WHAT CAME OF THE TREACLE-MOON
“The treacle-moon is over. I am awake and find myself married.”
Gordon read the lines in the diary he held, by the fading daylight. He
sat in the primrosed garden of his town house on Piccadilly Terrace,
beside a wicker tea-table. The day was at its amber hour. The curtains
of the open windows behind him waved lazily in the breeze and the
fragrance of hawthorn clung like a caress across the twilight. What he
read had been the last entry in the book.
He smiled grimly, remembering the night he had written it. It was
at Seaham, the home of his wife’s girlhood, the final day of their
stay--the end of that savorless month of sameness and stagnation, of
eating fruit and sauntering, playing dull games at cards, yawning,
reading old Annual Registers and the daily papers, listening to the
monologue that his elderly father-in-law called conversation, and
watching the growth of stunted gooseberry bushes--the month in which
he had eaten of the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. To-day he
recalled the trenchant features of that visit distinctly: the prim,
austere figure of Lady Noël, his wife’s mother, presiding at the
table; Sir Ralph opposite, mumbling for the third time, over a little
huddle of decanters which could neither interrupt nor fall asleep, the
speech he had made at a recent tax-meeting; his own wife with eyes
that so seldom warmed to his, but grew keener each day to glance cold
disapproval; and Mrs. Clermont, Lady Noël’s companion and confidante,
black-gowned, bloodless, with noiseless gliding step and observant
gaze--Jane Clermont’s aunt, as he had incidentally learned.
“The treacle-moon is over!” And that satiric comment had been penned
almost a year ago!
Gordon moved his shoulders with a quick gesture, as though dismissing
an unpleasant reflection, and took from his pocket a little black
phial. He measured out a minute quantity of the dark liquid into a
glass and poured it full of water. He drank the dull, cloudy mixture at
a draft.
“How strange that mind should need this!” he said to himself. “My
brain is full of images--rare, beautiful, dreamlike--but they are
meaningless, incoherent, unattached. A few drops of this elixir and
they coalesce, crystallize, transform themselves--and I have a poem.
I have only to write it down. I wrote ‘Lara’ in three evenings, while
I was undressing from the opera. It shan’t master me as it has De
Quincey, either. Why, all my life I have denied myself even meat. My
soul shall not be the slave of any appetite!”
He smiled whimsically as he set down the glass: “What nonsense it is to
talk of soul,” he muttered, “when a cloud makes it melancholy, and wine
makes it mad!”
He paused, listening intently. A low sound, an infant’s cry, had caught
his ear. His eyes grew darker violet. His look changed.
“Ada! Ada!” he said in a whisper.
In his voice was a singular vibrant accent--intense, eager, yet the
words had the quality of a sacrament and a consecration.
He rose, thrust the diary into his pocket and went into the house,
ascending the stair to a small room at the end of the hall. The door
was ajar and a dim light showed within. He listened, then pushed the
door wider and entered. A white nursery bed stood in one corner, and
Gordon noiselessly placed a chair beside it and sat down, his elbow on
his knee and his chin in his hand, looking at the little face against
the pillow, the tiny fist lying on the coverlid.
Gazing, his deeply carved lips moulded softly, a sense of the
overwhelming miracle of life possessed him. This small fabric was woven
of his own flesh. He saw his own curving mouth, his full chin, his
brow! Some day those hands would cling to his, those lips would frame
the word “father.” What of life’s pitfalls, of its tragedies, awaited
this new being he had brought into the world?
He sighed, and as if in answer, the baby sighed too. The sound smote
him strangely. Was there some occult sympathy between them? Her
birthright was not only of flesh, but of spirit. Had she also share in
his isolated heart, his wayward impulses, his passionate pride?
[Illustration: “ADA! MY ONE SWEET DAUGHTER!” _p. 103._]
At length he took out the diary and opening it on his knee, began to
write--lines whose feeling swelled from some great wave of tenderness:
“Ada! my one sweet daughter! If a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Whate’er of earth divide us I shall claim
Not tears, but tenderness to answer mine:
Go where I will, to me thou art the same--
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There are but two things in my destiny,--
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.
I can reduce all feelings but this one;
And that I would not;--for at length I see
Such scenes as those wherein my life begun.
The earliest--even the only paths for me--
Had I but sooner learned the crown to shun,
I had been better than I now can be;
The passions which have torn me would have died;
I had not suffered, and thou hadst not sighed.
I feel almost at times as I have felt
In happy childhood; trees, and flowers and brooks
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books,
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
Till even at moments I have thought to see
Some living thing to love--but none like thee.
With false ambition what had I to do?
Little with love, and least of all with fame.
And yet they came unsought, and with me grew,
And made me all! which they can make--a name.
Yet this was not the end I did pursue;
Surely I once beheld a nobler aim.
Yet If thou help me find it--even so
Shall I be glad that I have purchased woe!”
The door of the room adjoining opened and a figure dressed in white
appeared. He rose and passed through.
“You wished me, Annabel?”
“I do not wish Ada disturbed. As you know, I am starting with her to
Seaham to-morrow, and she needs the rest.”
