III.PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.
Austin Mayfell devoutly in love with Mrs. Dehon. This was without doubt thegrande passionof his life. And it was hopeless.
He was just at the age when such affairs are sternest realities to modern men. He was beyond the uncertainty of youth, and before the compromises and practicalities of middle life. And there was something about Gladys Dehon to make a man who cared for her ride rough-shod, neck or nothing, over all things else. All the world admired her; would have loved her had it dared. There was no daring about it in Austin’s case; his audacity was not self-conscious; he simply followed her as he had followed her over combe and beacon on that Exmoor day.
People could tell him little about her, savethat she had been very poor and very proud, and was very beautiful. Gladys Darcy—that had been her name—last of a broken family of Devon and of Ireland. She had neither sister nor brother, only a broken-down father, long since sold out of his Household captaincy. She had sold herself to Terwilliger Dehon, the rich speculator; and she was his, as a cut diamond might have been his; bought with his money, shining in his house, and he no more within her secret self than he might have been within the diamond’s brilliant surface. And two months after the wedding her old father had died and made the sacrifice in vain. Then she became the personage that the world knew as the “beautiful Mrs. Dehon.” May used to dream and ponder about her, long hours of nights and days; and he fancied that something about her life, her lonely bringing-up, her father’s precepts, had made her scornfully incredulous of there being such a thing as the novelist’s love in life. She had been a greater nature than her father, and all mankind had been nothing to her as compared with even him. Too early scorn of thisworld’s life prepares the soul for evil compromises.
Her character, her nature, she expressed in no way whatever. She had neither intimate friends, charitable occupations, tastes, follies, nor faults. She shone with a certain scornful glitter of splendor, but even of old Dehon’s millions she was not prodigal. She never flirted; she never looked at one man long enough for that. Her one occupation was hunting, and she rode to hounds in a way to jar the nerves of every M. F. H. in England.
Tom Leigh was afraid of her; and when they were asked for a week’s visit that autumn, in their box in Leicestershire, refused to go. May went. And if there was a man of whom she was not utterly unconscious, he surely was the one. Perhaps there was something about his way that she liked. For, with neither much speech, delay, nor artifice, our hero made his heart and soul up into a small packet and threw them into her deep eyes; and when she looked at him, he had them; and when she looked away, they were gone. And this he did perfectly frankly and directly, but without spokenwords. The world saw it as clearly as did she, and liked him none the less for it. He was quite incapable of any effort to conceal it; old Terwilliger might have seen it had he been so minded. Possibly he did, and the knowledge lent an added value to his chattel in the old stockbroker’s mind. Mrs. Dehon herself treated May with perfect simplicity, but with an infinite gentleness, as the moon-goddess might have looked upon Endymion.
This state of things got to be perfectly well known to the world. Such things always are well known to the world; nothing is more striking than the perfect openness with which our heart-histories are revealed in modern life, except perhaps the ease with which those most intimately concerned maintain a polite and unembarrassed appearance of utter ignorance upon the subject. All the world loves a lover, particularly a hopeless one; and it was quite themot d’ordreof society that year for people to ask Mrs. Dehon and the handsome American to their houses together.
And Mrs. Dehon? Well, before the coming of spring she felt a great and trustfulfriendship for this incidental castaway upon the waters of her troubled life. May afterward remembered that she told him many things about herself; and she had spoken of herself to no one else before, her own father included. She even let him see a little of her heart. And it is an axiom that he who sees ever so little of a woman’s heart has but to take it. Seeing is possession. This is the wisdom of the fair Melusine, and other wise old mediæval myths.
It is needless to say that May had absolutely forgotten the Countess de Valska; more completely than even she had forgotten the Siberian mausoleum of her Serge. If May thought of her once in that year, it was to dismiss her memory with a curse for his own folly, and a mental oath that no Trouvillian countess would part him, should his way ever be clear to Gladys Darcy. He would not recognize the hated name of Dehon, even in his thoughts.
