“Shall I despair because the day is dead,And all thy strange, sad witchery has passedInto the gold of visions! Shall I castMy soul to where the hands of Night outspreadThose cosmic epics, the emotions dreadOf panting planets and of stars aghast!Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlastThe sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand,And watched the sun make amber of thy hair!Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned,And delved thy glances with a grand despair!Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep.Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”
“Shall I despair because the day is dead,And all thy strange, sad witchery has passedInto the gold of visions! Shall I castMy soul to where the hands of Night outspreadThose cosmic epics, the emotions dreadOf panting planets and of stars aghast!Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlastThe sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand,And watched the sun make amber of thy hair!Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned,And delved thy glances with a grand despair!Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep.Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”
“Shall I despair because the day is dead,And all thy strange, sad witchery has passedInto the gold of visions! Shall I castMy soul to where the hands of Night outspreadThose cosmic epics, the emotions dreadOf panting planets and of stars aghast!Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlastThe sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!
“Shall I despair because the day is dead,
And all thy strange, sad witchery has passed
Into the gold of visions! Shall I cast
My soul to where the hands of Night outspread
Those cosmic epics, the emotions dread
Of panting planets and of stars aghast!
Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlast
The sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!
“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand,And watched the sun make amber of thy hair!Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned,And delved thy glances with a grand despair!Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep.Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”
“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand,
And watched the sun make amber of thy hair!
Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned,
And delved thy glances with a grand despair!
Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep.
Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”
PART II
SNOW covered the world, a dense dirge of white sounding deep into the black web of the woods. Clouds moved low in the sky, heavy and morose, unsilvered by the sifting sun. The hills were like the great billows of a milky sea. A silence as of suspense seemed to press ponderous and prophetic upon the land.
England again: sullen skies and the sullen atmosphere of Saltire society! Autumn had passed in a wizard blaze of gold. Sympathies had clashed at the outset like brazen cymbals. At Paris millinery had appealed to the one, the Louvre had possessed the other. At Rome the feminine mind had yawned under the shadow of St. Peter’s, while the male had moved musingly amid ruins. Florence had proffered nothing to Ophelia save opportunities for grumbling over thetable d’hôte; Raphael and the great Michael had called to Gabriel from the Accademia delle Bell’ Arti. At Ravenna the man had meditated over the tomb of Dante. At Venice the brackish flavor of the canals had eliminated the least leaning towards romance in the Honorable Ophelia’s skull. The affair had proved to her one long progress of monotonies. She had yawned through Italy as she would have yawned through the pages ofThe Pilgrim’s Progress. The antique exasperated her beyond belief; its dim philosophy offended the sensuous greed of the present. She had more than once suggested to Gabriel that he had been formed by nature to be a frowsy curio dealer, hoarding mediævalisms in a dusty shop. The temper of neither had improved during the sojourn amid vineyards and olive thickets. The woman’s mood had grown symbolical of Etna; the man’s had ascended towards Alpine regions of perpetual snow.
An irreligious man may be a very passable creature; an irreligious woman is a production more sinister than a double-headed leopard. Love and the adoration of a deity should be woven up in a true woman’s heart like the purple and gold threads of a sacramental garment. Atheism in a woman is an offence against the spirit of maternity. The Gusset girls had been bred upon an apathetic culture-ground and fostered on certain pert ethical concoctions that based a complacent liberty on reason. They went to church on occasions, and encouraged the bourgeois folk in a creed that they had been taught to regard with benignant condescension. Lord Gerald detested lengthy sermons and anything bordering on Calvinism. In the one brief burst of mental energy of youth he had imbibed the tenets of a certain philosophical school, and these rather flimsy convictions had propped him in an amiable epicureanism for the remainder of his earthly existence.
That she may escape the inherent perversity of her nature, a woman without a creed must indeed be possessed by phenomenal instincts towards saintliness. Nor was Ophelia Strong anything of a saint, even in the most lax rendering of the epithet. She was a woman of the world; a very modern production, an admixture of the extreme pleasurableness of imperial Rome with the cool and impertinent independence of the moneyed scion of contemporary life. The smart lady of fashion cannot be expected to garb herself in dowdy and bourgeois morality. The domestic virtues are becoming obsolete in many feminine brains. They are to be classed with samplers, crochet-work, cookery books, tracts, and other relics of vulgar superstition. Ophelia Strong was one of those ladies who live to the minute, revel in sensations, and believe in the employment of certain fashionable and shady members of the medical profession.
There was little cause for wonder that Gabriel and his wife should have discovered traces of mutual incompatibility before many months had elapsed. The one lived for the life within, the other for the life without. Marry an Acrasia to a St. Christopher and you will provide material enough to keep cynics employed for a century. There is no inherent unreason in strife under particular circumstances. A man may as well attempt to cultivate the Sahara as to perfect home life with a woman pledged to the demon worship of all that is vain and artificial. The modern fashionable person is an enlightened and independent spirit. A splendid emancipation scoffs at the barbarous ethics of the parlor. Æsthetic and piquant mischief is preferred to sincerity garbed in black bonnet, mackintosh, and galoshes.
Thus it may be recorded without exaggeration that a four months’ honeymoon on the Continent had not bourgeoned into deep marital blessedness. Gabriel and his wife had returned to Saltire in a certain dubious temper that did not flatter the future with prospects of peace. There were errors on both sides; inconsistencies in either character. A look of heavy petulance reigned on the woman’s face, and she had become addicted to hysterical outbursts of passion. Gabriel still wore his melancholy, Werther-like smile. The evolutions of marriage had not astonished his reason. The first squabble in a Parisian hotel had prepared him for the mockery that was to be. He was a man who could distil a species of melancholy intoxication from his own troubles. They barred him in upon himself and intensified to his mind the face of the girl who had stirred his blood in the summer that had gone. It is only when night comes that man beholds the stars.
Saltire had welcomed the couple with quivering tongues. Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacles had glimmered feverishly in the Saltire drawing-rooms, and her charity had dipped its forked irony in vinegar as of yore. The Misses Snodley were sentimental and expectant. Even John Strong’s enthusiasm was still rosy as a peony and bathotic as stale beer. He and Lord Gerald were much at dinner together, and political problems hung heavy over these Titanic minds. It was decreed as a matter of course that the young folk were supremely contented, bathed in a dotage of sensuous bliss. The Misses Snodley declared that Ophelia looked twice the woman since the hallowed influence of marriage had breathed upon her soul. As for Gabriel, they could vow that he had the orthodox joy of paternity gravely writ upon his face. And yet Mrs. Marjoy licked her teeth and sneered.
