When Ernest Le Breton got a letter from the business house of a well-known publishing firm, asking him whether he would consent to supply appropriate letterpress for an illustrated work on the poor of London, then in course of preparation, his delight and relief were positively unbounded. That anyone should come and ask him for work, instead of his asking them, was in itself a singular matter for surprise and congratulation; that the request should be based on the avowed ground of his known political and social opinions was almost incredible. Ernest felt that it was a triumph, not only for him, but for his dearly-loved principles and beliefs as well. For the first time in his life, he was going to undertake a piece of work which he not only thought not wrong, but even considered hopeful and praise-worthy. Arthur Berkeley, who called round as if by accident the same morning, saw with delight that Lady Hilda’s prognostication seemed likely to be fulfilled, and that if only Ernest could be given some congenial occupation there was still a chance, after all, for his permanent recovery; for it was clear enough that as there was hope, there must be a little life yet left in him.
It was Lady Hilda who, as she herself expressively phrased it, had squared the publishers. She had called upon the head of the well-known house in person, and had told him fully and frankly exactly what was the nature of the interest she took in the poor of London. At first the publisher was scandalised and obdurate: the thing was not regular, he said—not in the ordinary way of business; his firm couldn’t go writing letters of that sort to unknown young authors and artists. If she wanted the work done, she must let them give her own name as the promoter of the undertaking. But Hilda persevered, as she always did; she smiled, pleaded, cajoled, threatened, and made desperate love to the publisher to gain his acquiescence in her benevolent scheme. After all, even publishers are only human (though authors have been frequently known to deny the fact); and human nature, especially in England, is apt to be very little proof against the entreaties of a pretty girl who happens also to be an earl’s daughter. So in the end, when Lady Hilda said most bewitchingly, ‘I put it upon the grounds of a personal favour, Mr. Percival,’ the obdurate publisher gave way at last, and consented to do her bidding gladly.
For six weeks Ernest went daily with Ronald and the young artist into the familiar slums of Bethnal Green, and Bermondsey, and Lambeth, whose ins and outs he was beginning to know with painful accuracy; and every night he came back, and wrote down with a glowing pen all that he had seen and heard of distressing and terrible during his day’s peregrination. It was an awful task from one point of view, for the scenes he had to visit and describe were often heart-rending; and Arthur feared more than once that the air of so many loathsome and noxious dens might still further accelerate the progress of Ernest’s disease; but Lady Hilda said emphatically, No; and somehow Arthur was beginning now to conceive an immense respect for the practical value of Lady Hilda’s vehement opinions. As a matter of fact, indeed, Ernest did not visibly suffer at all either from the unwonted hard work or from the strain upon mind and body to which he had been so little accustomed. Distressing as it all was, it was change, it was variety, it was occupation, it was relief from that terrible killing round of perpetual personal responsibility. Above all, Ernest really believed that here at last was an opportunity of doing some practical good in his generation, and he threw himself into it with all the passionate ardour of a naturally eager and vivid nature. The enthusiasm of humanity was upon him, and it kept him going at high-pressure rate, with no apparent loss of strength and vigour throughout the whole ordeal. To Arthur Berkeley’s intense delight, he was even visibly fatter to the naked eye at the end of his six weeks’ exploration of the most dreary and desolate slums in all London.
The book was written at white heat, as the best of such books always are, and it was engraved and printed at the very shortest possible notice. Terrible and ghastly it certainly was at last—instinct with all the grim local colouring of those narrow, squalid, fever-stricken dens, where misfortune and crime huddle together indiscriminately in dirt and misery—a book to make one’s blood run cold with awe and disgust, and to stir up even the callous apathy of the great rich capitalist West End to a passing moment’s ineffective remorse; but very clever and very graphic after its own sort beyond the shadow of a question, for all its horror. When Arthur Berkeley turned over the first proof-sheets of ‘London’s Shame,’ with its simple yet thrilling recital of true tales taken down from the very lips of outcast children or stranded women, with its awful woodcuts and still more awful descriptions—word-pictures reeking with the vice and filth and degradation of the most pestilent, overcrowded, undrained tenements—he felt instinctively that Ernest Le Breton’s book would not need the artificial aid of Lady Hilda’s influential friends in order to make it successful and even famous. The Cabinet ministers might be as silent as they chose, the indignant duke might confine his denunciations to the attentive and sympathetic ear of his friend Lord Connemara; but nothing on earth could prevent Ernest Le Breton’s fiery and scathing diatribe from immediately enthralling the public attention. Lady Hilda had hit upon the exact subject which best suited his peculiar character and temperament, and he had done himself full justice in it. Not that Ernest had ever thought of himself, or even of his style, or the effect he was producing by his narrative; it was just the very non-self-consciousness of the thing that gave it its power. He wrote down the simple thoughts that came up into his own eager mind at the sight of so much inequality and injustice; and the motto that Arthur prefixed upon the title-page, ‘Facit indignatio versum,’ aptly described the key-note of that fierce and angry final denunciation. ‘Yes, Lady Hilda had certainly hit the right nail on the head,’ Arthur Berkeley said to himself more than once: ‘A wonderful woman, truly, that beautiful, stately, uncompromising, brilliant, and still really tender Hilda Tregellis.’
