0» 
 
 4 
 
 f
 
 m 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 FROM THE LI BRARY OF 
 MRS. H. RUSSELL AMORY. 
 
 GIFT OF HER CHI LDREN 
 R. W. AND NINA PARTRIDGE
 
 ^^^^^^^^s^*^^^/^
 
 COLLECTION 
 
 OF 
 
 BEITISH AUTHOES 
 
 TAUCHNITZ EDITION. 
 VOL. 2583. 
 
 GUILDEROY BY OUIDA. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES, 
 VOL. I.
 
 TAUCHNITZ EDITION. 
 
 By the same Author, 
 
 IDjVLIA 2 vols. 
 
 TRICOTIUN 2 vols. 
 
 PUCK 2 vols. 
 
 CHANDOS 2 vols. 
 
 STK,\THMORE 2 vols. 
 
 UNDER TWO FLAGS 2 vols. 
 
 FOLLE-FARINE 2 vols. 
 
 A TJEAF IN THE STORM, E TC I vol. 
 
 CECIL CASTLEiLVINE'S GAGE i vol. 
 
 MjVD.'VME la MARQUISE i vol. 
 
 PASC^VREL 2 vols. 
 
 HELD IN BONDAGE 2 vols. 
 
 TWO LITTI-E WOODEN SHOES i vol. 
 
 SIGNA (with portrait) 3 vols. 
 
 IN A WINTER CITY i vol. 
 
 ARLSX)NE 2 vols. 
 
 FRIENDSHIP 2 vols. 
 
 MOTHS 3 vols. 
 
 PIPISTRELLO I vol. 
 
 A VILLAGE COMMUNE 2 vols. 
 
 IN iLVREM^LV 3 vols. 
 
 BIMBI I vol. 
 
 WANDA 3 vols. 
 
 FRESCOES AND OTHER STORIES i vol. 
 
 PRINCESS NjVPRjVXINE 3 vols. 
 
 OTHMAR 3 vols. 
 
 A HOUSE PARTY i vol. 
 
 A R^UNY JUNE /i 0,60. 
 
 DON GESUALDO /6 0,60.
 
 GUILDEROY 
 
 O U I D A, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "UNDER TWO FLAGS," "SIGNA," "A HOUSE PARTY," ETC. 
 
 COPYRIGHT EDITION. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LEIPZIG 
 
 BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ 
 
 1889.
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Lord Guilderoy had written a few pages of an 
 essay on the privileges and the duties of friendship. 
 
 "Friendship is generally cruelly abused by those 
 who profess it," he had written with much truth. "It 
 is too often supposed, like Love, to carry with it an 
 official right to that kind of candour which is always 
 insolence. There can be no greater mistake. The more 
 intimate our relations are with any one, be it in friend- 
 ship or in love, the less should we strain the oppor- 
 tunity to say impertinent and disagreeable things. In- 
 timacy does not absolve from courtesy, though it is so 
 often separated from it by the unwisdom and the im- 
 petuosity of human nature. Indeed, there is even a 
 kind of meanness in taking advantage of our entry into 
 the inner temple of the soul to leave good manners 
 outside on the threshold. Abuse of all privilege is 
 vulgar, and the privileges of friendship, as they are 
 without prescription and left solely to our own judgment, 
 demand an infinite delicacy and forbearance in their
 
 b GUILDEROY. 
 
 exercise. There are many moments in friendship, as 
 in love, when silence is beyond words. The faults of 
 our friend may be clear to us, but it is Avell to seem to 
 shut our eyes to them. It is doubtful if fiiult- finding 
 ever did any good yet, or served to eradicate any fault 
 against which it is directed. Friendship is usually 
 treated by the majority of mankind as a tough and 
 everlasting thing which will survive all manner of bad 
 treatment. But this is an exceedingly great and foolish 
 error. Friendship may be killed, like love, by bad 
 treatment; it may even die in an hour of a single un- 
 wise word; its conditions of existence are that it should 
 be dealt with delicately and tenderly, being as it is a 
 sensitive plant and not a road-side thistle. We must 
 not expect our friend to be above humanity. We need 
 not love his defects, but we should forbear to dwell on 
 them even in our own meditations. We should not 
 demand from him what it is impossible he should give. 
 A character can only bestow that which it possesses. Time 
 and absence are the enemies of friendship, as of love; 
 but they need not necessarily destroy it, as they must 
 destroy love. For love is so intimately interwoven with 
 physical joys, that without these it cannot exist eternally; 
 but friendship, being an immaterial and intellectual 
 affection, ought to be able to endure without personal 
 contact, and to outlast even the total separation of two 
 lives ." 
 
