Zeus Gildersedge grunted.

“Pretty much so.”

“You find it a miserable experience?”

“You think so, eh?”

“If loneliness and poverty go together, you must be very poor.”

“You’re growing too clever with that tongue of yours.”

Joan leaned against the trunk of the acacia and smiled at the clouds. A

cataract of golden light poured through the delicate foliage, smiting

the shadowy grass with green splendor, painting quivering fleur-de-lis

upon the girl’s dark dress.

“Father,” she said, gently enough, “I often wonder what you live for.”

The man in the chair bit his pipe-stem and frowned.

“You do, do you!”

“I am young, you are old. What pleasures can you find in life?”

Zeus Gildersedge eyed her keenly under his drooping lids.

“What do most men live for?” he asked her.

“How should I know?” she answered him.

“Money, gold bags, beer, and bed. You will understand it all well enough

some day.”

She looked at him with her large, gray eyes, calm and incredulous.

“And what, then, of death,” she asked, “if we live for nothing more than

this?”

The man straightened in his chair.

“What’s that?”

“Death.”

“What’s death to you?”

“The falling of leaves and a silence as of snow under a winter sky. I

often think of death; nor is it strange to me. Do you fear the grave?”

“Stop this nonsense,” said the man, with some symptoms of rebellion.

“Are you happy?”

Zeus Gildersedge wriggled in his chair.

“When I want your sympathy I’ll ask for it,” he said. “You’re a little

too forward for your years, my dear. Don’t worry your head about my

future. Keep your sentimentalities for the birds and the bees and the

twaddling rubbish you read in books. Damn sentiment. Supper at eight.”

When the girl had gone Zeus Gildersedge clutched his ledger to him, his

brows knitted into a scowl of thought. His hands strained at the book

with a tremulous intensity, while his eyes stared into space. Overhead a

blackbird was pouring a deep torrent of song to join the sunlight. A

slight breeze made the boughs oracular with sudden mysterious

mutterings. The beneficent eyes of the universe seemed to watch with a

scornful pity the vague dreads of infidelity and greed.

As though waking from some unflattering dream, Zeus Gildersedge’s hands

relaxed and suffered the book to slip slowly into his lap. He breathed

an oath under his breath, gulped down a mouthful of claret, and lay back

in his chair chuckling.

V

‟I DETEST prigs,” said Mrs. Marjoy, as her hands flickered over the

tea-tray in the drawing-room of The Hermitage. “And of that tribe

commend me to young Strong as the prince of the sect.”

Mrs. Marjoy was one of those irreproachably vulgar persons whose mission

in life appears to be the distilling of spiritual nostrums for the

consciences of their neighbors. She was a born critic, a mercurial being

ingrained with prejudice and dowered with an inordinate self-esteem. She

had run “to tongue” in a remarkable degree; moreover, she scanned the

world through the prisms of a none too generous philosophy.

“My dear,” quoth Mrs. Mince, balancing a large slab of cake in her

saucer, “young people are naturally irreverent in these days. You would

hardly believe me, but Gabriel Strong, a mere boy, had the impudence to

argue with my husband on religious matters after dinner the other

evening. Poor, dear Jacob came home quite upset.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s chair creaked. She was a lady who seemed to extract

discords even from things inanimate. The harmonium in the church

school-room was her most eloquent disciple.

“What had the young cub to say?”

“Well, my dear, he contested that he could see no harm in that ignorant

nonconformist preaching at the village cross on Sundays. He snubbed

poor, dear Jacob most abruptly, and declared that he should go and hear

the fellow preach. Think of that—to the vicar of a parish!”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed, a habit of hers when she wished to be expressive.

“Abominable!”

“Such bad taste!”

“Intellectual young men are always objectionable. Strong, Junior, always

strikes me as a dissolute person. What do you think, my dear?”