Hilda, on her part, worked hard and well for the success of Ernest’s book as soon as it appeared. Nay, she even condescended (not being what Ernest himself would have described as an ethical unit) to practise a little gentle hypocrisy in suiting her recommendations of ‘London’s Shame’ to the tastes and feelings of her various acquaintances. To her Radical Cabinet minister friend, she openly praised its outspoken zeal for the cause of the people, and its value as a wonderful storehouse of useful facts at first hand for political purposes in the increasingly important outlying Metropolitan boroughs. ‘Just think, Sir Edmund,’ she said, persuasively, ‘how you could crush any Conservative candidate for Hackney or the Tower Hamlets out of that awful chapter on the East End match-makers;’ while with the Duke, to whom she presented a marked copy as a sample of what our revolutionary thinkers were really coming to, she insisted rather upon its wicked interference with the natural rights of landlords, and its abominable insinuation (so subversive of all truly English ideas as to liberty and property) that they were bound not to poison their tenants by total neglect of sanitary precautions. ‘If I were you, now,’ she said to the Duke in the most seemingly simple-minded manner possible, ‘I’d just quote those passages I’ve marked in pencil in the House to-night on the Small Urban Holdings Bill, and point out how the wave of Continental Socialism is at last invading England with its devastating flood.’ And the Duke, who was a complacent, thick-headed, obstinate old gentleman, congenitally incapable of looking at any question from any other point of view whatsoever except that of his own order, fell headlong passively into Lady Hilda’s cruel little trap, and murmured to himself as he rolled down luxuriously to the august society of his peers that evening, ‘Tremendous clever girl, Hilda Tregellis, really. “Wave of Continental Socialism at last invading England with its what-you-may-call-it flood,” she said, if I remember rightly. Capital sentence to end off one’s speech with, I declare. Devizes’ll positively wonder where I got it from. I’d no idea before that girl took such an intelligent interest in political questions. So they want their cottages whitewashed, do they? What’ll they ask for next, I wonder? Do they think we’re to be content at last with one and a-half per cent, upon the fee-simple value of our estates, I should like to know? Why, some of the places this writer-fellow talks about are on my own property in The Rookery—“one of the most noisome court-yards in all London,” he actually calls it. Whitewash their cottages, indeed! The lazy improvident creatures! They’ll be asking us to put down encaustic tiles upon the floors next, and to paper their walls with Japanese leather or fashionable dados. Really, the general ignorance that prevails among the working classes as to the clearest principles of political economy is something absolutely appalling, absolutely appalling.’ And his Grace scribbled a note in his memorandum-book of Hilda’s ready-made peroration, for fear he should forget its precise wording before he began to give the House the benefit of his views that night upon the political economy of Small Urban Holdings.
Next morning, all London was talking of the curious coincidence by which a book from the pen of an unknown author, published only one day previously, had been quoted and debated upon simultaneously in both Houses of Parliament on a single evening. In the Commons, Sir Edmund Calverley, the distinguished Radical minister, had read a dozen pages from the unknown work in his declamatory theatrical fashion, and had so electrified the House with its graphic and horrible details that even Mr. Fitzgerald-Grenville, the well-known member for the Baroness Drummond-Lloyd (whose rotten or at least decomposing borough of Cherbury Minor he faithfully represented in three successive Parliaments), had mumbled out a few half-inaudible apologetic sentences about this state of things being truly deplorable, and about the necessity for meeting such a distressing social crisis by the prompt and vigorous application of that excellent specific and familiar panacea, a spirited foreign policy. In the Lords, the Duke himself, by some untoward coincidence, had been moved to make a few quotations, accompanied by a running fire of essentially ducal criticism, from the very selfsame obscure author; and to his immense surprise, even the members of his own party moved uneasily in their seats during the course of his speech; while later in the evening, Lord Devizes muttered to him angrily in the robing-room, ‘Look here, Duke, you’ve been and put your foot in it, I assure you, about that Radical book you were ill-advised enough to quote from. You ought never to have treated the Small Urban Holdings Bill in the way you did; and just you mark my words, the papers’ll all be down upon you to-morrow morning, as sure as daylight. You’ve given the “Bystander” such an opening against you as you’ll never forget till your dying day, I can tell you.’ And as the Duke drove back again after his arduous legislative efforts that evening, he said to himself between the puffs at his Havana, ‘This comes, now, of allowing oneself to be made a fool of by a handsome woman. How the dooce I could ever have gone and taken Hilda Tregellis’s advice on a political question is really more than I can fathom:—and at my time of life too! And yet, all the same, there’s no denying that she’s a devilish fine woman, by Jove, if ever there was one.’
