All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes,
apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.
All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as
’.
Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are
encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —.
BY
"I am so glad to see you, dear Miss Brown," she
exclaimed to Anne's astonishment, despatching the other comers with a
mere frigid handshake. "I do think it is so good of you
to come."
"I wanted to come."
"You are such a darling," went on the fat Greek
lady. "Come along--I have kept seats for you and Mrs Spencer for
the recitation. Dear old Gosselin is going to recite for us--he is
staying with us. I beg your pardon"--this last remark was
addressed to a compact crowd of ladies and gentlemen on the threshold of
the largest reception-room, into which the lady of the house
summarily elbowed her way.
"Follow me," she whispered, as Anne, bewildered among the
lights and noise, tried to pick her way over the trailing skirts, and every
one turned to stare as she passed--"Here,
Euphrosyne"--perceiving one of her big bouncing daughters in the
crowd--"I want to introduce you to Miss Brown. Do
keep that chair to the left for the Duchess of Orkney--mind."
The spacious drawing-room was filled, as for a theatrical
performance, with rows of chairs, wellnigh occupied already. Into the very
first of these Mrs Argiropoulo led Anne and Mrs Spencer.
"Sit down," she whispered. "I do hope you'll
enjoy yourself, Miss Brown. You'll hear Gosselin beautifully here. Oh
dear, there's the dear Marchioness of Epsom; goodbye"--and
she whirled off her portly person.
"Goodness!" whispered Mrs Spencer, "old Argey has
actually put us into the best places!"
Anne looked round. In front was a vacant space, with an open piano, and
some chairs in a corner facing the company. All round and behind were
chairs, and only a little gangway remained leading to the piano, next to
where Mrs Argiropoulo had placed Anne. She had never seen such a crowd of
magnificently and oddly dressed people in her life. Old ladies in velvet
and diamonds,
young ones in Worth toilets, or weirdly attired in lank robes and draperies, with garlands of lilies or turbans, or strings of sequins in their disorderly locks.
"I scarcely know any one here," said Mrs Spencer, looking
round like a rapid little bird, "except one or two
artists--there are three or four R.A.'s--horrible
creatures, to think the public is so wickedly infatuate as to buy their
pictures! Will Englishmen ever have any poetic feeling in art? Papa would
rather die than be an Academician. There's little Thaddy
O'Reilly--horrid little jackanapes--in the door. That old
flat-faced man is Lord Durrant, the critic. All the frumpy people
with the diamonds must be peeresses, I'm sure. There's Cosmo
Chough just come in,--they're all looking about for somebody or
other. There's Browning talking to old Argiropoulo. Oh, here's
little Thaddy! How do you do, Mr O'Reilly?"
Mr O'Reilly, a callow critic who united æstheticism with
frivolity, bowed, and cast
curious glances at Anne. For a moment she felt horribly ungrateful about the dress. She was sure that little O'Reilly was thinking that it was a night-gown.
"Who's the lion to-night?" asked Mrs
Spencer.
Mr O'Reilly fixed his eyes on Anne, and answered languidly, with a
faint smile--
"Why, how can you ask, Mrs Spencer? Have we not all been invited
expressly to meet Monsieur Gosselin and his charming friends, the ladies
from the French comedy? No one comes to see lions or lionesses here, it is
much too intellectual for that."
"Do tell me who is the lion of
to-night," asked Mrs Spencer, laughing.
"Haven't I told you that there never are lions
here? only an occasional man of genius, shipped over fresh, between
petroleum tins and sewing-machines, from America, may stray in in
top-boots and a red flannel shirt--or it so happens that a
beautiful woman is first noticed here--or Victor Hugo walks in
quite casually to tea--or the ghost of Byron mistakes this for Westminster Abbey. Oh, no lions, never. Besides, here is Monsieur Gosselin, and here is Mademoiselle Meringue and Madame Gauffre just come in. You see, Miss Brown, how perfectly true it is that we are to meet them. They are taking their place behind the piano. Yes, that is Madame Gauffre with the diamond butterfly. You perceive how we are to have the pleasure of making their acquaintance. Do you remark the vacant space round the piano? Miss Euphrosyne Argiropoulo and her sister are alone privileged to enter it, and the waiters also, to talk to Monsieur Gosselin and his fair comrades, and offer them refreshments. It is what I call a moral cordon sanitaire, separating these artistes from the highly respectable company all round."
"How horrible!" said Anne; "and do they pay them to be
insulted like that?"
"Pay them? oh, never. The Argiropoulos are far too delicate for
that. Monsieur
Gosselin and mesdames of the comedy are intimate friends of the house: they have been dining here, and they are so kind as to recite a piece or two to Mrs Argiropoulo's guests. Let me see--what's he going to recite--ah--'Un Beignet.' That will be delicious."
Gosselin had come forward, his opera-hat in his hand, and begun
to recite. It was a very delightful performance, and Anne enjoyed it
greatly. Besides, it was a great relief to find that this entertainment was
a performance, and not as she had dreaded, a series of introductions and
conversations with celebrities. There was a dead silence during
Gosselin's recitation, except near the door, where people kept
pressing in and out. When he had ceased, Anne looked round. She was
surprised at the aspect of many of the company. They had evidently not been
listening at all, but looking about, straining to see some one in the front
rows. In a minute the little gangway leading to the piano was crowded.
Posthlethwaite, whom she had met several times before, was elbowing his
unwieldy person--a Japanese lily bobbing out of the button-hole
of his ancestral dress-coat--towards her. He had scarcely begun
a description of a picture which he had just seen, representing
"Aphrodite tripping with pink little feet across the dimpled sea
sands," when Mrs Argiropoulo came up with several gentlemen about
her, whom she began rapidly to introduce to Anne: two of them were
famous painters; one a well-known sculptor; another was an
aristocratic drawing-room novelist; the fifth a man of fashion. They
all stood in the gangway around Anne's chair, while Posthlethwaite,
who was not the person to be ousted, propped his elephantine person against
the end of the piano, and leaning down his flabby flat-cheeked face
and mop of tow, continued conversing with Miss Brown, regardless of the
new-comers, who exchanged smiles as they listened to him with much
more amused attention than they had listened to
Gosselin. Anne was very bewildered; and as she answered the remarks of the party surrounding her, she became aware that the people behind were all looking in her direction--looking, doubtless, at Gosselin and his ladies behind the piano, or at Posthlethwaite. For a moment Anne turned round, wondering whether she should see Hamlin. But instead of Hamlin, her eyes met a face as familiar as his--a dark, rather snub face, with bushy black beard and hair, which emerged high above the heads of a knot of literary and political celebrities. She started imperceptibly, but turned away, and looked towards the piano, where Madame Gauffre had begun to recite, her plump little black figure standing out against the moonlight flooding through the window, in strange contrast to the yellow light of the room, in which dimly loomed the tops of trees and the towers of Westminster. Could it be her cousin Dick? Anne rarely mistook people's faces, and least of all was it possible for her to mistake
Richard Brown's, though she had not seen him since that morning in Florence. But what should Richard be doing here, in this fashionable party? It was evidently a mere accidental resemblance, but it brought up a painful train of thought. Anne had once or twice written to her cousin and guardian from school, in a formal cold way, and he had let her know that he had become a partner in the military foundry, and had changed his address. She had got a vague idea that he was now rich. But she had not yet let him know of her arrival in England, and she felt ungrateful and rather ashamed, for, after all, he had always wished her well, and had been her playfellow. If he should have thought that she was ashamed of him? Heaven knows that was not her feeling, but she felt against Richard Brown a vague, instinctive aversion, as to something insulting and degrading to herself. She determined, however, to write to him the very next day.
With a shrill exclamation and a pert curtsy,
Madame Gauffre, who was reciting the part of a schoolgirl of fifteen, suddenly came to an end.
"How do you do, Annie?" said a voice behind her.
She turned round. It was Richard Brown.
"I saw you as soon as I came in," he said, calmly pushing
aside the astonished Posthlethwaite, "but I have only now been able
to make my way here. How do you like Madame Gauffre? don't you think
she's delightful? or rather, I ought to ask, how do you like
London?"
The voice was always that same deep one, which, when lowered to a
whisper, had something curiously hot and passionate about it; but the
accent and the easy worldly manner seemed as if they could not belong to
Richard Brown.
"Who the deuce is that fellow?" asked Posthlethwaite angrily
of Mrs Spencer.
"I don't know--I've never seen him.
Do you know, Mr O'Reilly, who that big black man is, that has just
come up to Miss Brown. Not one of our set, that's
certain."
"Oh Lord, no!" answered the little journalist. "You
don't read newspapers in your set, do you?"
"We always read the 'Athenæum,'" answered
Mrs Spencer, seriously.
"Newspapers are Cimmerian inventions," said Posthlethwaite.
"I'm a republican, red, incarnadine, a
démocrate for Robespierre; but I never
take up a paper, except to see which of my friends have left
town."
Thaddy O'Reilly laughed. "Oh, well, you won't find
Education Brown in the 'Athenæum,' Mrs Spencer--a
mere barbarian, Goth, Philistine, but well known in Philistia. He's a
tremendous Radical, goes in for disestablishment, secular teaching; an
awful fellow for obligatory education and paupers; he'll be in
Parliament some day soon, for he's backed by all the black
trade."
"Surely it is very easy to feed paupers, as people used to,
don't you know, in Chaucer?" said Mrs Spencer, simply and
seriously.
Young O'Reilly went into an inaudible but convulsive giggle.
"Anyhow, that's Brown--'Peace by Expensive
Warfare Brown' we call him. Look at him; he's a force in his
world, as your father is in yours."
"I wish he'd keep in his own coal-cinders,"
retorted Posthlethwaite. "What business has he to talk
to--"
"By Jove!" exclaimed O'Reilly, "it never struck
me,--Anne Brown--Richard Brown,--perhaps they're
relations!"
"What do you think of her?" whispered Mrs Argiropoulo to the
little knot of artists whom she had assembled.
Posthlethwaite, as usual, answered for the company.
"'Tis the body of a goddess; we must give it the soul of a
woman."
"That's Hamlin's look-out," answered
Paints, the R.A.
"Why, what's become of him?" they all asked.
"Surely he was to be here."
"Oh, be sure he's lurking around here," answered
O'Reilly; "of course he keeps in the background--enjoys
his triumph from afar. You don't sit in front of your own picture on
the first Academy day, do you, Paints?"