“I was very quiet,” he said almost apologetically, and a little wearily.
Her critical eye had wandered to the book and pencil in his hand. The
look was cold--glacially so--and disapproving, as she asked with quiet
point:
“My lord, when do you intend to give up your tiresome habit of
versifying?”
He stared at her. In all her lack of understanding, she had at least
spared him this. Yet this was really what she thought! At heart she
despised him for the only thing that to him made life endurable.
She took no pride in his poetry, wished him a man like others of
her circle--a dull, church-going, speech-reading, tea-drinking,
partridge-hunting clod! A flush blurred his vision.
“Surely,” a thin edge of contempt cutting in her words, “you do not
intend always to do only this? You are a peer, you have a seat in the
Lords. You might be anything you choose.”
“But if I am--what I choose?” he said difficultly.
A chill anger lay behind her constrained manner. Her lips were pressed
tight together. During the whole time of their marriage he had never
seen her display more feeling than in that brief moment on the terrace
at Newstead when he had put his mother’s ring upon her finger. For a
long time he had watched for some sign--each day feeling his heart,
so savage of vitality, contract and harden under that colorless
restraint--till he had come to realize that the untroubled gentleness
was only passivity, the calm strength but complacency as cold as the
golden guinea he had treasured, that the flower he had chosen for its
white fragrance was a sculptured altar-lily. Now her mind seemed jolted
from its conventional groove. The fact was that the constant flings of
his enemies, which he noted with sovereign contempt, had pierced her
deeply, wounding that love of the world’s opinion so big in her. And a
venomous review which her mother had brought her that day had mingled
its abuse with a strain of pity for her, and pity she could not bear.
“Why do you not choose to live like other men?” she broke out. “There
is something so selfish, so unnatural in your engrossed silences, your
changeable moods, your disregard of ordinary customs. You believe
nothing that other men believe.”
His face had grown weirdly white. The sudden outburst had startled him.
He was struggling with resentment.
“Cassidy’s doctrinal tracts, for instance?” The query had a tinge of
sarcasm.
She bit her lips. “You have no idea of reverence for anything. I might
have guessed it that night at Newstead and how you treated him! You
speak your views on religion--views that I hate--openly, anywhere. You
write and print them, too, in your verse!”
“You are frank,” he said; “let me be the same. What my brain conceives
my hand shall write. If I valued fame, I should flatter received
opinions. That I have never done! I cannot and will not give the lie
to my doubts, come what may.”
“What right have you to have those doubts?” Her anger was rising
full-fledged, and bitter-winged with malice. “Why do you set yourself
against all that is best? What do you believe in that is good, I should
like to know?”
“I abhor books of religion,” he responded steadily, “and the
blasphemous notions of sectaries. I have no belief in their absurd
heresies and Thirty-nine Articles. I feel joy in all beautiful and
sublime things. But I hate convention and cant and lay-figure virtue,
and shall go on hating them to the end of the chapter.”
“To the end of the chapter!” she echoed. “You mean to do nothing
more--to think of nothing but scribbling pretty lines on paper and
making a mystery of yourself! What is our life to be together? What did
you marry me for?”
“Bella!” The word was almost a cry. “I married you for faith, not for
creeds! I am as I have always been--I have concealed nothing. I married
you for sympathy and understanding! I know I am not like other men--but
I tried to make you love and understand me!--I _tried_! Why did you
marry _me_?”
For an instant the real pain in the appeal seemed to cleave through
her icy demeanor and she made an involuntary movement. But as she
hesitated, Fletcher knocked at the door:
“Mr. Sheridan, my lord, come to take you to Drury Lane.”
The words congealed the softer feeling. As the valet withdrew, she
turned upon her husband.
“Sheridan! and Drury Lane! That is the kind of company you prefer to
keep! A doddering old man who falls asleep over his negus in White’s
bow-window, coming and going here at all hours, and littering the
library with his palsied snuff-taking.”
A doddering old man! It was true. The soul of White’s and Brookes’, the
first table wit and _vivant_ of the kingdom, the companion of a royal
prince--he, “Sherry,” who all his life had never known ache or pain,
not even the gout, who had out-dandied and out-bumpered the youngest
of them--had lived beyond his time. The welcome of the gay world had
dwindled to a grudging patronage. Gordon had more than once of late
come between him and a low sponging-house or the debtors’ prison. Yet
at his wife’s tone, a gleam of anger shot into his eyes--anger that
made them steely-blue as sword blades.
“Sheridan was my friend,” he said. “My friend from the first, when
others snarled. He is old now--old and failing--but he is still my
friend. Is a man to pay no regard to loyalty or friendship?”
“He should have regard first to his own reputation. Do _you_? Even
Brummell and Petersham and your choice fops of the Cocoa-Tree tavern
and the Drury Lane committee have some thought for the world’s opinion.
But you have none. You care nothing for what it thinks of you or of
your morality.”
“Morality!” he repeated slowly. “I never heard the word before from
anybody who was not a rascal that used it for a purpose!”
“Why will you sit silent,” she continued, “and hear yourself defamed
everywhere without a word? Why will you not defend yourself?”