Of course, everybody asked themselves next day what this book ‘London’s Shame’ was like, and who on earth its author could be; so much so, indeed, that a large edition was completely exhausted within a fortnight. It was the great sensational success of that London season. Everybody read it, discussed it, dissected it, corroborated it, refuted it, fought over it, and wrote lengthy letters to all the daily papers about its faults and its merits. Imitators added their sincerest flattery: rivals proclaimed themselves the original discoverers of ‘London’s Shame’: one enterprising author even thought of going to law about it as a question of copyright. Owners of noisome lanes in the East End trembled in their shoes, and sent their agents to inquire into the precise degree of squalor to be found in the filthy courts and alleys where they didn’t care to trust their own sensitive aristocratic noses. It even seemed as if a little real good was going to come at last out of Ernest Le Breton’s impassioned pleading—as if the sensation were going to fall not quite flat at the end of its short run in the clubs and drawing-rooms of London as a nine days’ wonder.
And Ernest Le Breton? and Edie? In the little lodgings at Holloway, they sat first trembling for the result, and ready to burst with excitement when Lady Hilda, up at the unwonted hour of six in the morning, tore into their rooms with an early copy of the ‘Times’ to show them the Duke’s speech, and Sir Edmund’s quotations, and the editorial leader in which even that most dignified and reticent of British journals condescended to speak with studiously moderated praise of the immense collection of facts so ably strung together by Mr. Ernest Le Breton (in all the legible glory of small capitals, too,) as to the undoubtedly disgraceful condition of some at least among our London alleys. How Edie clung around Lady Hilda and kissed her! and how Lady Hilda kissed her back and cried over her with tears of happier augury! and how they both kissed and cried over unconscious wondering little Dot! And how Lady Hilda could almost have fallen upon Ernest, too, as he sat gazing in blank astonishment and delight at his own name in the magnificent small capitals of a ‘Times’ leader. Between crying and laughing, with much efficient aid in both from good Mrs. Halliss, they hardly knew how they ever got through the long delightful hours of that memorable epoch-making morning.
And then there came the gradual awakening to the fact that this was really fame—fame, and perhaps also competence. First in the field, of course, was the editor of the ‘Cosmopolitan Review,’ with a polite request that Ernest would give the readers of that intensely hot-and-hot and thoughtful periodical the opportunity of reading his valuable views on the East End outcast question, before they had had time to be worth nothing for journalistic purposes, through the natural and inevitable cooling of the public interest in this new sensation. Then his old friends of the ‘Morning Intelligence’ once more begged that he would be good enough to contribute a series of signed and headed articles to their columns, on the slums and fever dens of poverty-stricken London. Next, an illustrated weekly asked him to join with his artist friend in getting up another pilgrimage into yet undiscovered metropolitan plague-spots. And so, before the end of a month, Ernest Le Breton, for the first time in his life, had really got more work to do than he could easily manage, and work, too, that he felt he could throw his whole life and soul into with perfect honesty.
When the first edition of ‘London’s Shame’ was exhausted, there was already a handsome balance to go to Ernest and his artist coadjutor, who, by the terms of the agreement, were to divide between them half the profits. The other half, for appearance’ sake, Lady Hilda and Arthur had been naturally compelled to reserve for themselves: for of course it would not have been probable that any publisher would have undertaken the work without any hope of profit in any way. Arthur called upon Hilda at Lord Exmoor’s house in Wilton Place to show her the first balance-sheet and accompanying cheque. ‘What on earth can we do with it?’ he asked seriously. ‘We can’t divide it between us: and yet we can’t give it to the poor Le Bretons. I don’t see how we’re to manage.’
‘Why, of course,’ Hilda answered promptly. ‘Put it into the Consols or whatever you call it, for the benefit of little Dot.’