 Having written thus he rose, and paced to and fro 
 his library. 
 
 "That is not in the least true," he reflected. "It 
 ought to be, but it is not. Between the best friends 
 lowj- absence raises a mist like that which the Brahmin
 
 GUILDEROY. 7 
 
 magician calls up to conceal himself. Behind the mist 
 the features that we once knew so well grow vague 
 and unfamiliar. Frequent contact is necessary to sustain 
 all sympathy. It is no fault of ours; it is due to our 
 imperfect memories, and the change which comes over 
 our minds as well as our bodies with years." 
 
 He did not go back to his writing-table. The glass 
 doors of his library stood open and he walked straight 
 through them. The gardens stretched before them, 
 half in sunshine, half in shadow. Broad lawns, clumps 
 of rare evergreens, stately trees, beds of flowers which 
 had something of an old-fashioned carelessness and 
 naturalness in their arrangement. The distance was 
 closed in by high, close-clipped box hedges, relic of the 
 days of Queen Anne. He strolled out into the warm 
 moist air along the terrace of roses which stretched be- 
 fore this wing of the house. The roses were all tea- 
 roses, and the terrace was roofed and enclosed with 
 them; a few broad stone steps led from it into the 
 garden below; at either end of it was a great cedar. 
 It was a dreamy, pleasant, poetic place. The house 
 had more stately facades than this; some of it was regal 
 and very imposing in its dimensions and its decora- 
 tions, but this side of it was simple, old-fashioned and 
 charming in its simplicity. It was the part of the 
 house which he always used by preference himself. 
 
 Ladysrood had been so called in very distant days 
 of early British Christianity from some miracle of which 
 the memories were lost under the mist of many cen- 
 turies. It had been the site of a monastery in the 
 days of Augustine and of Bede, and then the strong- 
 hold of the race of which its present lord was the sole
 
 8 ■ GUILDEROY. 
 
 male representative. The house, as it now stood, had 
 been buiU in Tudor days and had had additions made 
 to it under architects of the Renaissance. The Tudor 
 section of it was that which Guilderoy loved and made 
 especially his own; the Renaissance part of it was left 
 for purposes of stately hospitality and ceremonial enter- 
 tainment: it was also in its way beautiful, but he dis- 
 liked it. He had lived much in Italy, and in these 
 great rooms with their frescoed ceilings, their sculp- 
 tured cornices, their marble columns, their seemingly 
 endless coup d'oeil, he missed the Italian sun; they made 
 him shiver in the grey, damp, gusty English weather. 
 Every one else, however, admired them immensely, and 
 they helped to make Ladysrood a very noble house, 
 though to its master it seemed a dull one. The gardens 
 were charming, the park was large and undulating, the 
 timber was superb, and beyond the park was wide, 
 heathery, breezy moorland, which stretched westward 
 to the western coast. 
 
 He walked along the terrace without any especial 
 aim or ol)ject in doing so. The day was late in Sep- 
 tember, but the air was still warm. The dahlias and 
 china-asters were glowing in their beds, and the salvias, 
 blue and red, made strong bands of colour where the 
 sun's rays caught them. There was a fresh homely 
 scent of damp grass and fallen leaves, and now and 
 then a scent from the sea, which was but a few miles 
 off beyond the woods of the home park. 
 
 "It is a dear place," he thought. He always thought 
 so when he freshly returned to it; when he had been in 
 it a few weeks it grew tiresome, dull, provincial — yet 
 he loved it always. At times it wore a mute reproach
 
 GUILDEROY. Q 
 
 to him for leaving it so often alone there in its state- 
 liness and silence, abandoned to the old servants who 
 had known it in his grandfather's time, and to whom 
 every nook and corner of it, every cup and saucer on 
 the shelves, every lozenge in the casements, were sacred. 
 They opened it all, and dusted it all, and every day 
 let the light stream through the numerous rooms, and 
 galleries, and staircases, and corridors, and watched with 
 vigilance the sight-seers who came on the public day 
 to stare open-mouthed at its splendours. No house in 
 England was better cared for in its master's absence 
 than this was, and yet it occasionally seemed to him to 
 ask reproachfully, "Why leave me so long alone?" 
 