Mrs. Mince cogitated over her cake. She was not exactly conversant with

the characteristics of dissolute young men, but as the vicaress of

Saltire she aimed at claiming a mild versatility in the technicalities

of vice and virtue.

“Jacob declares,” she said, retreating upon an infallible authority,

“that he has never met a young fellow so irreverently arrogant towards

the opinions of his elders. And Jacob is such a man of the world!”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with a tinge of irony. “It is so ill-bred

to argue with people more experienced than one’s self.”

The Cassandra of the tray solaced herself with a second cup of anæmic

tea. She had an irritable habit of shrugging her shoulders as though

troubled—science forgive the expression!—with a chronic urticaria of

the brain. Irritability, indeed, was her enshrouding atmosphere.

“As for those Gusset girls—” she began.

Mrs. Mince held up a horror-stricken hand.

“Such underbred young women. Why, I remember one of them coming to

church in a red dress on Good Friday. The way they get up, too!”

Mrs. Marjoy plunged into detail with the fervor of a scientist.

“I told that woman Ophelia once,” she observed, “that I wondered how she

could go into a public place with a low-cut blouse and no collar.”

“Really!” said Mrs. Mince, rapturously.

“She was rude, as usual. Said some necks did need covering up. It is no

use giving such girls advice.”

“Absolutely useless,” observed Mrs. Mince.

The teapot was regarnished and two more slices of cake delivered to

martyrdom. Mrs. Marjoy leaned back in her creaking chair and indulged in

philosophies.

“The aristocracy is rotten to the core,” she remarked, with

comprehensive complacency. “The broad-minded and educated middle-class

forms the backbone of the country. Any third-rate actress could teach

many duchesses manners.”

“My dear, your opinions are so full of commonsense.”

“I am always outspoken.”

“An excellent habit.”

“I flatter myself that I am a lady, Mrs. Mince, and I like to give

people my frank opinion. I never speak wantonly and unjustly of absent

neighbors. But as for those simpering and forward young Gussets, well—”

A knock at the door cut short Mrs. Marjoy’s unprejudiced diatribe. A

servant entered with a letter on a salver and stood waiting. Mrs. Marjoy

slit the envelope with the handle of a teaspoon, perused the contents of

the note, flicked it away contemptuously into the grate.

“No answer.”

The girl disappeared. The doctor’s wife flounced back in her chair,

shrugged her shoulders viciously, and surveyed her friend irritably

through her spectacles.

“From those Mallabys,” she said.

“Of Catford?”

“People I never could stand. An invitation to their garden-party—such

garden-parties, too! The ices made me ill there last summer; James was

about all night giving me chlorodyne. Let me see, what were we talking

about?”

“The Gussets,” crowed Mrs. Mince.

“Oh yes, those most immoral women. Really, my dear, I wonder John Strong

lets his daughter associate with such people, but of course everybody

knows that John Strong is a snob and a toady. The way the girl Ophelia

flirts with that young Gabriel is absolutely indecent. They are always

about fishing together, now, down in the Mallan. Most improper! You

should hear James’s views on society women. I’ve just been reading that

awful Gosling case in the newspapers.”

Mrs. Mince’s interest revived ostensibly. She brushed sundry crumbs from

her lap and rearranged her cushions.

“A most deplorable case,” she said, with Christian unction.

“How a man can run away from his wife passes my comprehension,” said the

physician’s mate. “I really do not know what we are coming to in these

days, what with women like the Gussets taking the lead in society.”

Mrs. Mince sighed an orthodox and Protestant sigh.

“The young men are so different, too,” she said.

“They want discipline, my dear, what with their absurd notions of

independence and their revolutionary ideas about the Church and

religion. We have had three assistants in a year—such boors! There was

Snooks, who fell in love with little Miss Ginge; I soon put my foot on

that. Then there was Lily, who talked theosophy and smoked such pipes in

the surgery that the whole house stunk. I had to forbid smoking, and

Lily left. The man we have now is such a glutton; always has two

helpings at dinner and eats half a cake at tea.”