‘The very thing!’ Arthur answered in a tone of obvious admiration. ‘What a wonderfully practical person you really are, Lady Hilda.’
As to Ernest and Edie, when they got their own cheque for their quarter of the proceeds, they gazed in awe and astonishment at the bigness of the figure; and then they sat down and cried together like two children, with their hands locked in one another’s.
‘And you’ll get well, now, Ernest dear,’ Edie whispered gently. ‘Why, you’re ever so much fatter, darling, already. I’m sure you’ll get well in no time, now, Ernest.’
‘Upon my word, Edie,’ Ernest answered, kissing her white forehead tenderly, ‘I really and truly believe I shall. It’s my opinion that Sir Antony Wraxall’s an unmitigated ignorant humbug.’
A few weeks later, when Ernest’s remarkable article on ‘How to Improve the Homes of the Poor’ appeared in one of the leading magazines, Mr. Herbert Le Breton of the Education Office looked up from his cup of post-prandial coffee in his comfortable dining-room at South Kensington, and said musingly to his young wife, ‘Do you know, Ethel, it seems to me that my brother Ernest’s going to score a success at last with this slum-hunting business that he’s lately invented. There’s an awful lot about it now in all the papers and reviews. Perhaps it might be as well, after all, to scrape an acquaintance with him again, especially as he’s my own brother. There’s no knowing, really, when a man of his peculiar ill-regulated mercurial temperament may be going to turn out famous. Don’t you think you’d better find out where they’re living now—they’ve left Holloway, no doubt, since this turn of the tide—and go and call upon Mrs. Ernest?’
Whereto Mrs. Herbert Le Breton, raising her eyes for a moment from the pages of her last new novel, answered languidly: ‘Don’t you think, Herbert, it’d be better to wait a little while and see how things turn out with them in the long run, you know, before we commit ourselves by going to call upon them? One swallow, you see, doesn’t make a summer, does it, dear, ever?’ Whence the acute and intelligent reader will doubtless conclude that Mrs. Herbert Le Breton was a very prudent sensible young woman, and that perhaps even Herbert himself had met at last with his fitting Nemesis. For what worse purgatory could his bitterest foe wish for a selfishly prudent and cold-hearted man, than that he should pass his whole lifetime in congenial intercourse with a selfishly prudent and cold-hearted wife, exactly after his own pattern?
Ernest’s unexpected success with ‘London’s Shame’ was not, as Arthur Berkeley at first feared it might be, the mere last dying flicker of a weak and failing life. Arthur was quite right, indeed, when he said one day to Lady Hilda that its very brilliancy and fervour had the hectic glow about it, as of a man who was burning himself out too fiercely and rapidly; you could read the feverish eagerness of the writer in every line; but still, Lady Hilda answered with her ordinary calm assurance that it was all going well, and that Ernest only needed the sense of security to pull him round again; and as usual, Lady Hilda’s practical sagacity was not at fault. The big pamphlet—for it was hardly more than that—soon proved an opening for further work, in procuring which Hilda and Arthur were again partially instrumental. An advanced Radical member of Parliament, famous for his declamations against the capitalist faction, and his enormous holding of English railway stock, was induced to come forward as the founder of a new weekly paper, ‘in the interest of social reform.’ Of course the thing was got up solely with an idea to utilising Ernest as editor, for, said the great anti-capitalist with his usual charming frankness, ‘the young fellow has a positive money-value, now, if he’s taken in hand at once before the sensation’s over, and there can be no harm in turning an honest penny by exploiting him, you know, and starting a popular paper.’ When Ernest was offered the post of editor to the new periodical, at a salary which almost alarmed him by its plutocratic magnificence (for it was positively no less than six hundred a year), he felt for a moment some conscientious scruples about accepting so splendid a post. And when Lady Hilda in her emphatic fashion promptly over-ruled these nascent scruples by the application of the very simple solvent formula, ‘Bosh!’ he felt bound at least to stipulate that he should be at perfect liberty to say whatever he liked in the new paper, without interference or supervision from the capitalist proprietor. To which the Radical member, in his business capacity, immediately responded, ‘Why, certainly. What we want to pay you for is just your power of startling people, which, in its proper place, is a very useful marketable commodity. Every pig has its value—if only you sell it in the best market.’