 "How is it?" he thought, "how is it that we have 
 lost the art of living in these dear old houses? Better 
 men than we did it and were not bored by it — did not 
 even know what being bored meant. They were cut 
 off from the world by the impassable roads that were 
 round them. It took weeks to get to London, and was 
 a portentous journey even to the nearest country town; 
 and yet they were contented, and they were not only 
 contented — they were often cultured scholars, true philo- 
 sophers, fine soldiers when they had to draw the sword. 
 They had the art of sufficing to themselves, and we 
 have lost it. We are all of us dependent on excitement 
 from without. All that our superior studies and our 
 varied experiences and our endless travels have done 
 for us is to render us entirely unable to support half 
 an hour's solitude." 
 
 "Is it not so, Hilda?" he said aloud, as a lady ap- 
 proached him. 
 
 "As I have not the honour of knowing what you
 
 I O GUILDEROY. 
 
 are thinking of, how can I say whether I agree with it 
 or not?" rephed his sister. 
 
 "It is too much trouble to put it all into words. If 
 you were a sympathetic woman you would guess it 
 without explanation." 
 
 "I am too matter of fact to be sympathetic; you 
 have told me so often. All the common sense of the 
 race has concentrated itself in me." 
 
 "A woman with common sense is dreadful," he re- 
 plied somewhat peevishly. "It is an unplesant quality, 
 even in a man. One's steward always has it, and one's 
 banker, and one's solicitor; but they are none of them 
 people whom one sees with unalloyed delight." 
 
 "They are very useful people," said the lady. 
 "Without them I do not know where you would be." 
 
 "Living in a garret in Paris, or in a mezzanina in 
 Venice, with some Jew or some manufacturer here in 
 my place, no doubt. I am not ungrateful," he replied. 
 "I was, indeed, wishing that I could live here all the 
 year round, as our great-great-grandfather did in George 
 the Second's days, going out in state with twelve horses 
 and outriders when he did go out, which was once in 
 ten years " 
 
 "You could drive twelve horses if it amused you; 
 but I think it would have rather a circus-look, a so»p(on 
 of Hengler. And where would be the devoted rustics, 
 who were ready to drag our great-great-grandfather's 
 wheels out of the mud?" 
 
 "Britons still love lords," replied Guilderoy, "and 
 will do so even when Mr. Chamberlain, as President of 
 the Republic, shall have decreed that all titles must be 
 abolished. The rustic may have ceased to be devoted,
 
 GUILDEROY. I I 
 
 but he still likes a gentleman better than he likes a 
 cad. He will pull one out of the mud sooner than he 
 will the other. That is a sentiment in the English 
 breast which has been too much neglected by the poli- 
 ticians. In France, Jacques Bonhomme hates M. le 
 Marquis savagely; but in England, Bill and Jack have 
 a rude unavowed admiration for my lord duke. Hunting 
 and cricket have done that." 
 
 "How well that comes from you, who never cared 
 about either a fox or a wicket!" 
 
 " What have my own personal tastes or distastes to 
 do with a national question? I should no doubt have 
 been a much more popular man in the county if I had 
 liked foxes and wickets! Hunting, to me, seems bar- 
 barous, and cricket childish; but as factors in the na- 
 tional life they have had great uses." 
 
 "You are so very dispassionate that you are in- 
 tensely irritating," said his sister. "Most people adore 
 things or hate things en bloc." 
 
 "Happy people!" replied Guilderoy. "They are 
 never troubled with any doubt or any divided inclina- 
 tions. It must be delightful to have the world sorted 
 into goats and sheep, into black and white, in that 
 fashion. 1 should enjoy it. The world to me looks 
 like a billiard-table; here and there a ball rolls on it, 
 that is all; the table is perfectly monotonous and pro- 
 foundly uninteresting." 
 
 "It does not look monotonous to those who play 
 billiards," she replied. "What you want to do to give 
 you an interest in existence is to occupy yourself with 
 its games, trivial or serious." 
 
 "I have a great many interests in existence. Of
 
 1 2 GUILDEROY. 
 
 some of Iheni you don't approve; you think them too 
 interesting." 
 