It was winter, late in January, with snow on the ground and no wind moving. The Saltire hills were white under the moon, checkered with the black umbrage of the woods. Stars gemmed the bare trees, that rose gaunt, tumultuous, and morose about the tiled roofs of The Friary. A warm glow streamed betwixt damask curtains, tincturing the snow. A ghostly quiet brooded calm and passionless in the night. The dark pines on the hills stood like a silent host, watchful, multitudinous, mute.
Gabriel and his wife were at dinner, embalmed in the sanctity of matrimonial solitude. A shaven-faced man-servant stood behind Gabriel’s chair. Candles were burning on the table under red lace shades. A silver epergne full of Christmas roses stood upon a richly embroidered centre of green and gold. Glass and silver scintillated on the immaculate cloth. The greater part of the room lay in shadow.
Ophelia, in a light blue tea-gown, sipped her claret and looked unseraphically at the man half hidden from her by flowers. Tension had arisen that day over certain very minor matters, domestic and otherwise. The conversation during dinner had been unimaginative and monosyllabic. The starched and glazed man-servant by the sideboard had stood, chin in air, staring into space.
Ophelia dispelled at last a silence that had lasted for some minutes.
“Going skating to-morrow?”
“Possibly.”
The wife toyed with a savory and looked at her plate.
“Do you ever make up your mind on any subject under the sun?” she remarked, with a crude curl of her long lip.
“I never trouble my brain, dear, over trifles.”
“What a limp animal you are. Pah, there’s too much pepper in this stuff! Take it away, James. And you can go. Leave the crumbs; we’ll picnic over dessert.”
The man whisked the plates away, set wines and liqueurs on the table, and departed, closing the door gently. Ophelia pulled a dish of preserved fruit towards her and nibbled irritably.
“Look here, Gabriel,” she said.
Her husband began handling a pair of silver nut-crackers.
“Well, dear?”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so curt before the servants. They might think we’d been married ten years by your manners. You never seem to consider me. If I wish a thing you immediately contradict me. I suppose my very wishing it is enough to set your temper on edge. You never seem to think I need amusing.”
“My dear girl, I suppose I am dull at times.”
“Dull! You put it mildly.”
“Indeed!”
“For Heaven’s sake, stop cracking those nuts. I have a beastly headache, and you fidget me to death. You men are so abominably selfish. Do you ever realize that we have been stuffed down in this place a month; I am getting sick of being bored out of my skin every hour of the day. I tell you, I can’t stand it; it’s getting on my nerves. We must rake up a house-party or do something outrageous. I never imagined you could be such a brutal dullard.”
The man laughed half cynically. The philosophic part of him was amused despite the occasion.
“You forget that we have become orthodox and respectable,” he said, “that we are expected to rent a pew in church, subscribe to missionary enterprises, exist on hash for lunch, and renounce the devil and all his angels. I am sorry I have contrived to become so abominably orthodox. I am only endeavoring to live up to middle-class ideals, dumpling-and-treacle philosophy, the ethics of top-hats and mid-day dinners on Sunday. Perhaps you might suggest some new and original piece of wickedness.”
The sally had no emollient effect upon Ophelia’s petulance. Her claws were out; and she was not a woman who could regain her amiability within half a day. She could lose most things, even her purse, with facility, but a grievance clung like a rubefacient plaster.
“One would think you had married me to be amused,” she said.
“Yours is the Eve’s part of the compact.”
“As a matter of fact, you seem to care more for a shilling volume of essays than for my company.”
“Really!”
“No woman should allow a library to exist in her house.”
“My dear girl, you are surely not jealous of Schopenhauer?”
“I have never heard of the fellow.”
“Perhaps it is as well; he is somewhat caustic.”
The wife gathered her gown and prepared to depart to the drawing-room. Gabriel opened the door for her. She gave him a look as she went out.
“I shall expect you in half an hour for billiards.”
“I will attempt to be punctual. Tell James to serve my coffee in the library.”
“Drat the library.” came the retort.
Now whether it was pure perversity on Gabriel’s part, or the romantic mesmerism of the work on which he was engaged, an honest eighty minutes had passed before he appeared in the red-and-white salon. Clouds had blackened still further the spiritual atmosphere. The fire had died to embers; a cheap novel lay dishevelled on the hearth-rug as though precipitated there in a moment of irritation. Ophelia was sitting with her feet on the fender, her chin resting on her clinched fists.
Gabriel closed the door gently, picked up the book, appropriated a chair, and sat down. He was even impolitic enough to yawn behind his hand. The storm seethed two paces away, gathering satirical bitterness over the listless fire.
“I hope you have amused yourself.”
The man glanced up, more surprise than apology upon his face. He was in a conciliatory mood; his wife’s voice was more than ominous of injured sentiment.
“I have been writing,” he said; “the hour after dinner is one of my most enlightened periods. My imagination kindles.”
“Imagination!”
The twinge of irony was admirable.
“You surely don’t consider such stuff literature?”
“I have hopes for myself.”
The lady tittered amiably and exhaled transcendent pity.
“Your conceit is really very amusing,” she remarked. “It is really too funny to think that you take yourself seriously. You—an author! My dear Gabriel, you are really too absurd.”
Now a man perhaps is never so sensitive as in the matter of mental acumen. Scoff at his ability as at a fond and fatuous delusion, a ridiculous piece of egotism, and you bid fair to touch his vanity to the quick. You may insult his figure with impunity, but it is dangerous to blaspheme against his mind.
“My dear girl, I hardly expect you to sympathize with me on such subjects.”
“Naturally you consider me beneath your notice.”
“You are not a competent critic.”
“No, I am a woman with common-sense.”
Gabriel stared hard at the fire.
“Can I expect you to understand the deeper side of my soul?” he said.
“Well, dear, the domestic side is shallow enough for me to form a fair estimate of the literary.”
The man winced despite himself.
“You are very kind,” he said.
“I only want to protest against your abominable selfishness.”
“Selfishness!”
The wife flung herself back upon her cushions.