"Mr Posthlethwaite, will you take Miss Brown in to supper?"
cried Mrs Argiropoulo, who was working up and down the crowd.
Richard Brown had already given Anne his arm.
"That can't be," cried Mrs Argiropoulo. "Mr
Posthlethwaite must take you in, dear. Dear Mr Brown, will you
take in my daughter?"
"Good-bye, Annie," whispered Richard Brown. "I
will come and see you to-morrow." And he let his cousin be
borne away in triumph by Posthlethwaite.
"Of course, Mr Posthlethwaite must take in Miss Brown,"
explained Mrs Argiropoulo to Mrs Spencer; "he's the most
conspicuous man, after all; and, as it were, it stamps her at once. By the
way, two R.A.'s, Paints and
Smeers, have already said that they would like to paint her."
"Walter Hamlin will never let her be painted by an R.A.,"
answered Mrs Spencer, fiercely; "and Annie has far too much artistic
feeling to endure such a thing. Why, Mr Bones has been drawing her for the
last week, and papa made a crayon of her."
As Anne passed through the crowd on Posthlethwaite's arm every one
turned to look at her. And then it suddenly flashed upon her that she was
the person people had been staring at, she was the lion of the
evening--she, the servant whom the great poet-painter had
adopted. Every one was looking at her; she felt horribly alone, numb,
unreal.
At that moment Hamlin came up.
"Have you amused yourself?" he asked. "Why,
what's the matter? do you feel ill?"
"Only very tired. Oh, why didn't you turn up before?"
Anne's voice was so wretched and supplicating that Hamlin felt quite
terrified.
"Where's Mrs Spencer?" he asked. "It must be
that hot room. Edith, do take Miss Brown home, she looks so awfully
tired."
"Permit me to take you down-stairs," said the
mellifluous fat voice of Posthlethwaite.
"I will take Miss Brown down myself, if you please,
Posthlethwaite;" and Hamlin pushed the prince of æsthetes
roughly aside.
"Why did you not show yourself the whole evening?" asked
Anne feebly, while he was helping her on with her cloak.
"Why--because--I thought I had no right to monopolise
you always," answered Hamlin in a whisper.
When the two women were alone in the brougham, Anne could stand it no
longer; and leaning her head in the corner, she began to cry.
"Why, what's the matter, Annie?" cried Mrs Spencer,
drawing her close to her. "What's the matter, my dear
girl?"
"Nothing--nothing," answered Anne, wiping her eyes.
"I suppose it is because I am so
worn-out--so--"
"It's that vile, ostentatious party," replied the
little woman, half in consolation, half in pride--"mere stupid
crushes--no real society, as we have it. And I do think
it is so disgusting of Mrs Argiropoulo to make all the people
stare at you as if you were a burlesque actress. Oh, I know that set of
lion-hunting, purse-proud, would-be artistic people.
They would have your photograph in all the shop-windows at once, and
Royal Highnesses to meet you. Papa and I always wonder that Walter
hasn't cut all those horrid sycophants before. You know that
it's only artists and poets of our school who will ever appreciate
you really, although the others would hawk you about as a sort of
professional beauty."
After the first shock of surprise, she resigned herself, without doubts,
or diffidence, or elation, to her new place. That she was more beautiful
than other women had indeed never occurred to her before; but once that it
had been proved to her she accepted it as a fact, as she had accepted as a
fact the still stranger news that Hamlin had singled her out to change her
life and love her. She did not take it at all as a merit or any other
exciting thing in herself: the only effect which it had upon her was
to strengthen a curious feeling, constitutional in her, and resulting
probably from the very coherence and weightiness of her character, that she
was fated to be or do something different from other women--a sort of
sense of tragic passiveness, which always formed the background of her
happiness. Moreover, the discovery which she had made at Mrs
Argiropoulo's somehow made Anne's position more intelligible
and simple to herself. She had heard of other men who had educated and
married girls of the lower orders on account
of their beauty. Hamlin's behaviour was now no longer a mystery to her; and the absence of mystery served merely, to Anne's quite unromantic, practically passionate, half-southern temper, to make Hamlin's nobleness and goodness more obvious to her. She had the curious Italian capacity for feeling an ideal passion--a passion which was merely a sublimated form of friendship and admiration--for a real personality; and her instinctive desire was merely to get nearer that real personality. But much as she tried, the reality of Hamlin seemed to escape and baffle her: he was a complex man, and she a homogeneous woman; and as she could not see Hamlin well in detail, she loved him in the very simple and broad outlines which she was able to comprehend.
Now that she had settled down in æsthetic society, and found her
place, and got to understand the main points of things, she was quite
ideally happy. Her life was very full, and was surrounded by a flood of
love,--on her side or on Hamlin's? She scarcely knew; but she
knew that she was happy. By this time the round of sight-seeing, play-going, excursions, and introductions, was over; her life had subsided into the normal. Its object, she felt, as one feels a wholesome and agreeable desire for food or sleep, was to make herself as worthy as possible of Hamlin, or rather to let him find in her the best possible bargain. She worked very hard at all the things which the school had left incomplete,--at what, living in that æsthetic society, seemed to her the solid requisites of life. She read history and biography and poetry, with the determination with which other girls, anticipating marriage, might study manuals of domestic economy; and she worked at developing her taste in art and music as others might have practised cooking or dressmaking; for these were the things which would be requisite in Hamlin's spiritual household. The people around her, the men and women of Hamlin's set, seemed to her as necessary, as inevitable, as normal as the trees and houses all round. Some of them
she liked, and some she disliked; but their ideas, though sometimes absurd caricatures, and their tempers, though often intolerable, seemed to Anne quite natural and proper in the main, though rendered ridiculous or disagreeable in individuals. Indeed she got rather to believe in imperfect individuals,--being thus constantly either made cross by the touchiness, the morbidness, the disgusting fleshliness, the intolerance of the æsthetes around her, or made to laugh by their affectations, their vanity, their inconsistency, their grotesque manias of wickedness and mysticism--while unable to judge or condemn the general, intellectual, and moral condition of which these individual excrescences were the result.
Some of the people were distinctly repulsive, or distinctly boring, or
distinctly annoying to her; others, like Mrs Spencer and her father and
mother and sisters, decidedly lovable; others, like little Chough,
decidedly amusing and amiable: and she took them as they came, but
with the indifference of con-
centrated feeling; for what did it matter whether she cared for them, or they cared for her, as long as she was doing her best to deserve Hamlin?
Meanwhile Anne Brown read quantities of medieval and Elizabethan
literature; went with Hamlin to see pictures and hear music; studied Dante
and Shakespeare--the algebra and arithmetic, so to speak, of the
æsthetic set--and even began, secretly, to work at a Greek
grammar. Twice a-week Cosmo Chough came to practise her
accompaniments with her; and twice a-week also, of an evening,
friends dropped in at the house at Hammersmith, when Mrs Macgregor would
leave her nephew and niece, as she called her, to entertain the guests. On
other evenings Anne would usually go to the house of one of the set, where
literature and art, and the faults of friends, and the
wrong-headedness of the public, were largely discussed; music was
made, young long-haired Germans on the loose performing; and poets,
especially the
inexhaustible Chough, would recite their compositions, perched on the arms of sofas, or stretched on the hearth-rug; while the ladies went to sleep, or pretended to do so, over the descriptions of the kisses of cruel, blossom-mouthed women, who sucked out their lovers' hearts, bit their lips, and strewed their apartments with coral-like drops of blood. Most of these poets, as Anne speedily discovered, were young men of harmless lives, and altogether unacquainted with the beautiful, baleful ladies they represented as sucking at their vitals; and none was more utterly harmless than Cosmo Chough. Instead of the terrible Faustinas, Messalinas, and Lucretia Borgias to whom his poems were addressed, the poor little man had in his miserable home in the north of London a wife older than himself, often bedridden and always half crazy, who turned the house in a sort of disorderly litter, neglected her children, and vented on her husband the most jealous and perverse temper; but the victim of Venus, as he styled himself,
nursed her with absolute devotion, denied himself every gratification to allow her a servant and send his children to school, and made all new-comers believe that Mrs Cosmo Chough was the most angelic invalid that the world had ever seen. People in the set had got accustomed to this fact, and treated Chough merely as an amusing little caricature of genius; but when Anne understood the real state of the case, she was deeply touched, and possessed with a violent desire to help the little man. He could not, indeed, restrain his habit of alluding in pompous language to Phryne, Pasiphaë, La Belle Heaulmière, Madame du Barry, and all the most celebrated improprieties of all times and nations; nor from discussing the most striking literary obscenities, from Petronius to Walt Whitman. But although at first surprised (as every one was surprised and indeed shocked) by Anne's unblushing and quietly resolute--"I think you had better leave that subject alone, Mr Chough"--he became quite devoted to Anne.
When he gave a set of lectures, in Mrs Spencer's house, on what was nominally Elizabethan drama, but virtually the unmentionable play of Ford, and the ladies dropped off one by one and merely laughed at poor Cosmo's eccentricities, Anne had the courage to sit out the performance, and to tell Chough openly that he ought to be ashamed of himself for holding forth on such subjects--a proceeding which made Hamlin's friends blame Miss Brown for want of womanly feeling and prudishness alike; and which put Hamlin just a little out of temper, until she answered his unspoken censure by remarking, with a sort of Italian bluntness and seriousness, that a woman of her age had no business not to understand the real meaning of such things, and understanding them, not to let the poets know that she would not tolerate them.
"You see, it enters into their artistic effects," explained
Mrs Spencer. "I don't like such things personally, but of
course everything is legitimate in art."
"They may be legitimate in art," answered Anne, sceptically,
"but they shan't be legitimate in my presence."
To return to Chough. Anne gradually became the confidant of the domestic
difficulties, though not of the domestic shame, of the little poet; and to
every one's great astonishment, she obtained Hamlin's
permission to have one of Chough's little girls at Hammersmith every
Saturday till Monday, and tried to instil into the miserable puny imps some
notion of how to behave and how to amuse themselves.
"You are not going to take that child out in the carriage with
you, surely?" asked Hamlin, the first Sunday that Maggy Chough spent
at Hammersmith.
"Of course I am," answered Anne. "She's the
daughter of your most intimate friend; surely you can't grudge the
poor little thing some amusement. And I want you to go with us to the Zoo,
Mr Hamlin. I'm sure it's much more fascinating than the
Grosvenor or the Elgin rooms."