 "Come and have some tea," said his sister; and 
 she walked to the glass doors of the library and entered 
 that apartment and rang for the servant. "Bring tea 
 here," she said to the footman who answered her sum- 
 mons; and in five minutes the tea was brought, served 
 in Queen Anne silver and cups of old Worcester, 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Evelyn Herbert, Lord Guilderoy had been born 
 to an enviable fate. A long minority had given him a 
 considerable fortune, and his name was as old as the 
 days of Knut. His old home of Ladysrood had been 
 inscribed in the Doomsday Book, and had never be- 
 longed to any but his race. His mother had been a 
 Frenchwoman of high rank, and his father a man of 
 brilliant accomplishments and blameless character. He 
 inherited from his mother a great charm and grace of 
 manner, and from his father a love of learning and a 
 facile and brilliant intelligence. Personally he was 
 handsome and i)atrician-looking; tall, fair, and perfectly 
 graceful; and his admirable constitution preserved him 
 safely through the many follies with which he risked 
 the injury of his health. Destiny had been kind — even 
 lavish — to him, and if, with all its favours, he was not 
 a happy man, it was, as his sister told him, most clearly 
 nobody's fault but his own. He could not perhaps have 
 said himself whether he were happy or not. Happiness
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 3 
 
 is a fugitive thing, and not apt to sit long quietly in 
 an arm-chair at the banquet of life. It is a fairy, 
 which is propitiated rather by temperament than by 
 fortune. 
 
 His sister. Lady Sunbury, was a handsome woman; 
 tall, stately, and imposing. She looked young for the 
 mother of sons who were in the Guards and at Oxford. 
 She had an expression of power and of authority; her 
 eyes were clear and penetrating; her mouth handsome 
 and cold. There were many who thought it a pity 
 that she had not been born to the title of Guilderoy 
 instead of her brother — her husband amongst them, be- 
 cause then she could not have married him. 
 
 "You are perfectly right; I know you are always 
 right; I admit you are; but it is just that which makes 
 you so damnably odious!" said Lord Sunbury once, in 
 a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in such 
 stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor 
 Street looked up at his open windows, and a crossing- 
 sweeper said to a match-seller, "My eye! ain't he giving 
 it to the old gal like blazes!" 
 
 Lady Sunbury, however, never divined that she was 
 called an old girl by the crossing-sweeper under her 
 windows, and her dignity remained unimpaired either 
 by that fact or her husband's fury. She was a per- 
 fectly dignified woman. She looked admirably at a 
 state ball; she received admirably in her own house. 
 She would have been admirable in a revolution, in a 
 siege, or in a civil war; but in the little daily things 
 of life she was not pliant, and she was not what is 
 comprised in the three French words facile a vivre. 
 Now to be facile a vivre is, as modern existence is
 
 1 4 GUILDEROY. 
 
 constructed, an infinitely higher quality than all the 
 heroic virtues. 
 
 "And yet what a good woman she is!" thought 
 Guilderoy often. "There is something quite pathetic 
 in such goodness being thrown away on such sinners 
 as Sunbury and I! And to think that if she were only 
 a little less excellent she would have had such a much 
 better chance of succeeding with both of us!" 
 
 Yet Guilderoy, who was of an affectionate nature, 
 was fond of her; she had been very kind to him when 
 he had been a little boy and she a tall girl in the 
 schoolroom; he always remembered that; besides, she 
 was the only near relative that he had remaining to 
 him, and he was always pleased to have her stay at 
 his house as she was staying now for a few days on 
 her way to visits in the adjoining counties, even if her 
 arguments and her reproaches, which were invariably 
 tuned to the same key, left him at the end of each of 
 her visits disposed to sympathise with that very unin- 
 teresting reprobate, Lord Sunbury. 
 
 She was one of those admirably virtuous women 
 who are more likely to turn men away from the paths 
 of virtue than the wickedest of sirens. Her brother 
 was more tolerant of her sermons than her husband 
 was, or her sons were; he appreciated the excellence 
 of her motives and the sincerity of her affections better 
 than they did, possibly because he could get away from 
 both more easily than they could. He pitied her, more- 
 over. An intellectual and intelligent woman, she had 
 married a silly man for his handsome person — a folly 
 clever women often commit. A proud \voman, she
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 5 
 
 was poor with that most painful of all poverty, inade- 
 quate means to sustain a great position; and a woman 
 of strong affections, she was doomed to see her attach- 
 ment impatiently received, or as impatiently shaken off, 
 in all the relations of her life, because she had not the 
 tact to control her temper or to resist her love of argu- 
 ment and domination. 
 