“Perhaps you think yourself insulted,” she said. “You marry a woman, neglect her, treat her to inconceivable dulness on all possible occasions. You give her the residuum of your intellect, the lees of your leisure. Books, books, twaddle, twaddle, from morning to night. I did not marry a library or a second-hand book-store. Do you ever consider my position?”
The man still stared into the grate.
“I have given you a home and myself,” he said. “You cannot expect me to dangle at your skirts all day long. I have lived much with books and my own thoughts till now; you must understand that I cannot give up all that was great in my mind before our marriage. Is all the selfishness on my side?”
“At any rate, all the dulness seems on mine.”
“What more do you desire me to give you?”
“A little consideration might be courteous. Am I to be boxed up in a country-house with a tea merchant’s son who thinks he is a genius and leaves me to exist on novels and coffee. You forget that I am not a frump of fifty. I want to live, although you have married me.”
“Live, by all means,” said the man.
“I want some pleasure in life.”
“Excitement and fashionable bonbons, I suppose.”
The woman lost the remnant of her temper and flashed up on the instant.
“Gabriel, I won’t be jeered at like this. You are an utter brute. Stay here and grub in your books like a hermit. I am not going to be a martyr to your vanity. I’m sick of your sour face. Thank Heaven, I can find amiability outside my own home. I shall take a holiday.”
The man stood up and still stared apathetically at the fire. His shoulders drooped and he looked sullenly dejected.
“Try a change, dear, by all means,” he said; “you seem to need it. I am a bit of a bookworm, I know. You must make allowance for me. I suppose you don’t want such a dull dog to travel with you.”
“Thanks. I can enjoy myself better alone.”
“Very good.”
“There is no need for me to come between you and your genius. No. I am not so vain as to desire that.”
A quarter of an hour later Gabriel had drawn back the curtains and thrown open the French window that looked out upon the lawns. Snow sparkled at his feet. The trees rose dark and solemn from the immaculate plain of winter; the stars were frost-brilliant in the heavens. Near stood a tall cypress with its shelving ledges gleaming white with snow. The keen breath of the night wrapped the man in a clear and spiritual atmosphere.
Snow upon the trees and on the hills! Snow, pure, passionless, and silent, flickered over by the faint wisdom of the stars! All the sweat and turmoil of the world seemed congealed into soundless sleep. The blood of the earth lay frozen in its great passionate heart. Love, hardened into ice, stood a purple pool of lifeless wine. A million centuries might have elapsed till the sun had waned into a half-molten sphere; and the earth, cold and immaculate at last, rushed icy-bosomed through perpetual night. A dead planet, a ghost world, a moon staring spectre-like on the blood-red passions of living stars! A dead planet, treading the universal cycle, cold, sunless, and without sin! The million atomic struggles tombed; the ant-heap of humanity petrified in the past! What, then, are the woes of man, when God’s eyes have watched the death agony of a thousand worlds!
And yet this microcosm outvapors the universe. His passions aspire to stir the faintest ripples of the most infinite ether. Framed in the likeness of God, his sphere is limitless, his future unfathomed. The old mythologies raised him amid the stars. Mayhap in ages to come he is transmogrified into a radiant being moving amid the vapors of a more stupendous sun.
And Gabriel! Gabriel thought on matters less sidereal at that moment. The stars were given sedilia whence they might stare upon the portentous tragedy working in the soul of a minor poet. The man had married clay, clay hot from the kiln of fleshliness; it had warmed him, but now it was as cold as the very snow. He had bartered away the spirit, and materialism had him wrist and ankle. The small stars of idealism had toppled out of the heavens. He was setting them back one by one like an artist frescoing the dome of a temple. Still, a woman held him by the loins; the Church had blessed the embrace, for the perpetuation of demi-gods and the unctuous preservation of morality. The problem was threadbare enough in all truth, and yet problems possess the power of perpetual rejuvenescence. Sin, error, and pain, those elixirs of life, keep the world quivering in the primal throes of existence. The Christian and the Buddhist tug at humanity, head and tail, while Death throws pebbles into an open grave.
THE Honorable Ophelia Strong had summoned to her side a certain friend of her youth, and departed from Saltire to an inland watering-place of repute. The pair had settled at a fashionable hydropathic establishment under the wing of an urbane and sympathetic medical gentleman. Neither Lord Gerald nor John Strong knew anything of the storms that had swept The Friary. They believed the atmosphere of the place to have been peaceful as a summer dawn.
It was promulgated in Saltire circles that Gabriel Strong’s wife had journeyed northward to Callydon for the sake of her health. The reason was sane enough, but, since Dr. Marjoy had not been consulted in the matter, his indefatigable mate had spread certain sinister suggestions through the neighborhood. And since the Saltire ladies were ready to accept any hint that was detrimental to the character of an absent sister, Mrs. Marjoy’s insinuations had bristled like Scotch thistles and flourished with exceeding rankness.
One evening late in February Mrs. Mince and the doctor’s wife had attended the Wednesday celebration of even-song at Saltire church. Mr. Mince had preached to seven ladies, the sexton, and the village idiot a very moving sermon upon spirituality, a sermon largely plagiarized from the works of a popular divine. After the service the ladies had taken leave of the vicar at the village cross. Mr. Mince had parted from them to call on Mr. Smith, the pork butcher, to arrange for the transference of the vicarage sow’s last litter into cash. Mrs. Mince and Mrs. Marjoy continued on their way, inspired by the imagined savor of toasted muffins that rose spiritually prophetic from Mrs. Marjoy’s tea-table.
“It is reported, my dear,” said Mrs. Mince, as she turned up her veil and tucked her black gloves into a ball—“it is reported that young Strong is to contest the constituency at the next election. Sir Hercules Dimsdale is retiring, dear old fellow! What changes we see as the years pass by!”
“Changes for the worse,” said Mrs. Marjoy. “Sir Hercules is such a gentleman; he always asks James to shoot with him twice a year. Young Strong a politician! Why, the cub has no more backbone than a jellyfish. His character would not stand an election.”
Mrs. Mince agreed with her usual flabby facility.
“There are such peculiar rumors abroad,” she said. “I cannot imagine where they come from. Most strange, Ophelia Strong going away like this. Don’t you think so, my dear?”
Mrs. Marjoy leered behind her spectacles.
“Very peculiar,” she said, suggestively.
“Most odd, particularly when they have been married such a short time. I wonder what the reason can be.”
“Health,” said the doctor’s wife.
“The woman looks well enough.”