“I never see him at church,” said Mrs. Mince, grievedly.

“Young men never go to church in these days,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with an

irascible twist of her mouth. “They are too enlightened, you know. I

told young Bailey, the man we had last year, that he ought to be ashamed

of himself setting the villagers such a bad example. He had the

insolence to say that from his own observations church-going did not

improve people’s tempers. Of course, I had to get James to give him a

month’s notice.”

“Young men must be a great worry in a house,” said Mrs. Mince,

sympathetically.

Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.

“They are so abominably selfish,” she said.

The doctor appeared at this period of the conversation, a kindly and

easy-going Briton, artificially cheery and optimistic. He shook hands

with Mrs. Mince and sat down on the extreme edge of a chair. His wife

gave him the dregs of the teapot, and remarked that he was late.

“Met young Strong in the village and had a chat,” he ventured, by way of

justification. “Bright young chap; a little too bookish, though.”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed.

“The rising generation reads too much,” she said. “Do you remember

Bailey, who was always reading novels on a Sunday till I gave him a

talking to and he left?”

Mr. Marjoy sipped his tea and sighed. He was a suppressed soul, a

Prometheus bound upon the rock of matrimony.

“Bailey was not half a bad chap,” he said, meekly.

Mrs. Marjoy ignored the remark.

“What’s Grimes doing?” she asked.

“He has been seeing folk all the afternoon.”

“James, I believe that fellow’s running after that Ginge girl like

Snooks did. I won’t have it, mind. I can never catch Grimes in the

surgery. What the man does with himself I can’t think.”

“Grimes is all right,” said the doctor. “I must say I like young

Strong.”

“A prig, my dear—an arrant prig.”

The doctor did not contradict her. He had grown wise in season and took

his chastenings with reverent patience. It was not his ambition to

out-talk his wife.

“You take my word for it,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with acrimony, “there will

be a scandal here soon. That young Strong is a most dissolute youth; and

as for the Gusset girl—well, I will be charitable and conceal my

thoughts. I always try to say kind things of people, when they will let

me do so by leading decent and respectable lives.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Mince, “you are a model of tact. By-the-way, I hear

the church-bell. I must attend vespers. Are you coming to hear Jacob

preach?”

“I will get my prayer-book,” said the doctor’s dame.

VI

PERILOUS and fair as Calypso is the imagination to the mind of man. A

strong soul girds the elf in tender subjection. Like wine, the

imagination fires the senses; they are saffron spray bubbling in an iris

bowl, red poppies smothered in an ecstasy of green, stars, diamonds, and

the long glimmer of a moonlit sea. Odors beat upon the imaginative

brain; colors burn its vision. Like a siren’s voice falls the chant of

the wind through the rose-red halls of summer. To the poet the world

leaps like a young lover into the bosom of the sunset. Seas clamor and

the stars tune their strings.

Gabriel was an imaginative man. His heart’s cords were subtle, swift,

and mystical. Songs born of the infinite strangeness of beauty were ever

throbbing at his ear. His senses were as godly as Apollo’s. The scent of

a pinewood smote him from afar. He could watch a hawk hovering a

glimmering speck beneath the clouds. He was quick and virile, strung to

the tense tones of beauty, red and blithe with the blood of June.

With too precocious a wisdom in the vanities of earth, a semi-Byronic

cynicism had marred his manhood. Like Joan, he had supped too richly in

his April days. Knowledge had bred contempt. To Gabriel women were so

many roses, each with a canker under the petals. He had been unfortunate

in his experimental philosophy. No superb contradiction had as yet given

his shallow pessimism the lie. He had met women, but not a woman. No

Shakespearian divinity had shamed the cynicism out of his manhood. To

him Sarah Golightly of the Gayety, or Mrs. Marjoy of Saltire, or the

numberless worthy daughters of uninteresting neighbors were equally null

and unlovable. A melancholy being, he had brought himself to the belief

that there were no Britomarts in the woman’s world of the day. He

believed in the possibility of womanly loveliness, adored the ideal

Beatrice devoutly, but never prognosticated the flitting of a goddess

athwart his earthly path.