 "My dear Hilda," he had said to her more than 
 once, "it is not enough to be attached to people to 
 secure their affections; we must suit ourselves to them, 
 we must study them, we must make ourselves agreeable 
 to them. Mr. Morris has said that love is enough, but 
 it isn't. It is only a bore if it is not accompanied by 
 self-restraint, discrimination, and daily exercise of tact 
 and judgment." 
 
 But he might as well have spoken to the Kneller 
 and Vandyke ladies in his picture-gallery. Lady Sun- 
 bury admitted that he was right in principle, but in 
 practice she still continued to irritate herself, infuriate 
 her husband, and alienate her sons, because she could 
 not keep to herself the superior good sense with which 
 nature had gifted her. 
 
 "When there is not a woman in the house one 
 never thinks of tea," said Guilderoy, as he took his cup 
 from her. 
 
 "You should have a woman in the house," said 
 Lady Sunbury curtly and with emphasis. 
 
 He smiled, and walked up and down the library, 
 with his cup in his hand. 
 
 "What an uncomfortable habit you have of walking 
 about!" said his sister irritably, with the Queen Anne 
 cream-jug in her hand.
 
 1 6 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "You think all my habits uncomfortable when you 
 do not think them improper," he returned with perfect 
 good-humour. 
 
 "Yes, they are the habits of a man who has lived 
 entirely for himself and after his own caprices." 
 
 "Possibly." 
 
 He did not care to defend himself. 
 
 Lady Sunbury looked at him as he paced to and 
 fro the library floor. She was passionately attached to 
 him, and proud of him, only she could not restrain 
 herself from worrying and finding fault with him, after 
 the manner of women. She was a few years older 
 than he, and her sense of herself as of a female mentor 
 set over him by nature never left her. She had been 
 intensely ambitious for him; she had believed, perhaps 
 with reason, that if he had chosen there was no position 
 in the State which he could not have filled, and filled 
 with honour. And here all his life was slipping away 
 from him, only occupied with idle dreams and pas- 
 sions as idle. She shut down the lid of the Queen 
 Anne teapot angrily. 
 
 "My dear Evelyn, you have missed your vocation," 
 she said, with much irritation. "Every man who does 
 miss his vocation is an unhappy man. He may be to 
 the eyes of others prosperous, but there is a worm 
 which eateth him and leaves him no rest. The worm 
 in you is suppressed ambition. It is a malady like sup- 
 pressed gout. Nature, circumstance, your own tempera- 
 ment, and all the accidents of birth joined together, 
 which they so very seldom do for anybody , to make 
 it perfectly possible for you to have been a great 
 man."
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 7 
 
 Thus she spoke, and her voice emphasised impos- 
 ingly the two last words. 
 
 Her auditor responded languidly: 
 
 "I have no ambition, either suppressed or developed, 
 and there are no great men. When a friend of mine 
 said that there were no great men to Mr. Gladstone, 
 he, who probably felt the remark to be personally 
 slighting, replied that there were as many as ever, but 
 that the general level was higher, so that they did not 
 look so remarkable. It is a reply comforting to modern 
 mediocrity. I am not prepared to say that it is a true 
 one." 
 
 "I think it is true, but it is altogether outside my 
 argument. I am saying that you might so easily have 
 been a great man, as great men go in these days; 
 whether they are really as big or not as they used to 
 be doesn't matter the least; you might have been as 
 big as any one of them, and you are mistaken if you 
 think that you are not ambitious — you do not know 
 yourself." 
 
 "Know thyself, saith the sage. It is the most 
 difficult and the most depressing of all tasks, and not 
 a very useful one when it is accomplished." 
 
 Lady Sunbury continued, as though he had not 
 spoken, to pursue her theme: 
 
 "It is only men in your position who can touch 
 public life without any possible suspicion of their 
 motives. It was the patriotism of the great peers which 
 carried England through her troubles from '89 to '15. 
 It is only men who have already everything which 
 position can give them who can govern with perfectly 
 clean hands, or who can have the courage in a great crisis 
 
 Guilder oy, I. 2
 
 1 8 GUILDEROY. 
 
 which is alone born of absohitcly pure disinterested- 
 ness." 
 
 "I have not the smallest (^nalificalion for governing 
 anything, not even a dog," replied Guilderoy. "All 
 my dogs do what they like with me — I am positively 
 afraid of displeasing them." 
 
 "There is hardly anything you might not have been, 
 with your position and your talents," continued the 
 lady. "You are indolent, you are capricious, and you 
 are very crotchety; but these are faults you might have 
 overcome if you had chosen, and if you had absorbed 
 yourself in public life you would have been a very 
 much happier man than you are." 
 