“Quite robust.”
“Most odd,” observed the vicaress.
“My dear, there is no need to look far for an explanation. You see, Mrs. Strong did not consult James; a matter of diplomacy. The inference is inevitable.”
Both ladies tittered. Mrs. Mince helped herself to another muffin, and wiped her fingers on a very crumpled handkerchief.
“Dear! dear!” she observed; “I often wonder what we are coming to in these fast and atheistical days. Life will become a terrible problem for Christian women like ourselves in the future. If there were only more men like Jacob in the country. That sermon was really a masterpiece.”
“A most moving appeal.”
“I knew you would think so, my dear. I am always imploring Jacob to publish his sermons, but he is so beautifully modest. I am sure they would exert a great influence on the young men of England.”
“If they sold, my dear,” said Mrs. Marjoy.
“There could be no doubt on that point.”
Mrs. Marjoy shrugged her shoulders; her black hat sat awry on her frowzy brown hair.
“Cheap fiction floods the market,” she observed—“such stuff as young Strong would write. Imagine that young fool setting himself up to be an author.”
“Ridiculous!” said Mrs. Mince.
“And poetry, too! Of course, immoral verses are always fashionable. And as for the novels, I have to read such few as we get before I can let them pass into James’s hands. He is such an innocent man, and I could not let him imbibe such abomination. There is Cracow’sRenovation, for instance. I have just finished the book, and I shall burn it.”
“Please lend it to me first?” said the vicaress. “As a clergyman’s wife I like to dip into these things. One must be wise as to one’s times, my dear, or one can never confront evil properly.”
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Marjoy. “I have turned down the most scandalous pages.”
“That will save me time. I can read the worst, my dear, and so speak with authority. I will take the book home with me to-night.”
The conversation again reverted to Ophelia Strong’s pilgrimage to Callydon. Mrs. Marjoy’s explanatory suggestions were neither very magnanimous nor very refined. Both ladies grew exceedingly animated over so lofty a topic. They discovered much complacent self-flattery in the comparison of their opinions. Mrs. Mince made frequent references to the text of her husband’s sermon.
Previous to the vicaress’s departure Mrs. Marjoy stated certain postulates that deserve record, evidencing as they did the salubrious and Christian atmosphere of that unique and excellent woman’s mind.
All servants are emissaries of Satan.
All fashionable women imbibe brandy secretly.
All men are libertines with the exception of one’s own husband.
Only those people are respectable who happen to move in the same groove as one’s self.
That charity, as a virtue, is peculiar to women.
That Gabriel Strong was an unprincipled person.
That his wife wore figure-pads and dyed her hair.
That Mrs. Jumble was a preposterous pedant.
That she, Mrs. Marjoy, hungered after the philosophy of Christ with her whole soul.
That a really fascinating woman need not consider her complexion.
That one should never buy sausage-meat in June.
JUDITH STRONG had joined Gabriel at The Friary, and Judith was as far removed in soul from the Saltire dames as Aldebaran is from the moon. Saltire needed the magic of Ruskin; it was in its Ice Age, crusted by custom. There were discrepancies in Saltire that would not have shone with splendor upon the pages ofSesame and Lilies. For the Cordelias, the Virgilias, the Imogens, Saltire could have proffered Mrs. Marjoy or Mrs. Mince, or even that beglassed Diana, Miss Zinia Snodley of the irreproachable boots.
Of the malignities that sucked leechlike at his honor Gabriel Strong was most honestly ignorant. Many seasons elapse before man reads the unpropitious faces of his fellows, not dowering himself spontaneously with the power of arousing hatred in others. The child’s optimism dies slowly, as the white swans change to geese, the foaming chargers to long-eared asses. Envy is the unwilling flattery of the fool. The true man puts forward the shield of power and regains once more the golden age of youth by triumphing godlike over the malice of mediocrity.
Judith had found her brother full of a restless morbidity, his mind like a darkened mirror full of vague shadows and indefinite glimmerings of light. He was alternately silent and impulsively verbose; burdened either with a monotonous melancholy or a scintillant and flippant mirth. He would spend much of the day breasting the winter winds and the mists that hastened over the hills. Of his married life he said no word to her, nor dared she tempt him for all her love to a confession.
One evening, after playing Chopin’s Second Waltz, she had turned in the dusk to find him staring at the flames as they flung tragic shadows through the twilight. He looked like a Dante, gazing morose and mute upon the pessimisms of some under world. The music had moved him; she had read its echoes in his eyes. Going on her knees, she had taken his hands in hers and pleaded with him after the gracious manner of her heart.
“Gabriel, what ails you?” she had asked.
The man had put her hands gently from him and turned his face into the shadows.
“Nothing,” he had answered her.
“Can you not trust me?”
“Dear, I cannot trust myself.”
She had crept close to him and leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Gabriel, is it your marriage?”
“Do not ask me,” he had said.
“May I not help you?”
“No one can help me,” he had retorted, rising and leaving her alone by the fire.
One winter afternoon they wandered together on the hills above the sea. The day was cheerless and full of the piping of the wind. The sea ran gray and lustreless under a sullen sky, whose clouds trailed dim and rain-laden over the hills. The woods were gaunt and wild as with remorse. Dead leaves lay rotting in the lanes; in some of the more sheltered ditches snow still lingered.
The conversation had fallen upon elemental things—the thirst for love and man’s eternal yearning for a spiritual creed. Judith, divine woman that she was, possessed that clarity of thought that abhorred dogmas and embraced untainted truth. Religion to her was as spiritual sunlight diffusing itself throughout the world. To her sanctity did not emanate from the pulpit. She was no automaton stirred to moral activity by black-letter phrases and studied incantations. To her life was religion, each heart-beat a natural prayer. Her Christianity was not of the book and the pew, but a bright atmosphere surrounding all things.
Gabriel was in a bitter mood. He had long escaped from the sensuous stupor into which his marriage had plunged him, and the awakening was the more humiliating to his pride. The natural fires of the mind were stirring from the ashes of a dead and sensual desire. His thoughts spread towards the unknown and into the wilderness of beauty and romance. He had bartered his liberty for red pottage and the bondage irked his soul.
Brother and sister came nearer to each other’s heart that day as they wandered over the misty hills. Judith had caught the man’s humor, and her sympathies were awake like birds on a May morning. It was pure joy to her to feel that she had some share in the man’s musings.