Hamlin smiled; and next day made a crayon drawing of Anne, one of the
dozens in his studio, with Chough's child; but he managed to make
Anne look mournfully mysterious, and the child haggard and wild, so that
people thought it represented Medea and one of the children of Jason.
So far Anne's acquaintance were entirely limited to the
æsthetic set; but there were two exceptions. One was a couple of
sisters, Mary and Marjory Leigh, who existed as it were on the
borderland--Mary Leigh being a sort of amateur painter with strong
literary proclivities; the other was Richard Brown, who, after the meeting
at Mrs Argiropoulo's, called at Hammersmith, was politely received by
Hamlin, with whom he appeared quite reconciled, and talked on a variety of
indifferent subjects, as if Anne Brown had never been his ward. Hamlin had
apparently never appeared to him in the light of a slave-buyer and
seducer, and all parties had apparently never been in any save their
present position. Anne
asked her cousin to one or two of their evenings: he came, seemed to know one or two people slightly, and although professing profound ignorance of art, managed to interest one or two of the æsthetic brotherhood by developing his views on the necessity of extending artistic training to the lower classes.
"He isn't at all a stupid man, that cousin of yours,"
remarked little Mrs Spencer; "and I do think he is so
right in wishing to give poor people a taste of beauty."
"I'm sure we are most of us poor people, and
don't always get a taste of anything else, Edith," cried her
father, the veteran painter in tempera, who was a fearful punster.
"Oh papa, you know what I mean; and I'm sure art will gain
ever so much. It's only what Mr Ruskin has said over and over again,
and Mr Morris is always talking about."
"Any one is free to give the lower classes that taste of beauty,
as long as I am not required to see or speak to the noble
workmen," said Hamlin. "I hate all that democratic
bosh."
"Oh, I know, Watty; your ancestors kept negroes, and you would
like to have negroes yourself," said Mrs Spencer, hotly.
"Heaven forbid! I only ask to be left alone, my dear Edith,
especially by reformers."
At any rate, Richard Brown was permitted to show himself sometimes in
æsthetic company. But Richard Brown did not avail himself much of the
condescending permission to improve his mind; and neither at her own house
(for people always spoke of Miss Brown's house now) nor at the houses
of any of her friends would Anne have had much opportunity of seeing her
cousin, had he not, by a curious chance, been a frequent visitor at the
house of the Leigh girls.
Mary Leigh was, as already said, a
demi-semi-æsthete; she had studied art in an irregular,
Irish sort of way, and she had a literary, romantic kind of imagination,
which fitted her rather for an illustrator than a painter. She felt the
incompleteness of her own endowment, in a gentle, half-humorous,
half-sad way; and the incompleteness of her own life--for her ideal of happiness was to travel about, to live in Italy, and this she had cheerfully sacrificed to please her sister, whose only interests in life were school boards, and depauperisation, and (it must be admitted) a mild amount of flirtation with young men of scientific and humanitarian tendencies. Between the sisters there was perfect love, but not perfect understanding; and Mary Leigh, who felt a little lonely, a little shut into herself by her younger sister, who was at once a philosopher and a baby in her eyes, vented her imaginative and artistic cravings in a passionate admiration for Hamlin's strange and beautiful ward or fiancée, a kind of intellectual fervour which Anne was as remarkable for inspiring as she seemed unable to inspire either ordinary liking or ordinary love: and as Mary Leigh likewise adored Hamlin, and Hamlin in return thought Mary Leigh a nice sort of girl, Anne Brown did what visiting and sight-seeing and shopping was left to her
almost always in Mary Leigh's company. Now, if Anne was the idol of the æsthetic Mary, the humanitarian and practical younger sister, who, with the cut-and-dry decision of a philosopher of twenty-two, looked upon æsthetics and æsthetes as somewhat pestilent in nature, had her idol also in a very different person, and this was no other than Richard Brown, to be whose lieutenant in some of his philanthropical and educational schemes was Marjory's highest ambition. Richard Brown had, ever since meeting his cousin at Mrs Argiropoulo's in the character of an artistic beauty, made up his mind that Anne was no concern of his, and was luckily disposed of in the æsthetic set; and for some time he almost took a pleasure in making her understand, whenever he met her at the Leighs' house in Chelsea, that he did not in the least expect her to take an interest, or pretend to take an interest, in the plans which he discussed with Marjory Leigh. Anne on the other hand, imbued with Hamlin's and
Chough's theory that all attempts at improving the world result merely in failure, and that the only wise occupation of a noble mind is to make for itself a paradise of beautiful thoughts and forms and emotions, was extremely sceptical of her cousin's and Marjory's schemes, and once or twice declared her disbelief with perfect openness.
Richard Brown was at first annoyed, then amused, then indignant; and
then, seeing how completely Anne's ideas were borrowed from her set,
and also how completely unsuitable they were to her downright, serious, and
practical nature, he determined, not without vanity playing a part as well
as conviction, to "let a little light," as he expressed it,
into her mind.
There had been recently founded, by some friends of his, a kind of club
where girls of the dressmaker's apprentice and shopwomen class might
spend their leisure moments in reading and meeting each other; which club,
besides a library and reading-room, offered
to its members a certain number of classes or sets of lectures on various subjects, delivered at a nominal price, after work hours.
The lecturers or teachers were nearly all young ladies: Marjory
Leigh had for some time lectured on sanitary arrangements (this being her
especial hobby), and Mary Leigh was going to set up a
drawing-class.
Anne Brown, practical by nature and æsthetically sceptical by
training, had no very great belief in the famous club; she had been told so
often that mankind is too stupid and degraded to be helped, that she had
almost got to believe it. But she let herself be taken one evening to a
lecture, at what she called Marjory's college. The lecture was just
beginning as they entered the little, white-washed, bare room up
innumerable stairs. Four or five young women, decently dressed, were seated
at desks, copy-books and ink-stands before them; and a
beautiful little girl, who had been pointed out to Anne in æsthetic
circles as a rising poetess, was seated opposite
them at the end of a table. The Leighs and Anne sat down silently near the door, and the lecture began. It was on modern history. The pupils listened with the greatest attention, their pens flying on their copy-books. The lecturer, a small, graceful, extremely frail little creature, began in a somewhat tremulous voice; then gradually, as she got more excited, became more voluble, excited, and absolutely eloquent.
"She is too delicate for such work," whispered Marjory,
"but she will do it."
Anne listened. But she did not follow the lecturer's argument very
closely. She thought what these girls were, what the drudgery of their
work, the temptations of their leisure, the hopeless narrowness of their
horizon; and she thought also, the thought throbbing on almost like dull
pain, what it would have been for her, when she also was alone in the
world--when she had drudgery on the one hand and temptation on the
other--when her whole nature had been parched and withered for want of
a few words that should speak of
higher and nobler things,--had she been permitted, once a-week, to come to such a place, to hear about such subjects, to be spoken to by such an earnest and enthusiastic and exquisite creature as this. At the end of the lecture the girls crowded shyly round the lecturer, some to beg her to explain a point, others to ask for books on the subject, all of them to thank with pathetic earnestness. Then they went away, and the Leigh girls came forward to the lecturer. From where she sat she could not see the new-comers; and she was astonished, and in a way awe-stricken, on seeing Anne Brown, the exotic beauty of whom she had heard so much, whose portrait she had seen in so many studios, and to whom she had been introduced almost in fear and trembling, for Anne had a kind of awe-inspiring fascination for imaginative people. Anne, on the other hand, was silent and depressed, and the little poetess must have made up her mind that this magnificent and sombre creature was as sullen and lethargic and haughty as one of
Michelangelo's goddesses. But in reality Miss Brown could have laid her head on one of the desks and cried like a child.
When, the following day, Mary Leigh came to take her out for a walk,
Anne looked as if she had received bad news, or as if she had bad news to
communicate. She answered only in monosyllables; until, as they were
looking in at a shop window, she suddenly turned to her companion.
"Do you think," she said hesitatingly, "that I might
perhaps--teach something at Marjory's college?"
"Teach!" exclaimed Mary Leigh in astonishment; "you
teach! Why, what would you teach, Anne dear?"
Anne was silent. She sighed. "That's just what I have been
thinking all the morning--I fear--but you see I do
so want to teach something. You see, that little poet-girl gives up
her time to it, and she was born a lady, and doesn't
know--can't know--all the good she is doing. While
I--"
Mary Leigh squeezed her hand.
"We will ask your cousin," she said.
"Oh no, not Dick--don't mention it to Dick,"
answered Anne; "he is sure to make difficulties and laugh at
me--he thinks me a useless thing."
"You a useless thing!" replied the enthusiastic
Irish girl looking at her companion. "Why, then--then all the
Titians in the gallery, and the Elgin marbles, and all Keats, and all
Shelley, and Beethoven, and Mozart, must be useless also."
Anne sighed. "All those things didn't make
themselves," she answered. "It's the artists who were
useful and whom we have to thank."
The other Miss Leigh was immensely astonished, and, with her youthful
intolerance, rather indignant at Anne's suggestion.
"I think," said Anne, hesitatingly, "that I could,
with a little work, manage medieval literature--at least medieval
lyrics."
Marjory shook her head. "There's too much of that sort of
thing already," she
said. "Every one wants to teach literature. Where's the use of telling them about a parcel of Provençal and old French and German and Italian people, when they don't yet know the difference between Voltaire and Molière, and Goethe and Frau von Hillern?"
"That's true," Anne said sadly.
Marjory was rather sorry for her rough practicalness, but at the same
time she had a blind impulse to harass an æsthete.
"Political economy is what we want most," she said; and, as
the door opened and Richard Brown entered, she went on--
"Isn't it true that political economy is what we want most
at the college, Mr Brown?"
"Yes," answered Richard. "How are you, Miss
Leigh?--how are you, Annie? What about it?"
"Oh, only that your cousin wants to teach at the college, and I
tell her that literature is no use, and that political economy is what we
want."
"You want to teach, Annie?" cried Brown,
and his face assumed that look of somewhat brutal contempt hidden under suavity of manner, which Anne hated so much. "You want to teach? How dull æsthetic society must be getting, to be sure!"
"I am not dull, Dick," answered Anne, sternly; "but it
struck me that, having been a poor girl without education
myself--until" (and she looked her cousin reproachfully in the
face) "Mr Hamlin had me taught--I have an obligation to help
other girls like what I was, greater than the obligation of people who have
always been educated. I daresay there may be nothing that I
can teach; but there is no reason to laugh at me."