He shrugged his shoulders, the flash of indignation past She had
touched the point of least response. The shrug angered her even more
than his satiric reply:
“What man can bear refutation?”
“You seem to think it beneath your dignity to deny slander,” she
went on. “You always did. I thought it would be different after we
were married. But it has grown worse. The papers print more and more
horrible things of you, and you do not care--either for yourself or for
me!”
He gazed at her with a curious intentness.
“Surely you pay no heed to such irresponsible tales?”
“If they were all! Do you suppose I do not hear what people say
besides? They do not spare my ears! Do you think I do not know the
stories--what they used to say of your bachelor affairs--with Lady
Oxford, and Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster--and Caro Lamb?”
“Is there none more recent?” A bitter smile had appeared, called by the
veiled insinuation in her tone.
Another name flew to her tongue, for malicious rumor had credited him
with a footlight amour. “Yes--Jane Clermont!”
A frown of incredulity and annoy hung blackly on his brow an instant.
Had this baseless gratuitous fling gone beyond the circle of Drury Lane
gossipers? Had it even reached his wife’s ears? Aloud he said:
“Really, I can scarcely hold myself responsible for silly chatterers
who are determined to Rochefoucauld my motives. I seem to be fast
becoming the moral Æsop of the community. I am judged by what I
presume Dr. Cassidy would call a dramatic Calvinism--predestined
damnation without a sinner’s own fault.”
Her control was gone. She could not trust herself to speak further and
turned away. He waited a moment in the doorway, but she did not move,
and with an even “good night” he left her.
* * * * *
At the foot of the stair, during Gordon’s painful interview, a
black-gowned woman had noiselessly bent over the hall table. A letter,
arrived by the post, had been laid there by Fletcher for his master.
She lifted it and examined it closely. The address was written in a
peculiar, twirly handwriting, on blue-tinted paper that bore in each
corner the device of a cockle-shell. She listened, then passed with it
into the library.
The room was unlighted, but a spring fire flickered on the hearth.
She caught up a paper-knife and crouching by the hearth held its thin
blade in the flame. When the metal was warmed, she softened the edges
of the seal and with deftness that betrayed long practice, split it off
without its breaking, opened the note and read it. Her basilisk eyes
lighted with satisfaction--the triumph of a long quest rewarded. Then
she warmed the wax again, replaced it, and as it hardened, broke it
across as if the letter had been opened in the ordinary manner.
As Mrs. Clermont rose to her feet, a thin, severe figure stood on the
threshold. She saw with relief that it was Lady Noël, and handed her
the letter with a feline smile.
“Perhaps your ladyship will know if this should be preserved,” she
said. “I found it just now on the floor.”
Lady Noël’s eyes glittered at sight of the cockle-shells. She read
it hastily by the firelight. Her look was coldly yet triumphantly
malignant as she leaned forward.
“Put an outer wrapper on this,” she ordered in an undertone, “seal it,
and take it at once to Melbourne House. Give it into William Lamb’s
hands--to no one else. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my lady,” the other replied, and left her noiselessly, as Gordon
came slowly down the stair.
“I have left your lordship this evening’s _Courier_,” said Lady Noël,
forbiddingly.
“Thank you,” he answered and looked at it carelessly. On its exposed
page a pencil had marked an article of considerable length whose title
was: “The Poetical Works of a Peer of the Realm, viewed in connection
with Christianity and the Obligations of Social Life.”
Its final paragraph was underscored with meaning heaviness:
“We have less remorse in quoting the noble lord,”--he read--“for,
by this time, we believe the whole world is inclined to admit that
he can pay no compliment so valuable as his censure, nor offer any
insult so intolerable as his praise. _Crede Gordon_ is the noble
lord’s armorial motto: ‘Trust Gordon’ is the translation in the
Red-Book. We cannot but admire the ingenuity with which his lordship
has converted the good faith of his ancestors into a sarcasm on his
own duplicity.”
A simmer of rage rose in Gordon’s throat. He tore the paper twice
across, flung it down, and passed on to the drawing-room. Seeing no
one, he rang for the valet.
“Where is Mr. Sheridan?” he demanded.
Fletcher was carrying a wine-glass and seemed surprised at the query.
“He was here five minutes ago, your lordship. Mr. Sheridan looked very
bad when I let him in, sir. I was just getting him this brandy.”
“I suppose he tired of waiting,” thought Gordon. “The Clermont has a
new part to-night, and Sherry’s bound for Fops’ Alley.”
As he buttoned his great-coat, he heard a cry from the valet, and ran
into the drawing-room to find Fletcher bending over the form of the old
wit, prostrate on the floor, moveless, speechless, his face swept by a
bluish pallor.
“Good God!” cried Gordon. “Help me lift him and fetch a doctor at once!”
With Fletcher’s aid the old man was placed upon a sofa, and Gordon
loosed the stiff neckerchief, put a cushion under the recumbent head
and chafed the sick man’s hands.
The physician looked grave when he came.
“A paralytic stroke,” he said. “He must be taken home.”