“I am weary of orthodoxy,” he said to her, as they threaded a wood where the trees stood in a silver vapor.
“What is orthodoxy?” she asked, as she followed at his heels.
“The blind cult of custom.”
“Why trouble over such a grievance; the world is wide. Need one think with the mob?”
“In Saltire, yes.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said to him, as she drew to his side and looked wistfully into his face.
Gabriel unbosomed to her.
“The place is like a stagnant pool to me,” he said, “covered with the scum of custom. To doubt, according to our neighbors, is a sin. He who weighs the problems of life is held to be an infidel. We are expected to receive Mr. Mince’s dogmas as the only exposition of all truth and knowledge. To experiment is infamous. We are hedged in with endless axioms as with thorns.”
Judith sighed and looked out over the sea.
“I fear you will find no rest in Saltire,” she said to him.
“Rest! No. Could it be possible? The place cramps and crushes my soul. There is no generosity, no hope, no idealism here. It is as a burial-ground for souls.”
“Escape from it.”
“Impossible.”
“And why?”
“What of Ophelia?”
They were both silent awhile, as though searching each other’s hearts. The wind tumbled the dead leaves at their feet; the clouds were gray and morose in the winter sky.
“Ah, Gabriel, it might have been otherwise.”
The man frowned and did not answer her.
“What of politics?” she asked him anon.
“I have pondered the question.”
“You would escape into a wider world—a world of endeavor and strong purpose.”
“Better than Saltire.”
“Better than mouldering here amid a decaying generation.”
“It is the fog of the place that chokes me.”
They had passed to the dull green of the meadows and skirted a ragged hedge where dead branches shook in the wind. A path curled from the wood above them, crossed the road that ran by the hedge, and threaded on through ploughed fields towards a thicket of pines. Gabriel and Judith had halted to gaze over the sea.
As they turned again towards the west a girl in a green cloak and russet skirt came out from the wood and followed the path that descended towards the lane. She carried her hat in her hand and walked bareheaded in the wind. Passing close to the pair, she glanced at Judith, then at Gabriel, halted a moment, and then hastened on with kindling cheeks over the meadows. It was thus that Gabriel and Joan Gildersedge met once more on the hills above the sea.
Judith had glanced unconsciously at her brother’s face. Its expression startled her. His eyes were full of a peculiar brightness, his cheeks afire, his lips parted. The face reminded her of some painting of Dante—Dante gazing upon Beatrice gliding athwart the path of life.
“Gabriel.”
The man darted a look at her and grew pale suddenly.
“What ails you?” she asked, with her hand on his arm.
“Nothing.”
“Are you ill?”
“No.”
“The wind is cold; let us go home.”
“Yes, let us go home.”
WINTER had intensified the loneliness that had fallen upon Joan Gildersedge’s heart. Of old, life had satisfied the girl; it no longer satisfied the woman. The lid of the casket had been lifted and the sunlight fell on the gems within, purple, vermilion, and green. The world had grown oracular. There was an ecstatic “Ah!” in the voice of the wind. The vellum had been torn from the mouth of the painted jar and odors roseate and rare were wafted up to the stars. She was ignorant in measure, yet quick with a strange, sweet intuition that made her eyes rich as purple clematis and bright as sunlit glass. She was even a most fascinating drama to herself; it was a pure and beautiful thing, this magic that had grown so silently within her heart. Like a white lily, green-stemmed and tall, it had put forth sudden bloom, and the fragrance hallowed the whole world.
Child that she was, her life had been lonely enough, and she had treasured the soul-picture of the strong face that had come to her through the summer silence. The man had spoken words to her, both of pain and delight—pain that they should be parted, delight that it was difficult to part. She thought of him always, yet knew no shame in the thought. As she would have recalled a golden meadow, or a glistening dawn, or an evening deep with amethystine silence, so she would remember the man’s voice and the eyes that had looked at her with a mute despair. She treasured the memory as a betrothed girl treasures the amulet that dangles over her heart. Pure, spontaneous, golden of soul, she had an earthly heaven in this love of hers. It was clean and spiritual, the virgin ecstasy of a woman, rich and fragrant as the meads of paradise.
She had taken Judith for Gabriel’s wife on the day she had passed them on the winter hill-side. The meeting had been a shock to Joan, and she had turned home with her whole soul shuddering. She felt miserable, humiliated, yet full of an exultant loneliness. Her love was inevitable to her, a book of dreams, sad yet splendid. Seeing that it filled her with transcendent instincts towards beauty, it had no sinister meaning for her heart. The problem surprised her in measure. Reality appeared to contradict truth. She had a species of conviction that by natural law Gabriel was hers and she Gabriel’s.
The last meeting had been oracular also in its effect upon the man. The look, half timid and pained, in the girl’s eyes remained with him vividly to the troubling of his spirit. The memory of it had been stamped upon his brain as with iron at white heat. This was but the fourth time that he had seen Joan Gildersedge, and each scene was a brilliant fresco, azure and green and gold. The winter landscape and the lonely eyes of the woman had touched all the slumbering idealism in his mind. His soul was like a deserted palace entered by its lord again. The jewelled casements glimmered in the sun; music and song moved mysterious through its gorgeous chambers; colors burned upon the walls; the odor of flowers breathed through its regenerate life.
Through manifold gradations Gabriel had come to a keen conception of a higher morality. He had flung away the yard-measure of superstition, and his possibilities were more magnificent and universal. From the rotting roofs of sectarianism his conception of love had risen to the spiritual azure of heaven. Animalism had ceased from his soul. It vexed him no longer; the tiger and the dog in him were inert and caged. It is only when man has purged himself of his baser instincts that he comprehends the wonderful significance of life.
Through the wilderness of speculation and desire Gabriel had come by a conviction that illumined his whole being. The inevitable laws of life were as plain to him as though written upon tablets of stone. He had erred and failed. Yet revelation had descended to him as he struggled towards the light. So long as animalism existed in his being, so long as fleshly things warred within his body, he was a bond-slave shackled from the supreme region of the ideal. Joan Gildersedge had ever been a white cloud to him, a golden vapor, beautifully pure. As the satyr squirming in the mire of an unlovely marriage he had dared not approach unto her soul. As the spirit man, the Christian, this high love was lawful and good unto his being. He was justified by the spirit. Though he were the bond-slave of an earthly houri nothing could prevent him aspiring to a divine love. Such a marriage was but a serf’s collar with the medallion of the beast thereon. A spiritual love could in no way make him false to a compact that had nothing of the divine in its consummation. He was the husband of one wife in the flesh. He could be the husband of one wife in the spirit.