‘The Social Reformer, a Weekly Advocate of the New Economy,’ achieved at once an immense success among the working classes, and grew before long to be one of the most popular journals of the second rank in all London. The interest that Ernest had aroused by his big pamphlet was carried on to his new venture, which soon managed to gain many readers by its own intrinsic merits. ‘Seen your brother’s revolutionary broadsheet, Le Breton?’ asked a friend at the club of Herbert not many weeks later—he was the same person who had found it ‘so very embarrassing’ to recognise Ernest—in his shabby days when walking with a Q.C.—‘It’s a dreadful tissue of the reddest French communism, I believe, but still, it’s scored the biggest success of its sort in journalism, I’m told, since the days of Kenealy’s “Englishman.” Bradbury, who’s found the money to start it—deuced clever fellow in his way, Bradbury!—is making an awful lot out of the speculation, they say. What do you think of the paper, eh?’
Herbert drew himself up grimly. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said in his stiffest style, ‘I haven’t yet had time to look at a copy. Ernest Le Breton’s not a man in whose affairs I feel called upon to take any special interest; and I haven’t put myself to the trouble of reading his second-hand political lucubrations. Faint echoes of Max Schurz, all of it, no doubt; and having read and disposed of Schurz himself long ago, I don’t feel inclined now to go in for a second supplementary course of Schurz and water.’
‘Well, well, that may be so,’ the friend answered, turning over the pages of the peccant periodical carelessly; ‘but all the same I’m afraid your brother’s really going to do an awful lot of mischief in the way of setting class against class, and stirring up the dangerous orders to recognise their own power. You see, Le Breton, the real danger of this sort of thing lies in the fact that your brother Ernest’s a more or less educated and cultivated person. I don’t say he’s really got any genuine depth of culture—would you believe it, he told me once he’d never read Rabelais, and didn’t want to?—and of course a man of true culture in the grain, like you and me now, my dear fellow, would never dream of going and mistaking these will-o’-the-wisps of socialism for the real guiding light of regenerated humanity—of course not. But the dangerous symptom at the present day lies just in the fact that while the papers written for the mob used to be written by vulgar, noisy, self-made, half-educated demagogues, they’re sent out now with all the authority and specious respectability of decently instructed and comparatively literary English gentlemen. Now, nobody can deny that that’s a thing very seriously to be regretted; and for my part I’m extremely sorry your brother has been ill-advised enough to join the mob that’s trying to pull down our comfortably built and after all eminently respectable, even if somewhat patched up, old British constitution.’
‘The subject’s one,’ Herbert answered curtly, ‘in which I for my part cannot pretend to feel the remotest personal interest.’
Ernest and Edie, howerer, in the little lodgings up at Holloway, which they couldn’t bear to desert even now in this sudden burst of incredible prosperity, went their own way as self-containedly as usual, wholly unconcerned by the non-arrival of Mrs. Herbert on a visit of ceremony, or the failure of the ‘Social Reformer’ to pierce the lofty ethereal regions of abstract contemplation where Herbert himself sat throned like an Epicurean god in the pure halo of cultivated pococurantism. Every day, as that eminent medical authority, Hilda Tregellis, had truly prophesied, Ernest’s cheeks grew less and less sunken, and a little colour returned slowly to their midst; while Edie’s face was less pale than of old, and her smile began to recover something of its old-fashioned girlish joyousness. She danced about once more as of old, and Arthur Berkeley, when he dropped in of a Sunday afternoon for a chat with Ernest, noticed with pleasure that little Miss Butterfly was beginning to flit round again almost as naturally as in the old days when he first saw her light little form among the grey old pillars of Magdalen Cloisters. Yet he couldn’t help observing, too, that his feeling towards her was more one of mere benevolence now, and less of tender regret, than it used to be even a few short months before, in the darkest days of Edie’s troubles. Could it be, he asked himself more than once, that the tall stately picture of Hilda Tregellis was overshadowing in his heart the natural photograph of that unwedded Edie Oswald that he once imagined was so firmly imprinted there? Ah well, ah well, it may be true that a man can love really but once in his whole lifetime; and yet, the second spurious imitation is positively sometimes a very good facsimile of the genuine first impression, for all that.
As the months went slowly round, too, the time came in the end for good Herr Max to be released at last from his long imprisonment. On the day that he came out, there was a public banquet at the Marylebone dancing saloon; and all the socialists and communards were there, and all the Russian nihilists, and all the other wicked revolutionary plotters in all London: and in the chair sat Ernest Le Breton, now the editor of an important social paper, while at his left hand, to balance the guest of the evening, sat Arthur Berkeley, the well-known dramatic author, who was himself more than suspected of being the timid Nicodemus of the new faith. And when Ernest announced that Herr Schurz had consented to aid him on the ‘Social Reformer,’ and to add the wisdom of age to the impetuosity of youth in conducting its future, the simple enthusiasm of the wicked revolutionists knew no bounds. And they cried ‘Hoch!’ and ‘Viva!’ and ‘Hooray!’ and many other like inarticulate shouts in many varieties of interjectional dialect all the evening; and everybody agreed that after all Herr Max was VERY little grayer than before the trial, in spite of his long and terrible term of imprisonment.