 "Public life is not a recipe for happiness — it is 
 worry, nothing else but worry from morning to night, 
 and nobody does any good in it. They are flies on 
 the wheel of the bicycle of democracy; the bicycle is 
 rushing down hill as fast as it can go; no fly will 
 stop it." 
 
 "No: no fly will, certainly; but when it falls over 
 at the bottom of the hill, the man who will be there 
 ready to pick it up and get into its saddle will be the 
 master of it and of the situation." 
 
 "That time is far off. It has only just started from 
 the top of the hill in England, and the man who will 
 wait at the bottom will be some soldier who will stand 
 no nonsense, and will set it going again with a bang of 
 his sword. It is always so. I never see any use in 
 fretting and fuming about it. Democracy, after having 
 made everything supremely hideous and uncomfortable 
 for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat-tails 
 of some successful general."
 
 GUILDEROY. I Q 
 
 "If our aristocracy did its duty " 
 
 "Oh no, you are wholly mistaken. Those who envy 
 us and hate us would not be disarmed by the spectacle 
 of our virtues were they ever so numerous. I may not 
 have done my duty individually; I do not pretend to 
 have done it; but I think that the Order has, as a 
 collective body, done theirs very admirably, and with 
 exceeding self-denial. Take our House, for example. 
 The popular idea of the House of Lords is that it is a 
 kind of hot-bed for all manner of unjust privileges and 
 abominable sinecures. The country does not in the 
 least understand the quantity of solid useful work 
 which is done there in committee, the way in which 
 young men sacrifice time and pleasure to do that work, 
 and the honest painstaking care for the national interests 
 which is brought to the consideration of every bill that 
 comes up to it. The House of Lords wants nothing of 
 the nation, and therefore it is the only candid and dis- 
 interested guardian of the people's needs and resources. 
 It has never withstood the real desire of the country; 
 it has only stood between the country and its impetuous 
 and evanescent follies. It has given breathing time to 
 it and made it pause before taking a headlong leap, 
 but it has never opposed what it saw to be the real 
 and well-considered national will. It has done what 
 the American Senate does; but it has done it better 
 than any elective senate can do, because the moment 
 any political body is elective it has at once a tendency 
 to servility, and is more or less open to cause, and to 
 be acted on by, corruption. As you said yourself just 
 now, it is only men who have already a position so 
 great that nothing can make it greater who can govern
 
 20 GUILDEROY. 
 
 public life with no possible laiiil of ulterior or personal 
 motive. It is because personal motives have crept in 
 so insidiously into English politics that they have 
 deteriorated in character so greatly as they have done 
 in our time." 
 
 "Every word you say only strengthens my opinion 
 that you should haven taken a part, and a great part, 
 in national life." 
 
 "You narrow a public question to a private one — 
 women always do. I know myself, which you admit is 
 rare, and I am wholly unfitted for public life as it is 
 now conducted in England; I have views which would 
 appal even my own party. I think that we should 
 have the courage of our opinions, and that we should 
 not bid for popularity by pretending that the mob is 
 our equal; we should have the courage to demand that 
 supremacy should go to the fittest, and we should 
 refuse to allow ignorance, drunkenness, and poverty to 
 call themselves our masters. We should declare that 
 the minority is always more likely to be in the right 
 than the majority, and that if generations of culture, 
 authority, and courtesy do not make a better product 
 than generations of ignorance, servility, and squalor, 
 then let all 'laws and learning, grace and manners die,' 
 since they have proved themselves absolutely useless. 
 But we have not the courage of our opinions; we are 
 all kneeling in the mud and swearing that the mud is 
 higher than the stars, I for one will not kneel, and 
 therefore I tell you I have no place in the public life 
 of my times." 
 
 Lady Sunbury was vexed and irritated. 
 
 "I do not see that your eulogy of the House of
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 1 
 
 Lords is in accord with your condemnation of public 
 life. If you have chosen " 
 
 "I beg your pardon. I say the House of Lords is 
 more admirable and useful than the people have the 
 remotest idea of, who think it only a kind of glass- 
 frame for rearing the mushrooms of prestige and 
 privilege. But I think the House of Lords would be 
 truer to itself if it had the courage to tell the people 
 that it could govern them, were it an absolute oligarchy, 
 with infinitely more honour abroad and prosperity at 
 home than they will ever get out of the professional 
 politicians and the salaried agitators whom it sends up 
 to Westminster." 
 