It was such a conclusion as this that sent him errant like a young Sir Percival, the man of a new age, eager to live life under the benediction of a new philosophy. That day the wind was warm and vigorous. Rain had fallen early, but the sun had rent the clouds and flung torrents of gold dust down upon the world. All the earth glittered, the sea, the woods, the streams. The sky was like a garland of orange blooms about the brows of the day.
Gabriel Strong was in one of those transcendental moods when the mind is convinced of the existence of God. The law in his own heart led him instinctively to feel the presence of the Unseen, to realize the superb dignity of the divine will. He trod the hills as Christ trod the waves—serene, calmly exultant, conscious of heaven and his own soul. He beheld all things through the glittering idealism of love. Nothing was prosaic, nothing unintelligible.
Burnt House, with its red wall, its rusty gates, its sepulchral trees, rose before him like a romance. He passed up the tangled, grass-grown drive as one who fulfils the prophetic visions of the past. The cypresses bent to him in salutation. The laurels glistened, smiled in the sun. Even the iron bell rang joyous, pealing loudly through the solitary house.
A tall, angular woman in a white cap opened the oak door to Gabriel. There were hard lines about her mouth, her jaw was square, her colorless eyes critical. Her black dress fitted close about her austere figure, and she wore a heavy silver brooch at her throat. She had the air of a woman bred in whitewashed chapels amid the bleating of harmoniums and the singing of hymns. Her face was like a stone wall painted with a lying epitaph; her mouth like an oak money-trap inscribed with an insinuating text.
Gabriel asked for Joan Gildersedge.
The woman looked him over, pursed her lips, and frowned. Her eyes travelled from his forehead to his boots and remained fixed upon his collar.
“Miss Joan’s out.”
“Will she be back soon?”
“Can’t say.”
“Is it any use my waiting?”
The tart person was considering the situation and the nature of her visitor. She knew his face and yet could not fix a name to it for the moment.
“Better leave a card,” she said. “You might possibly find Miss Joan in the meadow. She’s vagarious, and I ain’t a prophet.”
“Which way?”
“Down the drive, sir, and by the path on the left.”
“Thanks.”
“What name, sir?”
“You need not trouble.”
Betwixt the laurels and the yews Gabriel met Joan Gildersedge as he was returning towards the gate. They came upon each other quite suddenly, the girl emerging from the narrow path that plunged into the wall of green. There was neither the time nor the desire perhaps for prevarication on either part. The color had deepened on Joan Gildersedge’s face. All psychological reflections were swallowed up in the action of the moment.
“You—here!”
She stood looking in his face, still blushing slightly and holding herself a little aloof. Her eyes had grown suddenly dark yet luminous, like a deep pool half lit by moonlight. Their expression was ineffably mysterious and alluring.
“I have come to you again,” said the man.
“Why?”
The sunlight quivered in Gabriel’s eyes. His head was uncovered, his hair touched with light. He answered her slowly like a man who ponders his thoughts and pays out his words like gold pieces out of a treasury.
“I will tell you presently.”
“The truth?”
“To you—the truth—always.”
She gave a short sigh and turned back into the wilderness of the drive. Infinite happiness shone on her face, a warm, spiritual radiance glowing through her delicate skin. Her lips were parted in a smile, a smile that seemed to flood down from her eyes, even to ripple from her glimmering hair.
“Come, let us go out together, watch the sea and talk. There are snowdrops in the meadow—my March children.”
The perfume of the rain-drenched cypresses breathed about them as they wound through the shrubbery. The wind shook spray from the thousand glittering fringes. Its voice was as the half-heard moan of violins. Together they came out into the meadow beyond the wavering, sun-streaked shadows of the trees. To the south the sea lifted up a band of silver towards the sky.
They stood under the shadow of the wall, where the wind tossed the cypress boughs upward into sudden gestures of despair. New life seemed to breathe in the breeze. Sun and shadow played over the world. The man and the girl looked in each other’s eyes a moment and were happy.
“You will tell me why you have come to me again,” Joan said.
Gabriel stood as though to take the salt sea-wind into his bosom. He smiled as he spoke to her.
“Because I have come by deeper truth.”
“You are married?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
He frowned slightly and a shadow as of pain passed over his face. The girl was watching him with the calm content of one who trusts.
“You shall judge,” he said, “whether I desire to do you wrong or no. I thought once that I had no right to be near you, to hear you speak to me. It is the common verdict of the world that a man may not hold another woman to be nearer to his soul than is his wife. You understand me?”
“Yes,” she said, slowly, still looking in his face.
“Do you remember how the stars make one feel at night?”
“Well enough.”
“A yearning towards all that is noble, pure, and divine. Is there any evil in such a feeling?”
“How can there be?”
“And there are people in the world who seem to hang like stars over one’s soul. Is there sin in desiring to be near them, to be inspired towards truth by their beauty?”
“I cannot think it.”
“Nor I.”
“And so—?”
“I desire to be near you often. You speak to me of all my heart desires to be. That is all.”
“I understand,” she said, very slowly, with a strange light in her eyes—“I understand. Let it be so. Say no more.”
As when the moon rises, revealing splendors dusky and magnificent in some silent plain, so this sympathy, this dual comprehension, called into sudden radiance all that was fairest in the hearts of the man and the girl. A great calm seemed to steal upon both, gradual and infinite. For them the Eternal Spirit lifted up its blessed flame. For them the roses rushed into ruddy joy. For them the sea echoed the parables of the stars.
The girl had drawn closer to Gabriel; her hand brushed against his.
“I have been very lonely,” she said, “and it is not good to be alone.”
“No,” he said, in a voice that was half a whisper.
“There would be no loneliness—”
“If men were not fools and if women had not received the poison of the serpent.”
They were both silent for a season. Joan stooped down and gathered snowdrops as they grew against the wall. The man watched her. The flowers seemed emblems of what their love might be.
“I may see you again, then,” she said, presently, with a deep tone of content.
He stood back from her and looked towards the horizon. There was a radiance upon his face as though light fell on him out of heaven.
“Yes, if—”
“Well?”
“We vow here together.”