He WAS a little embittered by his troubles, no doubt;—what can you expect if you clap men in prison for the expression of their honest political convictions?—but Ernest tried to keep his eye steadily rather on the future than on the past; and with greater ease and unwonted comforts the old man’s cheerfulness as well as his enthusiasm gradually returned. ‘I’m too old now to do anything more worth doing myself before I die,’ he used to say, holding Ernest’s arm tightly in his vice-like grip: ‘but I have great hopes in spite of everything for friend Ernest; I have very great hopes indeed for friend Ernest here. There’s no knowing yet what he may accomplish.’
Ernest only smiled a trifle sadly, and murmured half to himself that this was a hard world, and he began himself to fear there was no fitting feeling for a social reformer except one of a brave despair. ‘We can do little or nothing, after all,’ he said slowly; ‘and our only consolation must be that even that little is perhaps just worth doing.’
Long before the ‘Social Reformer’ had fully made its mark in the world, another event had happened of no less importance to some of the chief actors in the little drama whose natural termination it seemed to form. While the pamphlet and the paper were in course of maturation, Arthur Berkeley had been running daily in and out of the house in Wilton Place in what Lady Exmoor several times described as a positively disgraceful and unseemly manner. (‘What Hilda can mean,’ her ladyship observed to her husband more than once, ‘by encouraging that odd young man’s extraordinary advances in the way she does is really more than I can understand even in her.’) But when the Le Bretons were fairly launched at last on the favourable flood of full prosperity, both Hilda and Arthur began to feel as though they had suddenly been deprived of a very pleasant common interest. After all, benevolent counsel on behalf of other people is not so entirely innocent and impersonal in certain cases as it seems to be at first sight. ‘Do you know, Lady Hilda,’ Berkeley said one afternoon, when he had come to pay, as it were, a sort of farewell visit, on the final completion of their joint schemes for restoring happiness to the home of the Le Bretons, ‘our intercourse together has been very delightful, and I’m quite sorry to think that in future we must see so much less of one another than we’ve been in the habit of doing for the last month or so.’
Hilda looked at him straight and said in her own frank unaffected fashion, ‘So am I, Mr. Berkeley, very sorry, very sorry indeed.’
Arthur looked back at her once more, and their eyes met. His look was full of admiration, and Hilda saw it. She moved a little uneasily upon the ottoman, waiting apparently as though she expected Arthur to say something else. But Arthur looked at her long and steadfastly, and said nothing.
At last he seemed to wake from his reverie, and make up his mind for a desperate venture. Could he be mistaken? Could he have read either record wrong—his own heart, or Hilda’s eyes? No, no, both of them spoke to him too plainly and evidently. His heart was fluttering like a wind-shaken aspen-leaf; and Hilda’s eyes were dimming visibly with a tender moisture. Yes, yes, yes, there was no misreading possible. He knew he loved her! he knew she loved him!
Bending over towards where Hilda sat, he took her hand in his dreamily: and Hilda let him take it without a movement. Then he looked deeply into her eyes, and felt a curious speechlessness coming over him, deep down in the ball of his throat.
‘Lady Hilda,’ he began at last with an effort, in a low voice, not wholly untinged with natural timidity, ‘Lady Hilda, is a working man’s son——’
Hilda looked back at him with a sudden look of earnest deprecation. ‘Not that way, Mr. Berkeley,’ she said quietly: ‘not that way, please: you’ll hurt me if you do: you know that’s not the wayIlook at the matter. Why not simply “Hilda”?’
Berkeley clasped her hand eagerly and raised it to his lips. ‘Hilda, then,’ he said, kissing it twice over. ‘It SHALL be Hilda.’
Hilda rose and stood before him erect in all her queenlike beauty. ‘So now that’s settled,’ she said, with a vain endeavour to control her tears of joy. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more, now; I can’t bear to talk about it: there’s nothing to arrange, Arthur. Whenever you like will suit me. But, oh, I’m so happy, so happy, so happy—I never thought I could be so happy.’
‘Nor I,’ Arthur answered, holding her hand a moment in his tenderly.