"Laugh at you!" cried Brown. "Oh, not in the least! I
was only smiling at the cool way in which you absolve those who are born in
fortunate circumstances from the obligation which you yourself
feel."
"I don't think that's quite true, Dick,"
answered Anne, simply. "You think it's absurd on my part, and I
knew you would,
because you think me frivolous and artistic."
"Well," said Brown, evidently surprised at her manner, and
looking searchingly in her pale, strange-featured face, "what
do you think you might teach?"--his voice was much gentler.
"At present"--Anne's voice sank, for she felt the
uselessness of her offer--"I can think only of medieval
literature" (Brown smiled); "but perhaps, if there were
something else, I might get it up."
"I'm sure there won't be a vacancy for anything except
political economy," interrupted Marjory Leigh, impatiently.
"I'm quite positive, from what the secretary told me, all the
rest is glutted."
"I fear it is the case," mused Brown. "There has been
a talk of teaching singing,--in which case, perhaps--"
"I don't sing well enough," said Anne, haughtily. Why
was she always having her æstheticism thrust in her face?
"Besides," added her cousin, "it's extremely
improbable."
They fell to talking of other things. As Brown was leaving, Anne stopped
him.
"Tell me," she said, "what are the best books to begin
learning political economy?"
Brown smiled. "Why? Do you want to teach it?"
"Since it is such an important thing," answered Anne,
gravely, "I think I should like to learn it."
"It's not amusing, Annie."
"It can't be duller than Minnesingers--and nothing is
dull when one is learning it. Can't you tell me of some
books?"
Brown looked at her with a puzzled expression. "I have written a
primer of it myself," he said--"I will send it you; and if
you get through that, you will find at the end a list of text-books,
some of which I can lend you to take into--"
"Thank you, Dick. I shall be much obliged to you."
"You shall have it this evening. Goodbye, Annie, and
felici studj, as you Italians say." He
laughed, and went away.
"You'll find it tough work," remarked Marjory, shaking
her short mane of hair out before the glass; "but, of course, a
primer is never very difficult."
When Hamlin had shown her the large drawing-rooms, the library,
the room which had been the play-room when he was a child, he took
Anne into the large Palladian hall, and showed her the innumerable
portraits of ladies and gentlemen in armour, and ruffs,
and bobwigs, and powder, hanging all round--his ancestors ever since his family had left England in the civil wars.
Anne looked at them shyly. They were mostly indifferently painted and
vapid--affected, like all old portraits by mediocre painters; but it
seemed to her that in most of these gentlemen, with peaked beards on their
Vandyck lace, or horse-hair wigs, or carefully powdered hair tied
back in silk bags, she could recognise a resemblance to the man by her
side--the same delicate, handsome features, the same fair, almost
beardless complexion, the same gentle, melancholy, slightly ironical
expression: and never did the real meaning of Hamlin's marriage
with her come clearer before her mind than when, in that silent hall,
surrounded by all those portraits of his ancestors, she suddenly saw
herself and him reflected in one of the long dim mirrors; she, so tall and
strong, so powerful of bone and muscle, with her strange,
half-southern, half-Jewish, and
almost half-Ethiopian beauty, by the side of that slight, fair, pale, aristocratic man, with features sharp like those of a high-bred race-horse, nervous and wistful and dreamy, as if he were tired of his family having lasted so long.
"They all married and intermarried for nearly a century,"
said Hamlin, "that's why they're all so like each other.
I often wonder why it didn't end in insanity--you see it has
ended in a poet at last. My mother was the first woman married by a Hamlin
for eighty years who was not at least a second cousin,--in those
islands there were very few decent people, you see. Don't they all
look dapper and respectable? It appears they were not. That man in the
corselet was killed in a duel about another man's wife. That one in
the middle, the boy in the grey dress with the powdered hair, Sir Thomas
Hamlin, they used to call the bad Sir Thomas, because he amused himself
practising pistol-shooting on black people, whom he had put all
round his yard;
he was a very fine gentleman, they say, and would go out only in the evening on account of his complexion. The one who looks like a woman, with the open shirt-collar and the long hair, was my great-uncle, Mordaunt Hamlin, who supposed himself to be a poet, somewhere in the first years of this century; he was an opium-eater, and did some horribly disgraceful things, I don't exactly know what, and was poisoned, they say, by some low woman, because she was tired of him. My father had his portrait removed; but I used to see it in the lumber-room when I was a child, and thought him very handsome and eery; and when I came of age, I had it brought down, because I think he's far better-looking and more interesting than any of the respectable ones. Then he was a poet also, you see, and Cosmo Chough pretends I'm like him. Do you think so, Miss Brown?"
"No," said Anne, laughing, as she looked at Hamlin, at that
noble and delicate face, which seemed to her the noblest and most beautiful
in the world; and yet, when she looked at Mordaunt Hamlin again, with his morbid woman's face and his effeminate bare throat, she could not help feeling a certain disgust at the thought that perhaps--perhaps-- Hamlin was just a little like him.
"That's my mother," said Hamlin, pointing to a faded
crayon of a beautiful, gentle, pathetic-looking woman.
"That is like you," cried Anne, delighted.
"That is very like you--like your expression. I was wondering
where you got your expression from among all your Jamaica
ancestors."
"I'm glad you think so. She was a very beautiful woman, and
very brave and noble, and not very happy, poor mamma."
"Did you know her?"
"Only till I was about twelve; she died young. That is grandpapa;
and that is my uncle Arnold,--he died young too--in fact, drank
himself to death. Don't you think he is like Mordaunt Hamlin?
That's papa;"
and Hamlin stopped before the full-length of a handsome effeminate man.
"You wouldn't think that he was a very violent man, would
you?" he said.
"No," answered Anne, looking at that weak, worn, rather
blear face, and thinking how her father, too, had been a drunkard; but how
different had been the drunkenness of the poor overworked mechanic, so
industrious and gentle and high-spirited when he was sober, from the
sort of emasculating vice of Mordaunt and Arnold Hamlin, of Walter
Hamlin's bad-faced father!
"It's very curious," pursued Hamlin, with a sort of
psychological interest in his own family, "how that Mordaunt, who,
after all, was no ancestor of mine, tries everywhere to perpetuate himself.
There's unfortunately no portrait of my great-grandfather, or
perhaps we might understand it; but perhaps it came from the mother.
It's curious I have never felt any inclination to drink--I mean,
however moderately; but I can't take
any wine at all--it makes me drunk at once."
"I never have seen you take any wine, by the way," said
Anne.
"I tried opium once; but Chough made me give it up. It's sad
to be denied any sort of unreal pleasures, don't you think?
That's my brother and I when we were boys."
Anne stopped to look at the picture.
It was very well painted, though a trifle old-fashioned. The two
boys were represented in shooting-jackets, with guns and dogs. The
shorter, slighter, and paler boy was evidently Walter Hamlin; the other was
more robust, boyish, and ordinary-looking.
"Your brother died when he was a child, did he not?"
"Oh no," answered Hamlin, quickly. "Poor
Arnold--was very fond of shooting--I hated it; but papa had the
picture painted on his account; he was the favourite at first, being
younger."
It seemed to Anne that Hamlin was going
to say something different from what he had said. What had become of Arnold Hamlin? Mrs Macgregor's allusions to him, who had evidently been her favourite nephew, always seemed to point to a melancholy end.
"It's curious," said Hamlin, after a moment.
"Arnold looked so jolly and strong when he was a child; and yet,
later, he got such a look of our grand-uncle Mordaunt."
"I think you have your grand-uncle on the brain,"
said Anne, trying to break through Hamlin's strange mood.
They left the hall, and went to the window of the large
drawing-room, and looked out on the reddening beeches and the grass,
permitted to grow high and thick, in the yellow sunlight.
"I shall sell this place most likely soon," said Hamlin;
"I've already had some offers for it. It's too large, and
pompous, and characterless for me. I should like a real old
country-house, two or three centuries old, with
flower-gardens and panelled rooms,--not this plaster and stucco
and romantic gardening.
Besides, I hate this place--have hated it ever since I was a child."
Anne did not answer.
"I hate this place," went on Hamlin, leaning on the
window-sill by Anne's side, "and that is the reason why
I have brought you here. Before saying farewell to it for good and all, I
wish to save it from being a mere hateful recollection in my life. I wish
to be able to think of it in connection with you;" and he looked up
at Anne, who was leaning against the tall French window.
"I don't know," went on Hamlin, again looking out at
the vaporous yellow sunset horizon-- "I don't know what
are destined to be the relations between our lives. You have seen too
little of the world as yet to be able to know yourself and me; and I am
more and more decided to abide by my original plan of giving ourselves time
to understand each other, and to understand whether we are made for one
another. . . ."
He looked at Anne; she had turned an ashy-white as she listened;
she had thought
that Hamlin loved her, and now . . . He noticed it, and understood, but pretended not to understand; he enjoyed playing upon a living soul, all the more upon a soul like this one, slow to respond to his touch, with low and long-sustained vibrations, like those of some deep-toned instrument.
"Don't take what I say in bad part," he went on,
conscious to himself that he was speaking the truth, and at the same time
that he was acting, telling it at a moment and in a manner which made it
untruthful; "and don't think that I mean anything horrid
against you or against myself, when I say that you don't yet know me,
and will not know me, perhaps, for some time. You see me through your own
nature, your own enthusiasms, your own aspirations; you think I am strong
where I am weak, and pure where I am impure."
Anne shook her head.
"I don't think so."
Hamlin smiled sadly.
"But I do. It's very sad to think that one
must lose so much that is worth most in life, all one's illusions, before one can approach the reality of even one's best friends,--that even one's best friends can be seen as they really are only when we have got disillusioned and disappointed, is it not?"
Hamlin had often said things like these in the letters which he used to
write to her, and had hinted, much more clearly, at weaknesses and
basenesses which she would some day recognise in him.
It could not occur to Anne, whose character was so completely of a
piece, that there was any untruthfulness in this mode of speaking, any more
than she could believe that Hamlin could be correct in thus speaking of
himself. The sort of shimmer, as of the two tints in a shot stuff, of
reality and unreality, of genuine and affected feeling, of moods which came
spontaneously and of other moods, noticed, treasured up, reproduced in
himself,--which existed in Hamlin, would be perfectly unintelligible
to Anne.
"I daresay," she answered gravely, "that you have
faults, in which, at present, I cannot believe; but those faults are not
the ones which you imagine. When a man knows himself to have a fault, he
ceases to have it--he cures it."