On the identical afternoon that Mrs. Marjoy was waxing charitable over

the moral deficiencies of her acquaintances, Gabriel and his sister

Judith were sessioned in the little red drawing-room at the hall. John

Strong had driven into Rilchester, leaving the pair to no unwelcome

solitude. Saltire Hall seemed to breathe anew through its quaint

casements and antique galleries when its most Victorian master had

vanished for a season.

Now Judith Strong was the one woman in the world who reclaimed her

brother from the charge of callow pessimism. She was one of those grave,

lovable, stately beings who shed over the world a lustre of truth. With

hair of red gold, eyes dark and contemplative, a complexion delicately

pale, she bore upon her face the benign and tender divineness of a young

Madonna. Her soul was clear and calm as a crystal sky. A sympathetic

wisdom had dowered her with a charm that graced her womanhood like a

crown of pearls. To Gabriel she was sister, friend, and mother. The two

loved each other with an inseparable tenderness that was, indeed,

Christian. Judith had learned to comprehend the subtler instincts of her

brother’s nature. He was no ordinary man, in her opinion, and she was

jealous for his happiness as for her own faith. But for Judith Saltire

would have been a dry desert to the man’s soul.

They had been singing together that afternoon certain old ballads and

glees that would have kindled the Pepysian ardor. Judith’s long, lithe

fingers were magical on the keys. Her whole being begot music. Gabriel

had listened to her playing that afternoon with infinite sympathy of

soul. She seemed as spiritual to him, as he sat in the window-seat and

watched her, as some fair woman stolen from Rossetti’s brain.

They partook of tea together by the open window, where roses nodded

against a gossamer veil of gold. Gardens stretched below into the wastes

of the woods, a dim maze of yews and lilacs, laurels and stately firs.

It was like some Tuscan landscape spread in quaint loveliness upon one

of Angelico’s frescoes. Mystery brooded on the air. The warm hush of the

summer noon was unbroken save by the distant sound of reaping in the

meadows.

Judith and her brother were in a solemn humor. Music had inspired them

to still thought and tenderness of mood. Brother and sister, woman and

man, they were glad of each other’s sympathy, grateful for solitude and

unbroken union of soul. Judith had long been troubled in her heart for

her brother’s future. She knew too well the sensitive necessity that

watched over such a mind as his. All women are fearful of prophesying

pain for those they love. And Judith feared in measure for her brother.

“Gabriel,” she said, anon, with her stately and simple directness of

expression, “it is strange to me that you do not tire of this place and

the sameness of its ways. Small decorums and small circles seem so

foreign to your nature. It is a year since you were in Italy. You must

chafe at times in Saltire. I should have thought liberty essential to a

man of your temper.”

Her brother smiled at her with an amused melancholy that often found

expression on his face.

“You mean that I am too much here?” he said.

“Not for us, dear. But you are a man of talent, and—”

She hesitated a moment, gazing with an intensity of thought into the

blue distance.

“Well?”

“My words were running over fast.”

“My dear girl, say anything you like to me; you are too honest for me to

be offended.”

Judith drew her chair nearer to his, and, leaning her elbows on its

arms, looked into her brother’s face.

“It is not good for a man to live always at home,” she said.

“Is it my fault?”

“No. I know father desires to keep you here. He is proud of you, and

ambitious—God pardon me—in a mistaken way. But then, my dear Gabriel,

a father must recognize the individual personality of his son. He can

only wrong him till he treats him as a fellow-man and not as a child.

Both of you may suffer through your amiable apathy.”

“Go on.”

“I do not pain you?”

“No, dear.”