‘How strange,’ Hilda said again, after a minute’s delicious silence; ‘it’s the poor Le Bretons who have brought us two thus together. And yet, they were both once our dearest rivals. YOU were in love with Edie Le Breton:Iwas half in love with Ernest Le Breton: and now—why, now, Arthur, I DO believe we’re both utterly in love with one another. What a curious little comedy of errors!’
‘And yet only a few months ago it came very near being a tragedy, rather,’ Arthur put in softly.
‘Never mind!’ Hilda answered in her brightest and most joyous tone, as she wiped the joyful tears from her eyes. ‘It isn’t a tragedy, now, after all, Arthur, and all’s well that ends well!’
When the Countess heard of Hilda’s determination—Hilda didn’t pretend to go through the domestic farce of asking her mother’s consent to her approaching marriage—she said that so far as she was concerned a more shocking or un-Christian piece of conduct on the part of a well-brought-up girl had never yet been brought to her knowledge. To refuse Lord Connemara, and then go and marry the son of a common cobbler! But the Earl only puffed away vigorously at his cheroot, and observed philosophically that for his part he just considered himself jolly well out of it. This young fellow Berkeley mightn’t be a man of the sort of family Hilda would naturally expect to marry into, but he was decently educated and in good society, and above all, a gentleman, you know, don’t you know: and, hang it all, in these days that’s really everything. Besides, Berkeley was making a pot of money out of these operas of his, the Earl understood, and as he had always expected that Hilda’d marry some penniless painter or somebody of that sort, and be a perpetual drag upon the family exchequer, he really didn’t see why they need trouble their heads very much about it. By George, if it came to that, he rather congratulated himself that the girl hadn’t taken it into her nonsensical head to run away with the groom or the stable-boy! As to Lynmouth, he merely remarked succinctly in his own dialect, ‘Go it, Hilda, go it, my beauty! You always were a one-er, you know, and it’s my belief you always will be.’
It was somewhere about the same time that Ronald Le Breton, coming back gladdened in soul from a cheerful talk with Ernest, called round of an evening in somewhat unwonted exultation at Selah’s lodgings. ‘Selah,’ he said to her calmly, as she met him at the door to let him in herself, ‘I want to have a little talk with you.’
‘What is it about, Ronald?’ Selah asked, with a perfect consciousness in her own mind of what the subject he wished to discourse about was likely to be.
‘Why, Selah,’ Ronald went on in his quiet, matter-of-fact, unobtrusive manner, ‘do you know, I think we may fairly consider Ernest and Edie out of danger now.’
‘I hope so, Ronald,’ Selah answered imperturbably. ‘I’ve no doubt your brother’ll get along all right in future, and I’m sure at least that he’s getting stronger, for he looks ten per cent. better than he did three months ago.’
‘Well, Selah!’
‘Well, Ronald!’
‘Why, in that case, you see, your objection falls to the ground. There can be no possible reason on either side why you should any longer put off marrying me. We needn’t consider Edie now; and you can’t have any reasonable doubt that I want to marry you for your own sake this time.’
‘What a nuisance the man is!’ Selah cried impetuously. ‘Always bothering a body out of her nine senses to go and marry him. Have you never read what Paul says, that it’s good for the unmarried and widows to abide? He was always dead against the advisability of marriage, Paul was.’
‘Brother Paul was an able and earnest preacher,’ Ronald murmured gravely, ‘from whose authority I should be sorry to dissent except for sufficient and weighty reason; but you must admit that on this particular question he was prejudiced, Selah, decidedly prejudiced, and that the balance of the best opinion goes distinctly the other way.’
Selah laughed lightly. ‘Oh, does it?’ she said, in her provoking, mocking manner. ‘Then you propose to marry me, I suppose, on the balance of the best Scriptural opinion.’
‘Not at all, Selah,’ Ronald replied without a touch of anything but grave earnestness in his tone—it must be admitted Ronald was distinctly lacking in the sense of humour. ‘Not at all, I assure you. I propose to marry you because I love you, and I believe in your heart of hearts you love me, too, you provoking girl, though you’re too proud or too incomprehensible ever to acknowledge it.’
‘And even if I do?’ Selah asked. ‘What then?’
‘Why, then, Selah,’ Ronald answered confidently, taking her hand boldly in his own and actually kissing her—yes, kissing her; ‘why, then, Selah, suppose we say Monday fortnight?’
‘It’s awfully soon,’ Selah replied, half grumbling. ‘You don’t give a body time to think it over.’
‘Certainly not,’ Ronald responded, quickly, taking the handsome face firmly between his two spare hands, and kissing her lips half a dozen times over in rapid succession.