 "If it did it would be swept away." 
 
 "Is that so sure? At all events, it would fall with 
 dignity. It is not dignified to pass bills which it knows 
 to be poisonous to the honour and welfare of the 
 nation, because it has the couteau a la gorge of its own 
 threatened extinction. Courage is the one absolutely 
 necessary quality to an aristocracy; and I know not 
 why our House should fear its own abolition. It is 
 the country which would suffer far more than our- 
 selves." 
 
 "Go to the House and say so." 
 
 "The House is not sitting," he replied with a little 
 laugh, as he rose and walked to one of the windows. 
 Opposite to the window was a great cedar tree spread- 
 ing its dark shade over a velvet lawn. On one of the 
 boughs of the cedar a wood-dove was perched high up 
 against the sun; the light made the white and fawn of 
 his plumage look silvery and gold; he was murmuring 
 all sorts of sweet things to his lady-love, visible to him
 
 22 GUILDEROY. 
 
 though not to his observer; he was perfectly, ideally 
 happy. Round the trees at the same moment were 
 flying three sparrows fussing, shrieking, quarrelling. 
 The foremost had a straw in his beak, and the others 
 wanted it. 
 
 "The professional politicians," murmured Guilderoy. 
 "The lover is wiser by a great deal." 
 
 "That depends on Avhat sort of person the lady is," 
 said his sister, Avith some unpleasantness in her tone. 
 
 "Not at all," said Guilderoy. "She is to him what 
 he thinks her at all events; Avho wants more?" 
 
 And he continued to watch the dove cooing and 
 fluttering in the sunshine on the topmost branch of the 
 great cedar. 
 
 "The dove wants a great deal more if he is wise," 
 said Lady Sunbury. 
 
 "If he is wise he is not half a lover," replied 
 Guilderoy. "The sparrows are wise in your sense and 
 the world's, not in mine." 
 
 "I wish you were like the sparrows." 
 
 "You wish I were a professional politician, or a 
 salaried agitator? My dear Hilda, what taste!" 
 
 "I wish you were anything but what }'ou are." 
 
 "One's relatives invariably do." 
 
 Lady Sunbury went up to her brother and put her 
 hand in affectionate apology on his shoulder. 
 
 "You know what 1 mean, my dear. You have such 
 talents, such great opportunities, so noble a character. 
 I cannot bear to see them all thrown away on women." 
 
 He laughed, and moved a little away. 
 
 "Every woman thinks a man's life 'thrown away' 
 on another woman; when a man's life is given to her-
 
 GUILDEROY. 2^ 
 
 self she thinks it 'consecrated' to her. You ahvays use 
 two vocabularies for yourself and your neighbours." 
 
 I^ady Sunbury turned away, offended and silent. 
 
 Guilderoy still continued to gaze dreamily at the 
 cedar with the birds in it, which had furnished him 
 with his metaphor. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 "He really ought to make some marriage," thought 
 Lady Sunbury, when she had left him, and took her 
 way through the draAving-rooms opening one out of an- 
 other in a succession of rooms, all decorated and 
 furnished as they had been in George the Second's 
 time, and with their ceilings and panels and mantel- 
 pieces painted by the Watteau School. 
 
 "He really ought to marry," she thought; "it makes 
 me wretched to think that he should go on like this." 
 
 And yet what woman living would have seemed to 
 Lady Sunbury to be the equal of her brother? 
 
 She would have been sure that a Venus was a 
 dunce, a Pallas a blue, a Penelope a fool, a Helen a 
 wanton, and an Antigone a fright. All the graces, all 
 the muses, and all the saints rolled into one would 
 have seemed to her either a dowdy or an e'cervele'e, 
 either a humdrum nobody or a portentous jade, if such 
 an one had been called Lady Guilderoy. She had a 
 most ardent and honest desire to see her brother mar- 
 ried, and yet she felt that his marriage would be quite 
 intolerable to her. For a person who prided herself on
 
 24 GUILD EROy. 
 
 her consistency the inconsistency of her feelings was an 
 irritation. 
 
 "I should hate her. I could not help hating her," 
 she mused as she walked through the drawing-rooms. 
 "But I should always be just to her, and I should be 
 very fond of the children." 
 
 Nothing, however, she knew, could be further from 
 her brother's intentions than to give her either the 
 woman to hate or the children to adore. 
 