“You see, a man to be a man must work out his destiny alone. He must not

pander to mere blood relationships. And I am so proud of you that I

would not have your character weakened by too much kindly sloth. You

cannot develop here as you should. You think too much, see too little.

And then—”

“Go on, dear.”

“Father is a good man, but prejudiced. He does not understand you. And,

my dear boy, one must beware of prejudiced affections; they are stable

only so long as we please the bestower. I know father wants to make a

county gentleman of you, an M.P., and the like. He does not want you to

work. And there I disagree with him. He will cramp your intellect and

soul if you are not careful.”

Gabriel looked in her eyes and smiled.

“You fond traitor!” he said.

“No, I am not that,” she answered. “I only want to save you both pain in

the future. It is not likely that you will be content to be a boy

forever. Some strong circumstance must inevitably set you at variance

with father’s prejudices. Then will come struggle and rebellion, anger

and reproaches, and sad days. You are a strong man, only you do not

respect your strength. I do not think that you realize your

responsibilities towards yourself. Filial obedience is good, but honest

and manly independence is better.”

They were silent a moment as in mutual thought. A slight breeze stirred

the roses; the noise of reaping waxed in the meadows.

“Where did you gather all this wisdom, little woman?”

“From my instincts, dear. Instincts are a woman’s reason. I have been

thinking much, debating much in my mind. And I am not at ease as to your

future. Pardon me.”

Gabriel reached for Judith’s hand. His bronzed fingers clasped her white

ones. They looked into each other’s eyes.

“What would you have me do?” he asked.

“Not surrender to father’s whims in everything. Emancipate yourself by

degrees; teach him to respect your individuality; prepare him to

recognize your freedom.”

“Yes.”

“Choose your own sphere; you are six-and-twenty. Ask him for an

allowance; travel a year or two; work and develop your own powers.”

Gabriel pressed her hand.

“Any more?”

“And oh, Gabriel, don’t let him marry you off-hand from worldly and

ambitious motives. Be a man; think and choose for yourself. Don’t give

up your soul to a girl because for one month she seems lovely and

desirable.”

The man’s face clouded even in the sun.

“You are very frank with me,” he said.

“I am your sister, and I love you.”

“You are a good woman, dear, and I will ponder what you have said to

me.”

“And you are not hurt?”

“Who is hurt by a good woman’s love?”

Strangely enough, that same evening, over his after-dinner port, John

Strong expounded his principles with regard to the union of the sexes.

“There are many mistaken notions abroad about matrimony,” he said,

snuffing the smoke from a favorite cigar. “People drag too much silly

sentimentalism into the question. What is marriage but a delicate

investment in flesh. I know life, and I give you my word, my boy, that

there’s precious little difference between women when you come to study

them in detail. One is tall, another short, some pretty, some plain;

they all have tempers, they all love dress, they are all vain—much of a

muchness. Love is generally a hysterical prejudice. Take my advice and

marry by reason.”

Gabriel besought further paternal advice on the subject. His father

expanded. He loved dogmatism and was in his element.

“Take a practical view of the question,” he said. “When I see a fine,

handsome, good-tempered girl, born of good stock into an excellent

social position, possessing grit and savoir faire, then I say to myself,

‘Wise William who secures that investment.’ That, sir, is what I call a

reasonable marriage.”

Gabriel meditated a moment over his claret.

“You do not believe in the worth of the deeper sentiments?” he said.

“Poetry, sir, is very well between calf covers and gold lettering, but

for God’s sake keep poetical notions out of plain, honest existence.

They are ruinous.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t theorize. I know.”

Gabriel smiled one of his melancholy smiles. Traitor to his own craft,

he half believed his father’s dictum to be true. His pessimism with

regard to the present levelled his expectations to a mundane tone.

Sentiment might have suited a Laura or a Fiametta. It was obsolete

according to modern notions. An up-to-date woman did not stand in need

of poetry and heroics.