She waited.
“That I never touch you, never so much as touch your hand. That our flesh is severed absolutely; that only our spirits meet.”
“I will swear that,” she said, slowly.
So, under the sunlit sky and in the breath of the breeze, they swore both of them together a solemn oath, an oath to heaven.
OPHELIA STRONG had discovered her escape from domesticities a relief after the irritations and petulances of the last few months. Married life had proved nothing to her save the inconsiderate bigotry of her husband and the selfishness of men who refuse to reconsider habits formed in bachelor days. Ophelia believed herself to be a most misunderstood and ill-used person, a woman sacrificed to the over-fervid rashness of her own heart. Her love, a very shallow stream dependent largely on the rainfall of flattery, could easily be turned into other channels. A devotee of sensations, vain and convictionless, it was the most natural problem for her to consider how best she could frame life afresh in order to produce the most palatable and abundant satisfactions to press into the cup of pleasure.
Had Ophelia Strong been possessed of the literary knack, the world would probably have received from her sundry erotic and hysterical effusions upon the supreme brutality of man. Ophelia was a feminine realist in the flesh, but she was unable to record her experiences on paper. Possessed of a grievance, the modern Sappho scrolls out her often sordid wisdom and barters her emotions for the dubious edification of the members of circulating libraries. It is necessary in these days for the feminine realist to display a vivid familiarity with physiological data. The morbid anatomy of her own physical being is placed on record with a sincerity worthy of an encyclopædist. Elaborately stained sections are often remarkably beautiful under the microscope. Even diseased tissues tinctured azure and red resemble fine arabesque on rich mosaics. Reflect on the suggestiveness of morbid changes, however, and you will perhaps feel that there is something unpleasant in watching a woman preparing specimens to prove how the bacteria of sin affected her moral tissues.
Ophelia Strong possessed a grievance—a grievance capable of being developed to picturesque effect. She had read much hysterical fiction, and was inclined to believe that there was a distinct melodramatic charm in posing as a woman with a past. It was interesting to be able to hint that her heart had been bruised and trampled by a brutal and insensate fate. Like many women, she began to develop a depraved thirst for sympathy and a spurious conviction of a hundred and one imaginary woes.
The particular hydropathic establishment patronized by Ophelia at Callydon was conducted in a style both plutocratic and pliant. The upholstery was sumptuous, the cooking excellent, the staff discreet and exceedingly servile. A very passable string band played in the winter-garden during the evening. The resident physician was a charming person with a pale face, a little black mustache, and beautifully manicured hands. He was the joy and salvation of all the dames who came to take the “waters.” In the height of his fame, the medical gentleman was permitted to prescribe for the Dowager Lady Punter’s poodle.
The etiquette of the establishment was remarkable for its pliability. There were charades, dances, concerts, billiard matches every evening; coaching parties, tennis tournaments, picnic expeditions during the day in summer. Golf appealed to the more strenuous. Flirtation bulked largely in the régime. Every one was expected to be jovial and mischievous. The society was mixed, but quite picturesque and genial. There was the usual array of stylish men, beautiful creatures who gravitated into Callydon at certain seasons of the year. There were maiden ladies of every age and complexion, powder-primed and natural. There were widows, charming souls! who delighted in the atmosphere of youth. There were earnest mothers who yearly brought bevies of daughters with a sly, matrimonial programme. There were elderly men who flirted extravagantly under the pretence of being grandfatherly and sympathetic. There were even a few solemn individuals who crept about morosely and seemed born out of season, individuals who frowned in the reading-room when any one chattered, refrained from festivities, and were generally objectionable. Last of all, there was Major Maltravers, the Admirable Crichton of the place, who played the violin and had learned morality at Simla.
Ophelia Strong’s first meeting with James Maltravers occurred on the Collydon golf-links, where she and Miss Mabel Saker had gravitated to play a nine-hole “single” before lunch. Major Maltravers happened to meet her in the doorway of the pavilion as she returned ruddy and victorious from her morning on the “downs.” The soldier was one of those persons who boasted a cosmopolitan excellence in sport. He could prate of his tiger-skins, his polo matches, his conquestsde cœurwith the cheerful optimism of the army. A woman’s points were to him much on a par with those of a horse. He liked breed, spirit, a fine carriage, and the elastic grace of healthy animalism. Anæmia and spirituality were not noted in his programme.
The same evening he was introduced to Ophelia in the winter-garden by Mrs. Hayman, one of the elders of the community, and it was soon evident that he desired to make himself as interesting as his extensive experience and worldly fascination permitted. He was a tall, well-proportioned person with very regular teeth, deep-set eyes, and an emphatic chin. He possessed to perfection what would have been called the aristocratic air, and, despite his sporting proclivities, he dressed quietly and in perfect taste. His conversation partook of that hyperbolical and ironical method that passes for wit in certain circles. He was positively cultured in many ways; even attempted epigrams on occasions, and could quote German philosophy to impress the unlearned. For the rest, his complexion was pallid, his mustache shiny as jet, his person groomed with the most particular care. People considered him a very charming person, world-wise, cultured, a man who excelled in society, and could even express most graceful opinions concerning religion.
It was not long before he bestowed the larger share of his leisure upon Ophelia Strong and Miss Mabel Saker, her friend, as sparkling a brunette as ever sparkled in yellow-back fiction. They had played golf together, and the major had advanced so far in favor as to be able to discuss his own fancies and foibles with Ophelia. He admired her and the Trojan splendor of her beauty. Moreover, he was an interesting person, polished and rounded by long pilgrimages in the stream of life.
The winter-garden at Callydon was hung with electric lights screened under shades of olive-green silk. Its glass glittered above the dusky and profuse shadows of many palms; its floor was mosaiced green, blue, and white. Ophelia’s lounge-chair was lodged under a tall palm about whose brazen urn a rich company of arum lilies stood in bloom. A mass of azaleas colored a background about her white arms and neck, her lustrous hair and pale-blue dress. A fountain played close by, its spray glittering down with a musical cadence on the drenched green foliage of ferns.
The major had drawn a stool inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl beside Ophelia’s chair. Miss Mabel Saker had left them early to their own devices. The green palm with its group of white lilies seemed a species of oasis admirably placed for those who desired to be alone.
“Playing golf to-day?” the soldier was saying. “Not bad links, these. Bunkers jolly stiff; regular infernos. I went round in eighty. Play much, eh?”