A sensation of a new experience passed through Hamlin's mind as
Anne said this: it seemed so strange, pathetic, grand, to
him--who knew himself to be for ever mixing up the unrealities of his
art with the realities of his life, to be continually experimenting upon
himself the moods of his poetry--that any one should seriously think
thus, should not know that when a man recognises in himself a fault, he
may, so far from eradicating, cherish it stealthily.
"You have asked me not to be angry with you for telling me that I
am inexperienced and cannot yet know my own mind," said Anne;
"don't be angry and don't laugh at me if I tell you that
I think you don't always know yours. I have often observed how
ima-
ginative you are about yourself, how apt to fancy morbid things; I suppose it is because poets are always turned inwards, and because you have not perhaps been very happy sometimes, and because"--and she looked at him half laughing, half with the tears in her eyes--"you are very good. I daresay I don't know you thoroughly yet, but I know you--I know I know you--better sometimes than you do; because you fancy all sorts of horrid mysterious flaws in your character wherever there is a little inequality; and I know how good and noble you are, and how you are always thinking that you must be wicked."
Hamlin did not answer. He was deeply touched, touched all the more
because he knew how little she guessed at the self-conscious
unreality of so much of him.
"You are very comforting," he said sadly, then went on more
cheerfully: "well, what I wanted to say, when we began to
discuss which of us knew the other better, is this,--that whatever we
may be destined to be to
one another in future--and this I dare not decide even in surmise--you will always have been to me, in these years that I have known you, in the past and present, an infinite source of happiness and good; a something which to have possessed, as I possess your friendship, will always remain, even should all the reality come to an end and only the recollection remain, the most precious thing in my life." He had taken her hand, and playing with her strong shapely fingers, so much stronger and less delicate, though not less shapely than his own, looked with a kind of solemnity into her face. Anne could not answer, for if she did, she knew she must cry; she felt the tears, as it were, all through her nature; she seemed to see, she knew not why, but as a solemn certainty, that things could never go any further, that Hamlin was prophesying the inevitable future: and yet, in the midst of this quite inexplicable, unreasonable sense of loss and resignation, there was a deep happiness which she had never
before felt, the happiness of the present; a something new to Anne, though all other lovers have felt the happiness of possession of one another, even at the moment of loss.
"It is getting chilly," said Hamlin, and shut the window.
"You look very pale, Miss Brown; had you not better put on some
warmer dress this evening?"
His voice seemed like the curtain dropping after a scene, or the chord
at the end of a duet. It was a return to reality and prose.
"Perhaps I had better, and I ought to go and see after your aunt;
good-bye for the present."
Hamlin strolled out into the terrace, and lit a cigarette; the past and
present, his real and unreal self, Anne, his brother and father, his
great-uncle Mordaunt--all went cloudily through his brain. He
was very happy. Love to him was not what it was to other men, not what he
had tried it himself in former years. It was romance, but romance not of
ladders and hairbreadth escapes, but
of psychical conditions, of spiritual sensations. He had written fleshly poetry and passionate poetry, but no one could be less fleshly or less passionate than Hamlin: the 'Vita Nuova'--if it could be made modern, and the parts altered and reversed--unreal reality of love, had been his ideal, and he had got it.
They had many conversations like this one. Hamlin never so much as
kissed Anne's hand, never told her that he loved her, spoke merely of
himself, of her, of the future and the past, of what she would one day
know, of what he would one day feel; and Anne listened seriously, trying to
cure him of his despondency and morbidness, trying to persuade him of his
own worth and of her clear-sightedness, while never a suspicion
crossed her simple stern mind that all this earnest talk, which was so
tragic and still so delightful, was the thing which she scornfully
connected with whispers and kisses and nonsense,--in one word,
love-making.
older sister of Hamlin's mother, and had lived in the house for many years as a widow. She had been twice married, each time for love, and each time to men who, if one might trust her nephew, had been immediately reduced by her into the most devoted and timid slaves; yet she always spoke of marriage as if every misfortune of her existence was due to it. Imbued with the pseudo-scientific and somewhat anti-social philosophy of early deism (though herself a rigid stickler for decorum), Mrs Macgregor had a way of talking of love and marriage which for some time had made poor Anne profoundly miserable: men and women, averred the old lady, were, whatever they might pretend to the contrary, entirely at the mercy of their animal passions,--to suppose that any one successfully resisted them was sheer folly; marry people must, but marriage was the most unfortunate of all necessities, the beginning of all unhappiness, the end of all independence, self-respect, and pleasure in life; it was the long waking up from a dis-
graceful delusion; yet this disgraceful delusion, this drunken condition called love, was (always according to Mrs Macgregor) the one beautiful and poetical thing in the world.
"I don't believe that all people are like that, Aunt
Claudia," Anne would often exclaim indignantly. "I don't
believe that all people marry from unworthy passion, just to wake up and
find its unworthiness. I am sure that if love were such a vile thing, and
marriage such a mistake, every man or woman with any self-respect
and self-restraint would refuse both."
"Oh, my dear child," Mrs Macgregor would answer with a
smile, "wait till you are a little older and see what a disgusting
thing life is."
"If it is," answered Anne, feeling quite nauseated and
terrified, and at the same time resolute in herself--"if it is,
Aunt Claudia, it is because men and women are mostly such wretched, weak,
silly, base, puling creatures."
Then, when she saw Hamlin, and thought of
the noble way in which he had acted towards her, of the calm and clear love and gratitude which she felt towards him,--when she thought of the things which they talked about together, of the desire to become worthier with which his love had inspired her, of the greater trust in his own worthiness which she hoped her love was instilling into him,--nay, when she looked at that thoughtful, delicate, almost diaphanous face of his, Anne's anger towards the old lady would turn into mere pity; she would merely, in her own certainty of worthiness, smile at what she now considered as the mere empty talk of a disgusting school of thought, or, at best, as the lamentable generalisations from a horribly exceptional family, such as she understood, vaguely, that of Hamlin's father to have been. And, for the rest, Anne believed that though people were very ridiculous, and affected, and mean in little matters (she was thinking of the Spencers, and the Saunders, and so many other of her æsthetic friends), and although they might also, like
Cosmo Chough, make the mistake of thinking indecent things interesting and dramatic, the vast majority of mankind and womankind was really very pure, and generous, and loving at bottom. So, after a time, she listened to Mrs Macgregor's remarks with only a little habitual and instinctive annoyance, but without any kind of serious belief in them. And when Aunt Claudia would sometimes allude to the bad lives which had been led in this particular house--to the vices (taking them quite as ordinary matters) of Hamlin's grandfather and father and uncles, of the neglect and violence which her sister, Hamlin's mother, had suffered from, hinting that, if one only knew, the self-same things were happening in every other family on earth,--whenever there came any such allusions, Anne would carefully, as it were, close up these loopholes into a past, in which she scarcely believed and from which she shrank: the world seemed to her as good, and healthy, and strong, and easy to understand as herself. But while she did thus,
Anne was so gentle and sympathising to Mrs Macgregor, that the old lady was never hurt by her contradictions; indeed she would sometimes say that, were she not persuaded that no law of nature can have any real exceptions, she would almost believe that Anne was quite different from any other woman that ever was.
It seemed somehow, here all alone in this ancestral home of
Hamlin's, as if the fate which Hamlin had refused to forestall was
working itself happily out; and as if, tacitly, the poet-painter and
the girl whom he had educated were becoming affianced to each other. None
of the outward ceremony was broken through; he was always Mr Hamlin, and
she Miss Brown, and there was never an allusion permitted to any more
intimate relations. But it seemed perfectly natural that he and she should
go walks together; that Aunt Claudia should leave them alone at breakfast
and luncheon; and that, when the old lady had retired to her room, they
should remain,
with brotherly and sisterly ease, though not brotherly and sisterly free-and-easiness, talking together of an evening. And as they talked, their plans seemed constantly to merge; that they should be separated never occurred to either (except when Hamlin was in one of his tragic moods), although not a word passed to settle their future together. The long courtship, the long enjoyment of a ceremonious and unfettered love, was what Hamlin had wished for, and what he had; to a fixed future, a family and family affections, he was not the man to look forward; it would have to come, and he did not feel any dislike for it, but he gave it no thought. As to Anne, she had never made up her mind that she had a right to be Hamlin's wife; to have thought so for one moment would have seemed to her grasping ingratitude; and she was too happy in the present to think about the future. The thing to be thought of was to become worthy of him, that was all.
Hamlin's acquaintance with Anne Brown had not been without a
decided influence on his art. He had written a number of sonnets about her
ever since the moment of their first meeting, recording various moods, real
and fictitious, in connection with her, and of which he had sent or read
her the greater number. Perhaps he would have written much the same sort of
thing about any other woman; but Anne had influenced him at once more
directly and more indirectly. The æsthetic school of poetry, of which
Hamlin and Chough were the most brilliant exponents of the younger
generation, was evidently running to seed. It was beginning to be obvious,
to every one who was not an æsthete, that the reign of the mysterious
evil passions, of the half-antique, half-medieval ladies of
saturnine beauty and bloodthirsty voluptuousness of the demigods and heroes
treated like the figures in a piece of tapestry, must be coming to a close;
and that a return to nature must be preparing. Anne had felt it, and had
vaguely determined
that the man who was to revolutionise poetry was Hamlin. Indeed, who else could it be? The elder poets were safe in their ruts; the majority of the younger ones who had already come forward were mere imitators and caricaturists, not excepting the great Chough himself. Hamlin alone was a man of genius; he alone was capable of turning over a new leaf; and one or two new departures, attempts at a new way of describing things, if not actually an attempt at describing new things, persuaded Anne that the change was beginning. She did not like telling him that she perceived it coming; for she thought that Hamlin might, did he perceive it, consider it as an apostasy from his original school, and draw back. But she encouraged him by showing a marked preference for the pieces which savoured of this new style; and she even suggested to him to write a tale, in which he should substitute, for the conventional background copied by æsthetic poetry from the borders of missals, the pictures of old masters and of their French gods, Gautier
and Baudelaire, the scenery of his own home, the wide commons, the beech-woods on the downs, the solemn horizons of the fenny country which spread from Wotton to the sea. He had written it, and read it to her during that fortnight of solitude; and Anne's heart had beat at the thought of the change which was to be wrought by Hamlin's new book--of the unknown youths hitherto fumbling vainly for a new style, who were to recognise in Hamlin the leader of a new school, the prophet of a new art. When the colony of London æsthetes arrived at Wotton, the new poem was solemnly read to them. They were all seated in the old-fashioned library, the rows and rows of old novels and books of standard literature, the busts of ancient philosophers looking down upon them,--a quaint little assembly of ladies in peacock-blue and dull sage and Japanese dragoned and medieval brocaded gowns, with slashed sleeves and limp tails--of men got up to look like Frenchmen or Germans, or Renaissance creatures, in wondrous velvet-
eens, colonred almost like the bindings of their own books. They listened with considerable attention, and obvious impatience to interrupt. The first who did so was Mrs Spencer.