‘Let me go, Ronald,’ Selah cried, struggling to be free, and trying in vain to tear down his thin wiry arms with her own strong shapely hands. ‘Let me go at once,—there’s a good boy, and I’ll marry you on Monday fortnight, or do anything else you like, just to keep you quiet. After all, you’re a kind-hearted fellow enough, and you want looking after and taking care of, and if you insist upon it, I don’t mind giving way to you in this small matter.’
Ronald stepped back a pace or two, and stood looking at her a little sadly with his hands folded. ‘Oh, Selah,’ he cried in a tone of bitter disappointment, ‘don’t speak like that to me, don’t, please. Don’t, don’t tell me that you don’t really love me—that you’re going to marry me for nothing else but out of mere compassion for my weakness and helplessness!’
Selah burst at once into a wild flood of uncontrollable tears: ‘Oh, Ronald,’ she cried in her old almost fiercely passionate manner, flinging her arms around his neck and covering him with kisses; ‘Oh, Ronald, how can you ever ask me whether I really really love you! You know I love you! You know I love you! You’ve given me back life and everything that’s dear in it, and I never want to live for anything any longer except to love you, and wait upon you, and make you happy. I’m stronger than you, Ronald, and I shall be able to do a little to make you happy, I do believe. My ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts your thoughts, my darling; but I love you all the better for that, Ronald, I love you all the better for that; and if you were to kick me, beat me, trample on me now, Ronald, I should love you, love you, love you for ever still.’
So they two were quietly married, with no audience save Ernest and Edie, on that very Monday fortnight.
When Herbert Le Breton heard of it from his mother a few days later, he went home at once to his own eminently cultured home and told Mrs. Le Breton the news, of course without much detailed allusion to Selah’s earlier antecedents. ‘And do you know, Ethel,’ he added significantly, ‘I think it was an excellent thing that you decided not to call after all upon Ernest’s wife, for I’m sure it’ll be a great deal safer for you and me to have nothing to say in any way to the whole faction of them. A greengrocer’s daughter, you know—quite unpresentable. They’ll be all mixed up together in future, which’ll make it quite impossible to know the one without at the same time knowing the other. Now, it’d be just practicable for you to call upon Mrs. Ernest, I must admit, but to call upon Mrs. Ronald would be really and truly too inconceivable.’
At the end of the first year of the ‘Social Reformer,’ the annual balance was duly audited, and it showed a very considerable and solid surplus to go into the pocket of the enterprising Radical proprietor. Ernest and Herr Max scanned it closely together, and even Ernest could not refrain from a smile of pleasure when he saw how thoroughly successful the doubtful venture had finally turned out. ‘And yet,’ he said regretfully, as he looked at the heavy balance-sheet, ‘what a strange occupation after all for the author of “Gold and the Proletariate,” to be looking carefully over the sum-total of a capitalist’s final balance! To think, too, that all that money has come out of the hard-earned scraped-up pennies of the toiling poor! I often wish, Herr Max, that even so I had been brought up an honest shoemaker! But whether I’m really earning my salt at the hands of humanity now or not is a deep problem I often have many an uncomfortable internal sigh over to this day.’
‘There is work and work, friend Ernest,’ Herr Max answered, as gently as had been his wont in older years; ‘and for my part it seems to me you are better here writing your Social Reformers than making shoes for a single generation. One man builds for to-day, another man builds for to-morrow; and he that plants a fruit tree for his children to eat of is doing as much good work in the world as he that sows the corn in spring to be reaped and eaten at this autumn’s harvest.’
‘Perhaps so,’ Ernest answered softly. ‘I wish I could think so. But after all I’m not quite sure whether, if we had all starved eighteen months ago together, as seemed so likely then, it wouldn’t have been the most right thing in the end that could possibly have happened to all of us. As things are constituted now, there seems only one life that’s really worth living for an honest man, and that’s a martyr’s. A martyr’s or else a worker’s. And I, I greatly fear, have managed somehow to miss being either. The wind carries us this way and that, and when we would do that which is right, it drifts us away incontinently into that which is only profitable.’
‘Dear Ernest,’ Edie cried in her bright old-fashioned manner from the office door, ‘Dot has come in her new frock to bring Daddy home for her birthday dinner as she was promised. Come quick, or your little daughter’ll be very angry with you. And Lady Hilda Berkeley has come, too, to drive us back in her own brougham. Now don’t be a silly, there’s a dear, or say that you can’t drive away from the office of the “Social Reformer” in Lady Hilda’s brougham!’