In his despair, he confided in Tom Leigh again. Tom saw no reason to change his previous opinion. The hole seemed if anything deeper, now that two were in it. “I don’t see but what you’ve got to escapethe countess, bring Serge to life, kill old Terwilliger, and thus give her two years’ mourning,” said he. “Why the deuce didn’t you find her out first?” he added, ruefully. “Old Terwilliger only married her eighteen months ago.”
“I don’t know,” said May. “Why don’t you invent his railway schemes, and discover his Cornish mines?”
“True,” assented Tom. “Old Dehon always does get in on the ground floor. However,” he added, brightening up, “if you can marry her, you’ll get her and his money, too.”
“Damn his money,” said May.
Tom looked shocked, and changed the subject, and May’s heart continued so to bleed internally that soon Gladys Dehon’s marble brow would soften to pity as she saw him wane. Meantime Terwilliger’s capon-lined stomach waxed apace, and even his digestion was to all appearance unimpaired.
Now, it is probable that ours is the first civilization known to history where this state of things could exist, be mutually known, and continue in tranquil permanency.But it does—that is, it nearly always does—and it is a credit, after all, to our teaching and our times that it does so. The ancient Perseus cut Andromeda’s chains, and departed with her by the next P. and O. steamer they could signal; the modern one sits down on the strand beside her, and he and Andromeda die to slow music—that is, in case either should chance to die before the malady is cured. And Andromeda’s master relies on the strength of his chains and on Perseus’s good bringing-up, and is not wholly displeased at the situation. Particularly for a sly old stock-broker like Terwilliger Dehon, whose idea of values is based on the opinion of the street, a Perseus to his Andromeda is half the fun. The world, on the whole, approves the situation; but the husband Dehon is not a popular character, and it likes the Perseus better. Not, of course, that it is willing to condone anything improper, particularly on the part of Andromeda.
But Austin May stood the passive rôle for precisely twelve months; and then he made up his mind that something would have to break. He hoped it might be the neck of oldTerwilliger; but Providence seldom spoils a dramatic situation by so simple a denouement. And, to tell the truth, considering the way the three rode to hounds, it was much more likely to be his own or Gladys’s. One thing was sure: their triangular relations were too strained to continue. He came to this conclusion after one precisely similar day upon Exmoor, a year after their first meeting; except that upon this occasion the deer took to the sea below Glenthorne and was drowned, and he and Gladys rode homeward side by side in silence.
Accordingly, that night Austin May wrote a letter; and in the morning showed Terwilliger a telegram from America, took his departure, shook hands hard with old Terwilliger, barely touched the slender fingers of his wife, but, when he did so, left the letter in her hand. May kept no copy of this letter; but he remembered it very well. It ran as follows:
“Gladys:“I must not stay in England any more. I cannot bear it. I know that you are unhappy, and I must go where, at least, I shallnot see it. Nor can I trust myself with you after our ride of yesterday.“Remember always that, wherever I am, I am always and only yours. This is a very strange thing to say; but I think there are times when men and women should show each other their hearts, however much the truth may shock the prudes and pedants. And I do very much wish to say that if ever you are free, I ask you to marry me.“It is a sad thing that the circumstances of your wedded life are such that I can say these things to you and not offend you. But you have shown me enough of your heart for this.“I go now into Asia. A trivial duty will call me to my family home for one day, on August 14, 1886. Then, if I do not hear of you there, I shall disappear again. After that I shall write you once a year.“Good-by,“A. M.”
“Gladys:
“I must not stay in England any more. I cannot bear it. I know that you are unhappy, and I must go where, at least, I shallnot see it. Nor can I trust myself with you after our ride of yesterday.
“Remember always that, wherever I am, I am always and only yours. This is a very strange thing to say; but I think there are times when men and women should show each other their hearts, however much the truth may shock the prudes and pedants. And I do very much wish to say that if ever you are free, I ask you to marry me.
“It is a sad thing that the circumstances of your wedded life are such that I can say these things to you and not offend you. But you have shown me enough of your heart for this.
“I go now into Asia. A trivial duty will call me to my family home for one day, on August 14, 1886. Then, if I do not hear of you there, I shall disappear again. After that I shall write you once a year.
“Good-by,“A. M.”