"Why, Walter!" she exclaimed indignantly, "what
possesses you? are you crazy? Why, you are going in for realism; do you
know that?"
"I don't see any particular realism, Edith," answered
Hamlin, testily.
"Come, now, it isn't Zola, my dear," said her father,
a good-natured man, who never carried his belief in himself to the
length which it was carried to by his family.
"No, it isn't Zola," cried Miss Spencer; "but
it's worse than Zola. . . ."
("It's just the decentest thing I've heard for many a
long year," murmured the old painter.)
"It's worse than Zola, because it's poetry and not
prose, because it's English poetry, because it's poetry by
Walter Hamlin, who has hitherto been an apostle of beauty, and is now
basely turning apostate and going over to ugliness."
There was a slight laugh at Mrs Spencer's
vehemence, in which Hamlin alone did not join.
"I don't think there's anything actually ugly in
it," put in Chough, blandly. "Hamlin could never write anything
ugly. But it is certain that there's a want of idealism in it, a want
of that exotic perfume which constitutes the essence of poetry. I think
it's an unfortunately chosen subject. . . ."
"I think it' s perfectly disgusting," gobbled out
Dennistoun, the little rickety poet, who had to be carried up and down
stairs, and who wrote, while slowly sinking inch by inch into the grave,
about carrying off lovely girls, and throttling them in the fierceness of
his love. "Did you notice about the heroine washing the children? I
call that beastly, beastly. And then, I don't know how any man can
write a poem about people who are in love and get married."
This seemed an unanswerable piece of criticism. Anne alone leaned across
the table; she was very indignant. "I think," she
said, "that there is much more poetry in people who love each other respectably, and respectably get married, than in all the nasty situations which modern poets write about."
Cosmo Chough looked at Dennistoun, and Dennistoun looked at Mrs
Spencer's father.
"My dear young lady," cried the old painter in his broad
Scotch, "d'ye ever know any of these gentlemen write a poem
about people who did any single respectable thing?"
"I wonder you can talk like that, papa," silenced his
daughter, whose zeal for him and his school included timely snubbings for
himself.
"Well, my dear, I privately think with Miss Brown that
there's nothing more poetic than a gude, bonnie lass of a wife, and I
don't wonder a bit at Walter being of that opinion. But then, of
course, I'm not a poet."
"It's that washing of the children which troubles me,"
reflected Chough, "and their being married. Don't you think,
now, Hamlin, that you might just alter a little, and make it appear that
they weren't married?"
"Only put a husband of the lady in the distance," suggested
O'Reilly, laughing.
"Thank you," said Hamlin, affecting to laugh, "your
suggestion is most happy, and most characteristic. You are always full of
original ideas--all of you," and he looked bitterly round.
Chough felt the rebuke and was silent. But Dennistoun, who was gasping,
propped up in his chair, was furious.
"It's not a question of an alteration here or there,"
he gobbled out; "it's the whole tone of the poem which is
pestilent. It's Wordsworth pure and simple, that's what it
is."
Hamlin rolled up his MS. He was very white. The others he did not mind,
but this little rickety Dennistoun, whose poems were the most limited and
the most hopelessly morbid of the whole set, annoyed him; for in
Dennistoun, for all his limitations and repetitions, Hamlin recognised the
most genuine poet of his circle, his most real rival. Those words,
"It's Wordsworth, that's what it is," were like
a blow. He could have knocked down Dennistoun, had he not been a cripple.
The conversation was changed; and soon the first dinner-bell
dispersed the company. When Anne came down she heard some one stirring in
the study next door. She went in. Hamlin was seated before the table, his
head on his hands; the MS., all crumpled up, lay in front of him.
Anne came silently to his side. Her heart was bursting with
indignation.
"What's the matter?" asked Hamlin, crossly.
"Nothing. I only came--because I wanted to see
you--because I wanted to tell you how I despise those people and their
disgusting, unmanly school of poetry--how I hate their stupid
criticism,--how completely I believe in you and in your
poem."
Anne had spoken with vehemence and almost anger. She took one of his
hands, which was dog's-earing the MS.
"Oh, why," she asked, "why do you read
them what you write? Don't you know them sufficiently to know what they will say?"
"I never thought--" and Hamlin stopped. "I never
thought that that fellow Dennistoun would ever dare to speak like that
about a poem of mine." His tone was angry and tearful, like that of a
punished child.
"Nor did I. I never thought any one would dare to speak like that.
But what does it matter--what can the words of such a man matter to
you?"
He did not answer.
"Surely," went on Anne, "you can't mind what
they say? You believe in your poem, as I believe in it?"
It seemed so impossible to her how any one could not believe in that
poem, which seemed to her so strong, and noble, and beautiful.
"I know you believe in it," answered Hamlin, brusquely;
"you made me write it--so of course you must--"
"And--and--are you sorry to have written it?"
"I don't know; I can't judge. There's
O'Reilly outside."
"The disconsolate poet being consoled by his beautiful
fiancée for having written about
people who were united in legitimate wedlock," whispered
O'Reilly to Mrs Spencer as they entered the room.
"Well, Hamlin, old fellow, do you repent you of that sinful
marriage between your hero and heroine?" asked O'Reilly.
"I repent me of nothing at all, except of having read my poem to a
parcel of damned meretricious rhymesters," answered Hamlin,
angrily.
"Walter!" cried Mrs Spencer, "how can you talk like
that!"
But, despite this bravado, Anne felt, and her spirit sank within her,
that Hamlin had been disgusted with his poem. He was rather cantankerous
throughout dinner; and Anne, watching him, felt a strange mixture of
indignation--towards his critics for their criticism, and towards
Hamlin for minding it.
But Anne proved mistaken. Whether the critics became less rabid on the
following day, or whether Hamlin was suddenly smitten with the truth of
their criticism, she could not say. He was very snappish at first towards
Chough, and absolutely refused to speak to Dennistoun for nearly
twenty-four hours. Chough, who loved Hamlin like the apple of his
eye, would not, however, be spurned; he followed Hamlin about, he soothed
him, he flattered him, he assured him that he was much the greatest poet of
his generation; but he repeated, al-
most with tears in his eyes, Dennistoun's criticism.
"Such a poem will never, never do," he cried;
"it is impossible, intolerable, and it will just put some fellow like
Dennistoun into your place."
"Thank you for your advice, Chough," answered Hamlin,
angrily; "I think I told you before that I didn't want
it."
Anne did not revive the subject of the unlucky poem. It was useless
provoking quarrels between Hamlin and his friends; quarrels in which she
was forced to own to herself that he showed himself too easily mortified
and put out of temper. If he had been taught to mistrust their judgment, if
he had been alienated from their school by their absurd criticism, why, so
much the better. This business drew Anne's attention to the poetry of
the school; she re-read a number of poems by Chough, Dennistoun, and
several gods, demigods, and heroes of the movement. Whether it was that she
had read
them fragmentarily before, or that she had not understood their full meaning, or whether her attention was now called to their bad points rather than to their good ones, she scarcely knew; but it seemed to her that she had never before comprehended this style of poetry: its beauty had ceased to please her, it seemed to her false, emasculate, diseased. Hamlin alone had not gone to its worst lengths; he had sinned, but comparatively little. He was evidently intended for something better. And Anne thought with pride of that "Ballad of the Fens" which they had all fallen upon, and which was to be the signal for a new era in poetry. Soon it would be out; and she the only person to have appreciated it. It seemed to Anne that at last, in her humble way, she might be beginning to repay the debt of gratitude which she owed Hamlin (not that she wished that the debt should ever be less, God knows, or dreamed that it could be); but at last Hamlin might reap some advantage from his generosity. He
had stooped to make her, to turn the Perrys' servant into a lady; in her turn, perhaps she, the woman of the lower classes, might encourage the delicately nurtured poet to attempt things bolder, simpler, and more healthy than he had done before.
The proof-sheets of the new volume began to come in. Anne had
read nearly all its contents at one time or other, yet Hamlin, in his
grave, ceremoniously adoring way, handed on the proofs to her. One day a
fresh bundle came by post. After breakfast, Hamlin took Anne aside.
"I want you to read these sonnets," he said. "I
don't think you have read them all. There are rather more than I care
to print in this volume, so I should like you to select those which you
think the best or the least bad: divide them into two packets, and
tell me which you prefer."
Anne was quite taken aback for joy, and at the same time for fear.
"Don't say that," she said; "I could never,
never take the responsibility of deciding about your poems. Let me read them, and let me tell you what I like best, but don't ask me to choose. What am I, that I should decide in such matters?"
"You are the person whom I trust and respect, and--will you
let me say so?--whom I love most in all the world," said Hamlin,
solemnly. "For whom should my poetry be written except for you? Whom
else should I care to please? Are you not the best and worthiest thing in
my life, and is it not my highest ambition to do anything worthy of
you?"
Hamlin had never spoken so passionately and earnestly before.
Anne did not answer, but she squeezed his hand, and the gesture, and the
look accompanying it, meant "I love you."
"Listen," said Hamlin, detaining her as she was
leaving--"I want to say one word more. These sonnets are not
merely my verses; they are myself--and many of them, you will see, are
about you. Perhaps you
would rather that some of these were not published; perhaps your permitting them to be published might mean more than you should wish. Tell me your opinion frankly, and put aside everything that you don't like."
"I will," answered Anne. "What you wish me to do, I
must do."