“For health’s sake.”
“Nonsense.”
“Dr. Glibly’s advice. I am his patient.”
“Pardon the remark, but you don’t look delicate.”
“Appearances are often fallacious.”
“As a matter of fact,” said the major, with confident frankness, “my friend Graham was only saying to me this afternoon that you were the most healthy-looking June rose he had ever seen blooming outside the Callydon pavilion. Now, I come to consider it, you do appear a trifle tired. Shut me up, you know, if you think I’m too personal.”
“I prefer frankness,” said Ophelia.
Maltravers displayed his white teeth.
“It makes life more rational,” he observed.
“One always knows how one stands.”
The soldier produced a cigarette-case from the pocket of his elaborately braided dinner-coat. The string band in an alcove had struck up the overture to a popular comic opera. A party of girls came in from the vestibule, laughing and chattering, their dresses forming a brilliant mingling of colors under the palms.
“Do you mind smoke?” said the man, humming the chorus the band was playing.
“Not a bit. My husband smokes everywhere.”
“Lucky man. You spoil him, of course. Is he here with you?”
“No. He spends his time at home grubbing about in books.”
“Nonsense!”
“All husbands are spoiled,” said Ophelia.
The major elevated his eyebrows and appeared interested.
“What cynicism—at your age!”
“Oh, I am not so very young.”
“Four-and-twenty?”
“I did not refer to years, but to experience.”
The soldier leaned his elbows on his knees and adopted an attitude that was both respectful and sympathetic.
“I am sorry to hear you speak like that,” he said, with a chivalrous and fatherly air. “I hate to hear a woman hint at disappointments.”
Ophelia regarded the man interestedly from under her heavy aureole of hair. He seemed a blunt and brotherly person, and his ingenuous sympathy was quite fascinating, rendered to the languid accompaniment of a waltz.
“Some men are impossible creatures,” she said, fingering her rings. “For one thing, I was unfortunate in never possessing a brother.”
“Healthy friends, brothers,” observed the soldier. “I remember handling a whip once to good purpose. It instilled excellent moral tone into the young cub I chastened. All girls ought to have brothers.”
“Excellent in theory.”
“I never theorize. A man who has seen much of the world keeps to facts; theory is a perishable commodity. If a woman does not possess a brother by blood she ought to retain one by adoption.”
“The thing is to discover him.”
“There are plenty of decent, manly fellows knocking about the world,” said the soldier.
Maltravers lit a second cigarette, and nodded to two youths in evening dress who were passing, with the complacent patronage of a minister in power. He was one of these men who are never so happy as when they are monopolizing the individual attention of a pretty woman. Maltravers preferred to pose as a very superior and sagacious person.
“The folly of matrimony,” he said, “is that women will go and marry young idiots of five-and-twenty, and submit themselves to the conceited and priggish patronage of mere boys. Young men are unstable creatures, with the nonsense not knocked out of them by hard experience. Love runs with mumps and measles; we are all prone to it in youth.”
The man with the white teeth and the waxed mustache delivered himself of his convictions with concentrated adroitness. His attitude was extremely politic. At all events, it pleased the woman to whom his words were addressed.
“You approve, then,” she said, “of the man of forty as a matrimonial investment?”
“Certainly I do.”
“Rather an unromantic conclusion.”
“Not a bit of it,” retorted the soldier. “Do you think all the romance of life belongs to the treacly twenties? Your youth of the lily period will swear away his immortal soul ten times in two years. Your tough man of forty has lived through his inconsistencies, and falls in love at last with the grim seriousness of one who knows what it means to be in earnest. He does not prattle and sentimentalize for six months and then revert to a barmaid. He loves like the man he is. You will find I am right, perhaps, some day.”
Ophelia Strong smiled, it being her prerogative as a woman to seem amused. The veteran was refreshing and vigorous.
“Your views amuse me,” she said. “I am not so sure that there is not truth in what you say. Young men do not realize how much some things mean to a woman. We are very human.”
“Exactly; that is my chief point.”
“Then you believe that we need much humoring and a great measure of consideration?”
“You repeat my meaning.”
“Well?”
“A woman should find out whether a man knows how to love before she marries him.”
“How should she arrive at the conclusion?”
“If the man has any vanity, avoid him as you would avoid Satan. A man’s vices and foibles are more than half vanity. If you can tell the particular man that he is ugly or stupid, and he continues to adore you, then take him; he won’t make a bad husband.”
As may be inferred from the characters of the parties concerned and the circumstances in which they were situated, this first debate proved but the prologue to a gradual and more intimate acquaintanceship. Callydon was an amiable place, and the proclivities of its visitors were so familiar that no ill-natured criticisms were passed on ultra-Platonic friendships. Ophelia Strong was glad of the man’s countenance. When a woman’s vanity has conceived itself injured by fate, she is in a mood ripe for sympathies that can salve her smarting spirit. Nothing pleases her better than being able to hint at her woes to a friend of the opposite sex whose discretion had been matured by intimate contact with the world. It is the old fable of the child playing with fire, the inherent mischief of human nature experimenting with the morbid excitements of the more passionate affairs of the heart. However innocent be the delusion, the forbidden fruit glows amid the green leaves and the antique dragon lies grinning in the grass.
James Maltravers was a diplomat of a high psychological order. As a lover, he believed in dramaticisms of an elevated type, tragedy of a picturesque nature, moralities staged to a full orchestral accompaniment. He had studied the methods of certain up-to-date play-wrights, and had come to the conclusion that nothing impresses a woman more than the idea that a man is suffering untold ethical torments by reason of the inevitable fascination of her beauty. The picture of a moral hero struggling in the coils of love impressed him vividly with a sense of dramatic power. Such a conviction bade fair to shine with glorious persuasiveness before the fine vanity of the feminine soul. Paolo burning upon the grid of fate.
In due course he adopted an air of dejected melancholy in Ophelia’s presence, looked at her with sad, saturnine eyes, and seemed like a wounded stag too conscious of the barb. His conversation was often philosophical and pitched to a most elevating refrain. He looked blank verse even to the last tragic cadence of a monologue under the stars. He made much of chivalry; the subject served him well. It was a glittering cloak, a fine robe of tinsel and glass to ape majesty. It suited the man’s part with distinction. Maltravers went about on moral buskins, and was altogether a very impressive and romantic figure.