She went up into her room, shut the door, and seating herself at the
table, unrolled the little bundle of proof-sheets. But at first she
could not read, or could read only the titles--her heart beat so, and
the blood boomed so in her temples. That he should love her so much,
believe in her so much--that it should really be he, just he and she,
and not some one else; it seemed too strange to be true. She slowly began
to read the sonnets. Some of them she knew already; others were expansions
in verse of things which Hamlin had said or written to her; many were about
herself, passionate, with a sort of delicate, subdued, respectful passion,
played, like some exquisite instrument, in various keys and rhythms of
subdued pain or
gladness. She felt so proud and glad, and at the same time so moved and saddened, that she almost cried over them. There were a lot of other sonnets, descriptive of places and of moods. Some of these she did not at all relish. They were not fleshly nor exactly improper; but they contained allusions which Anne could not help following, allusions which she did not quite understand, but which she did not like. She felt half ashamed of herself, wondering whether all the impure poetry which she had lately been reading, whether her prejudice against the school to which these decidedly belonged, might not be making her imagine things which were not meant; and Anne blushed at the thought--blushed at her knowing so many things, having learned so many things, in her half education as an Italian servant, in her culture as an æsthetic personage, which perhaps other girls of her age would not dream of. It was probably only her own morbid fancy. But then she came upon a set of sonnets--
no fewer than twelve connected together by similarity of title--which put an end to her doubts. She felt giddy and sick as she read them; mysterious and mystical hankerings, mysterious half-longing repentance, and half-repentant longings after untold shameful things. Anne pushed aside the proof-sheets, and leaned her head on her hands. She seemed to be smothering for want of air; she went to the window, and leaned against its rails. It was raining--a steady, clear fine rain. She looked at it mechanically as it filled the air like a thin veil, and crevassed the sand outside with yellow trickles of water. She did not for one instant believe that Hamlin had ever felt the things about which he was writing; but he had written about them. She knew, from an unerring instinct, as well as from her own deep love, that Hamlin was as pure a man as could be found; had he not been towards her--was he not, at that very moment--the very personification of chivalrous and spiritual lovingness? Then she
remembered the allusions which, without understanding them, used to frighten her in his letters--the allusions to vague evil which beckoned to him, which surrounded him; and she remembered also his constant references in conversation to his being unlike what she imagined, to his baseness and unworthiness. Two years earlier she would have been seized with an agonising terror; a week before she might have been overcome with pitying admiration at his self-tormenting moral purity, taking umbrage at every thought of evil which passed across and seemed to soil his mind. But somehow, now, she did neither. She did not for one second believe that Hamlin was in any way a bad man. She repeated to herself that he was morbidly introspective, self-scrutinising, morbidly imaginative; but she could not realise that these hateful sonnets had been written in any great agony of imagined self-debasement; they were so artistic, so evidently written with enjoyment, so self-conscious; they were so clearly not the
doubts of a troubled mind, but the work of a poet--and, what was much worse, so clearly the work of a poet of a definite school, of the school of Chough and Dennistoun and all the others, whom she was beginning to loathe. Anne looked at them over and over again. There was no reality in them; mere revolting pose. Gradually her mind settled about them. They were doubtless things written long ago, when, without knowing what it all meant, he had been carried away by the wave of imitation of one or two shameless or foolish writers. He had alluded to sonnets which he had expected her to dislike, he had insisted so on a certain number being put aside; if he had made her think that it was the sonnets about herself which provoked his doubts, that came from a sort of shame, an unwillingness to point out to her what she might perhaps overlook: it was not quite straightforward, but everybody, Anne had learned by this time, did not do right in a quite straightforward way. The only thing which perplexed her was, why he
had submitted these poems to her at all? Why had he not torn them up? why shown them to her? A little she could not help, as a woman, resenting his having done so at all. But perhaps he had done so to show her the difference between what he had been and what he was going to be,--perhaps--perhaps he had got a little callous, living among poets of this school. Anyhow, they were things of the past, and Anne did not distress herself any longer about them, so foreign did they seem to Hamlin, so impossible was it to bring them into connection with the thought of him. She put the proofs into her pocket, and waited for an opportunity of giving them back. Before dinner, when the guests were safe out of the way, she called Hamlin into the library.
"Here are the proofs," she said, laying them on the
table.
"Have you read them already?" cried Hamlin; "how sweet
of you! Now tell me what you think about them."
He looked so cheerful, so utterly uncon-
scious of the possibility of Anne's having anything to say disagreeable to himself and herself, that she began to feel nervous.
"I think they are most of them very beautiful," she answered
slowly--"indeed, quite some of the best things you have ever
done--and especially those about me; I am very grateful to you for
them. But"--she resumed, after a moment's
silence--"there are some which I dislike extremely, and which
are utterly unworthy of you. I have put them into the smaller roll by
themselves." She spoke rapidly, decidedly, but when she had done she
felt that she was crimson.
Hamlin seemed quite speechless for astonishment. He quickly unrolled the
smaller parcel, and glanced at its contents. A look of surprised
ill-humour crossed his face.
"I am quite astonished at your choice," he said with
affected coolness; "for these are the very sonnets which Chough and
Dennistoun and all my other friends picked out as among my best."
So he had already provided himself with a stock of criticisms.
"I am no judge of their technical merits," answered Anne,
trying to feel as if she had expected this news. "It seemed to me
that they were very excellent in workmanship, and there is beautiful
imagery in them. But I think the subject and tone of them horrible."
she spoke resolutely and unflinchingly, because she saw Hamlin's eyes
fixed incredulously on her. "You asked me to give you my frank
opinion; and even had you not asked me, I should have felt bound to tell
you that I think those sonnets ought not to be published. Perhaps you think
it strange of me to speak so openly; but, of course, I understand what
those sonnets allude to, and, of course, so will every grown-up
reader."
Hamlin bit his moustache.
"There is not a single word to which any one can take objection in
these sonnets," and he turned over the proofs.
"What do the words matter? It is the
meaning. I think," and Anne vainly tried to soften down her expressions,--"I think that those sonnets are things you should be ashamed of."
Hamlin's eyes flashed, but he kept his temper.
"Everything is legitimate for the sake of an artistic
effect," he said, echoing the worn-out aphorism of his
school.
"Even to do a disgraceful thing?"
"I can see nothing disgraceful in a man attempting to describe
what has passed through his mind."
Hamlin spoke sullenly and doggedly.
"You have shifted your position," cried Anne. "You
intimated just now that a man may pretend to anything for the sake of an
artistic effect. And now you are trying to make me believe that you really
have felt and thought those horrible things. It is of no use. You have
not--"
"How do you know?" exclaimed Hamlin, angrily. "Do you
think I tell you everything that I have ever done, or thought, or
felt?"
Anne was silent for a moment: that he should prefer to make her
believe in his own baseness! It was horrible, loathsome, and, at the same
time, pitiable and childish.
"I know you have not," she repeated, "because I know
you to be a gentleman. And I know that all that is affectation--school
affectation--learned from creatures like Dennistoun and Chough; they
have all done it, or something of the sort, and you have learned what comes
naturally to their dirty minds. Oh, Mr Hamlin, do not commit this
abomination--this baseness of pretending to shameful things which you
have not felt or thought; do not be so mean, so base, so lying, as to
slander yourself for the sake of an artistic effect." Anne had seized
his arm; he was shaken by her unexpected vehemence and passion; he had
never thought that Anne could become so passionate about anything; he
looked on, taken by surprise, not knowing what to think.
"Do not slander yourself," repeated Anne--"do not
blacken your real self, which does not
belong to yourself alone, which belongs also to your friends, to your honour, which belongs in part to me. Do not lie to me about yourself!"
"As you choose," answered Hamlin; "perhaps you are
right; though, heaven knows, I thought myself, when writing those sonnets,
but too bitterly in earnest."
Anne's look--a look of incredulous contempt--smote him
like a rod.
"I suppose I am apt to be morbid," he said, sadly;
"that is the wretchedness of my life, that I never know where the
truth about myself really lies--it seems to me that I ought to speak
out, and yet . . ."
"And yet it is mere nonsense."
Hamlin smiled a forced smile.
"Perhaps it is. Since you are determined, I suppose it must
be."
"You won't publish those sonnets?" asked Anne,
anxiously.
"I will not, since they offend you so much. But it is curious,
that of all the people to
whom I have shown them, you are the only one who has taken the slightest exception to them."
For a moment Hamlin had been overcome, had been delighted by this sudden
burst of impetuosity, by this passionate belief in him and vindication of
himself. But now, as he again glanced at the sonnets, he was once more
annoyed and resentful.
"Such things must be judged from a purely artistic
standpoint," he said with some irritation.
"I am willing to judge art from an artistic standpoint; but I
cannot judge from an artistic standpoint an honourable man trying to defame
himself."
Hamlin sighed.
"Well, after all, I bade you select, and the principal thing is
that you should be satisfied. But it is a pity, because those
were just the best sonnets in the book; and the book will be very small
without the 'Ballad of the Fens.'"
"The 'Ballad of the Fens'?--aren't you
going to print that? What do you mean?"
Could Hamlin be merely worrying her, to vent his annoyance at the loss
of the sonnets?
"The 'Ballad of the Fens' has been torn up,"
answered Hamlin, with a kind of dogged satisfaction.
"Oh, Mr Hamlin! How could you--the finest thing you have ever
written."
The ballad torn up!
"I know you thought it good, and so did I myself. But, on
reflection, I saw that my friends were right, and that such a thing would
not do."
He spoke sharply, brutally, as if to bring home to Anne the
unreliableness of her judgment: she had induced him to write it; she
had praised it; and she wanted him to tear up those sonnets.
"It is a bad plan to keep things about which one is
doubtful," he went on; "so I tore it up. I think it was wiser;
don't you?"
"No," said Anne, in a husky voice which burst out in a way
that almost frightened him; "no, no--it was . . ." but she
said no more.
"Edmund Lewis is coming the day after to-morrow,"
announced Hamlin to his aunt, to Anne, and to his guests.
There was a chorus of exclamations of surprise, sprinkled with
pleasure.
"Who is Edmund Lewis?" asked Anne. "He is an old
friend of mine, a charming fellow whom I have not seen for some years. Some
of the drawings in the drawing-room at Hammersmith are by
him."
Anne remembered the name, and the strange, beautiful, cruel, mysterious,
out-of-drawing heads in crayon, which had curiously impressed
her the first morning after her arrival in England, rose before her eyes;
since then she had seen so many similar things, had got to understand so
completely that mysterious, beautiful faces, with combed-out hair,
big weird eyes, and cruel lips, were so much school property, that she had
become quite indifferent to them.
"I thought you told me that something strange had happened to
him--that he had left England for good," remarked Anne.
"Oh, it was nothing particularly strange," interrupted
little O'Reilly--"only a German lady whom he met one day,
blond, fat, thirty-five, who was nothing but a soul--you know
the sort of thing--with a husband who was a great deal besides a soul
(a charming man, for the rest, and quite wildly in love with the
Gnädige Frau). The excess of soul
having induced acute neuralgia in the lady,
poor Teddy Lewis, who is a tremendous magnetiser, was called in to soothe her agonies, during which process the lady discovered that the soul-sorrow and consequent neuralgia from which she suffered was due to the soullessness of her husband, and that only the brotherly affection of Ted could cure her. The difficulty was the husband, who loved the lady fervently, and she him, but not in a way which should satisfy her soul. Hence struggles, agonies, &c.--you've read it all in the 'Wahlverwandschaften'--finally ended by the husband being implored to sacrifice himself to the spiritual exigencies of his adored wife, which absolutely required that he should divorce her and let her marry Lewis. That's all."
"How can you talk in such a flippant way, Mr
O'Reilly?" cried Mrs Spencer. "You have a way of making
the most serious things seem ridiculous. Poor Mrs Lewis! she's dead
now; you needn't make fun of her."
"Poor Mrs Lewis!" laughed O'Reilly;
"well, you know you wouldn't receive her, Mrs Spencer, when she first came to England."
"I thought her a designing woman then; I didn't know all the
circumstances."
"Come now, Edith," interrupted her father, in his broad
Scotch; "I think the less ye knew those circumstances
the better it was for all concerned."
"I don't see that at all, papa. I don't see why a
woman's happiness should be sacrificed," and Mrs Spencer, who
was the most devoted of wives and mothers, tossed her head rebelliously.
"I don't see why the world should insist that a woman is to be
satisfied with a husband who is good to her and her children. After all,
she has a soul, and that requires response."
"Would you behave as Mrs Lewis did?" asked O'Reilly,
"If--well--let me see--Mr Spencer were suddenly to
develop an overpowering belief in the Royal Academy and in Zola?"
"Papa would never have let me marry a man who could
ever develop such beliefs."
At this perfectly solemn answer there was a general laugh; even poor Mr
Spencer, who was the most timid of æsthetical persons, joining.
"I think it was rather hard on poor Ted Lewis," remarked
Hamlin, "to become necessary to the soul of a lady whether he liked
it or no."
"Oh, Lewis liked it well enough, be sure of that," answered
Chough, bitterly.
"Don't you think it was rather hard upon the husband,"
suggested Anne, "since he really cared for his wife? Fancy being
abandoned like that, and his children left without a mother!"
"He was at liberty to marry again," replied Mrs Spencer
sharply, still thinking of what she would do if by any chance Mr Spencer
were to suddenly disbelieve in her father and his school.
"What would you have had Lewis, or rather
the poor Baroness, do, Miss Brown?" asked O'Reilly.
"Why, I would have them never dream of each other; but if they had
been so foolish, be ashamed as soon as possible, and each go his and her
way, and attend to his and her proper concerns."
Dennistoun, who had sat silent at the other end of the table, propped up
on his chair, suddenly stretched out his long neck, and gobbled
out--
"Love permits no man or woman to resist: it is imperious,
irresistible, dragging us along to happiness, or misery, or shame, whether
we will or not. Love is the extinction of the reason, the extinction of the
will, or rather the merging of the whole individuality in one mysterious
desire. Those who can talk of resistance have never experienced love. Woe
to them! their hour is coming!"--and he tried to fix his weak
eyes on Anne.
"Well," she answered quickly, "I hope I may never make
such a disgusting fool of my-
self as you describe, Mr Dennistoun; but as I think that not everybody is liable to go mad, so also I think that not everybody is liable to falling in love in your sense of the word."
O'Reilly leaned over the back of her chair.
"It happens only to those who want to write about it, Miss
Brown," he whispered.
"Anyhow," remarked Hamlin, "Lewis is a charming
fellow, and I am sure you will appreciate him, Miss Brown. He is, moreover,
the most backbitten man in creation," and Hamlin glanced round the
table; "but you must never believe any harm of him."
Perhaps, thought Anne, Edmund Lewis was disliked by this set for the
same reasons which, she could not help understanding, were beginning to
make her vaguely unpopular. Still, she did not like the story of his
marriage, she did not like the recollection of his morbidly beautiful
drawings.
"It's good news about Lewis," said Hamlin to her after
breakfast; "but unfortunately
there's been rather a bothering letter also. Did I ever mention a cousin of mine, the daughter of papa's sister and of a horrible Russian creature called Polozoff? She was brought up with us as a child, and is connected with a great many painful circumstances. I have completely lost sight of her since she was about fifteen, and now I suddenly get a letter from her telling me that her husband is dead, and that she is coming to England. I rather loathe the idea of her, and if you knew the part she played in this house fifteen years ago, you could understand it. But the worst is that Aunt Claudia perfectly abhorred her--I will tell you the horrible, prosaic, tragic story some day--and that I perfectly dread having to break the news to her. I do hate a scene so! There she is; I suppose I'd better tell her."
Mrs Macgregor was walking slowly up and down the gravel walk before the
house.
"Do come and keep me in countenance.
It really is no fault of mine, but I know my aunt will be furious."
"What's the matter?" cried Mrs Macgregor suspiciously,
as if expecting to be told something disagreeable.
"I wanted to tell you, Aunt Claudia," said Hamlin,
"that I had a letter this morning."
"Yes, I know, from your dear Lewis," interrupted Mrs
Macgregor. "What's that to me?"
"I don't mean that one. I had a letter from--guess from
whom?" and Hamlin tried to smile--"from Cousin
Sacha."
Mrs Macgregor recoiled as if she had trodden on a toad.
"From whom?"
"From Cousin Sacha. Sacha Polozoff--Madame Elaguine, I
suppose I ought to call her."
For a moment there was a dead silence. The old lady's face,
usually so vacant, was lit up into a terrific energy of anger.
" What business has she to write to
you?"
"Well, really, aunt, I don't see why she
shouldn't," answered Hamlin. "After all,
we are cousins, and we have never openly quarrelled.
"My aunt," he explained, turning to Anne, "has got a
tremendous aversion--a prejudice--towards this one and only
cousin of mine. She disliked her father, very reasonably, and I think she
has let her dislike descend to the second generation rather
unreasonably."
"Unreasonably!" exclaimed Mrs Macgregor;
"you know it was not unreasonable, Walter--you know
what that Cousin Sacha of yours was in this house."
"I know nothing of the sort," cried Hamlin, angrily.
"I know that Sacha lived in this house as a child; I know she left it
as a child; I know we all hated her and hers, and that perhaps they
deserved it; but I know that we have no right to hate a woman of whom we
know nothing, because she happened to have been a badly brought up child,
years ago.
"At all events," went on Hamlin, "I insist upon her
being properly treated as a lady, and a relation."
"Properly treated!" almost foamed out his aunt. "Do
you mean to say that she is coming here?"
"Not here; but to London. Her husband is dead; and she writes to
me that she thinks she had better send her boy to an English school; and as
the only person in England upon whom she has a claim--"
"A pretty claim!" interrupted Mrs Macgregor.
"As her first cousin, she has written to me for information and
assistance."
"And you are going to give it her, Walter?"
"Of course I am. And I hope, Aunt Claudia, that you will remember
that I won't be disgraced towards a lady who has done us no harm. She
will be in London, most likely, when we return at the beginning of
winter."
Anne had heard many allusions to this Cousin Sacha, and they belonged to
that class of cynical hints which always made her indignant with Mrs
Macgregor. She instinctively took part with this unknown woman,
and she admired Hamlin's decision and generosity. Why did he not always act like this?
"That child--that Sacha," said Mrs Macgregor, when
Hamlin had left them, "was the evil genius of his house. She was sent
as if to embody all the bad tendencies of the family. It was a miserable
house at best, my brother-in-law's, for he was a weak,
vicious, violent man. But just when this wretched child was brought to us
my sister had died, Mr Hamlin was very much shaken and repentant for the
life he had led her, and I really believe that he had made up his mind to
live decently for the sake of his children. The two boys were growing up,
and there seemed some chance of things going quietly and happily. Then Mr
Hamlin thought fit to invite home his sister, who was a widow; she had
married a horrible Russian, a sort of indecent madman, with every possible
vice under the sun. She was an odious woman herself, the regular
slave-driving type of the Hamlins. Oh, you can't judge of them
from
Walter; he's like my sister, not like them. Well, she was violent, and overbearing, and tyrannical, and lazy, and hysterical, like a regular Jamaica woman. She was enough in the house; but then she had this child of hers, this Sacha, with her--a wretched, neglected creature, brought up by French servants, who were her father's mistresses, and literally with no more idea of right and wrong than any of the little heathens whom they pick out of gutters in the East End and send to reformatories."
"Poor child!" said Anne. She shuddered at this glimpse into
Hamlin's early life; it had a horrible attraction for her, and yet
she felt that she would far rather know nothing about it. All this filth
seemed to cling to her mind and soil it. "How horrible for
her!"
"She was about twelve when she came to us," went on Mrs
Macgregor meditatively, "and you couldn't believe that such a
child could exist in Christendom. She could no more spell the simplest word
than I can speak
Arabic; she spoke an awful jargon of English and French and Russian and German, and she used to talk about things, and repeat stories which she had heard from her nurses, or her father, or her father's friends--I don't know whom--that were enough to make your hair stand on end. Mr Hamlin was in perfect despair; because, although he was a vicious sort of man himself, and quite did my poor sister to death with his bad conduct, he was awfully strict about all his kith and kin, and kept the boys as tight as if he had been a Puritan. What we all had to go through, you have no idea. At first I was quite ashamed to let any governess see such a little heathen as that child was, and we had to pay the governesses double wages to keep them on. Then, every time that they tried to break Sacha off some one of her disgusting ways, her mother, who was always moaning and groaning with imaginary maladies on her sofa, and no more thought of her daughter than of the man in the moon, would go into hysterics
and throw things in their face, and have them turned away, and keep Sacha for a day in her room, kissing her and giving her sweets. Well, we thought we were little by little getting the better of her; and then, thank goodness, Madame Polozoff, that was Mr Hamlin's sister, died. Sacha learned a few things, and began to behave a little more like a Christian child; but it was only on the surface. She was utterly and thoroughly corrupt. When the boys returned from school (Arnold was sixteen, and Walter seventeen), the mischief began. That wretched Sacha fell madly in love with Walter, and began running after him; but Walter perfectly loathed the sight of her: he was always the cold, moral, ir