 He had seen all the most charming marriageable 
 women of Europe, and he had taken none of them. So 
 far as his life was pledged at all it was given to a 
 woman whom he could not marry. 
 
 Guilderoy, left to himself, glanced at his neglected 
 essay lying on the writing-table. "What is the use of 
 saying these things?" he thought. "Everything has 
 been said already in the Lysis. We keep repeating it 
 with variations of our own, and we think our imitations 
 are novelty and wisdom." 
 
 He threw the written sheets between the pages of a 
 blotting-book, and took up a letter lying under them 
 and read it again; he had read it when it had arrived 
 with all his other correspondence in the forenoon. It 
 was from the lady of whom his sister did not approve. 
 
 It was an impassioned letter. 
 
 Now, when a man is himself in love such letters 
 are delightful, but when his own passion is waning they 
 are apt to be wearisome. 
 
 "How much of it is love?" he thought. "And how 
 much love of proprietorship, jealousy of possible op- 
 ponents, pleasure in a flattering affichc? God forgive 
 me! I have not the smallest right to be exacting in
 
 GUILDEROY. 2$ 
 
 such matters or hypercritical, and yet it takes so much 
 more to satisfy me than I have ever got in these things." 
 
 He was conscious of his ingratitude. 
 
 After all, a great many women had loved him 
 greatly, and had given him all they had to give; and if 
 the quality of their love had not been equal to some 
 vague exaggerated impossible ideal which floated be- 
 fore his fancy, it had not been their fault probably; 
 much more probably his own. 
 
 He lit a match and burnt the letter, and re- 
 membered with a pang the time when a single line 
 from the same hand had been worn next his heart for 
 days after it had been received. 
 
 "Why do our feelings only remain such a very little 
 time at that stage?" he mused; and he wondered if the 
 wood-dove in the cedar tree knew these varying and 
 gradual changes from ardour to indifference. He was 
 not actually indifferent. He felt that to become in- 
 different was a possibility, and when this is felt in- 
 difference itself is never far off we may be sure. " Elle 
 vient a pas lents ; mats elle vieiit." 
 
 The letter asked him to spend the winter in Naples. 
 He usually spent the winter somewhere in the south, 
 but a vague dislike to the south rose in him before 
 this request. 
 
 The sense that his presence there was regarded 
 as a right weakened his desire to go. Like all high- 
 mettled animals, he turned restive when he felt the 
 pressure of the curb. With the reins floating loose on 
 his neck he followed docilely. 
 
 "If I do go," he thought, "I shall have all my days 
 mapped out for me; I shall be worried if I look at an-
 
 26 CUn.DEROY. 
 
 Other woman; I sliall be told fifty times a week that I 
 am heartless. Perhaps I am heartless, but I thuik not; 
 and, even if one is, to be told so perpetually does not 
 make one's heart softer." 
 
 Was he heartless? 
 
 He thought not; and in this respect he knew 
 his own temperament. He was even more tender- 
 hearted than most men; but he had been spoiled and 
 caressed by fortune, and habitual self-indulgence had 
 made him apt only to consider himself with an uncon- 
 sciousness which made it less egotism than habit. 
 
 He had done some things which were unselfish and 
 generous in an unusual degree; but they had been 
 great things in which the indolence and fastidiousness 
 of his character had been banished by new and strong 
 emotions. In ordinary matters he was selfish without 
 being in the least aware of it, as indeed happens with 
 the majority of peoi)le. 
 
 When the letter was burnt he went to one of the 
 windows and looked out. 'J'he day was closing in, and 
 the shadows were taking the colours from the autumnal 
 flowers and making the woods beyond look black and 
 forbidding, while a few red leaves were being driven 
 along the terrace under a breeze which had suddenly 
 risen and blew freshly from the sea. A winter here 
 would be unendurable, he thought. It was very many 
 years since he had seen Ladysrood in the winter months. 
 None of the sports of winter were agreeable to him, 
 and he did not care for house parties which required 
 an amount of attention and observance from a host very 
 distasteful to his temperament. He usually came here 
 only when he wished for entire solitude, and the gentry
 
 OUIT.DEROY. 27 
 
 of his county sighed in vain for the various entertain- 
 ments, the balls, the dinners, and the hunting break- 
 fasts, to which, had Guilderoy been like any one else, 
 the great house would doubtless have been dedicated. 
 But he saw no necessity to so dedicate it. Ladysrood 
 was much isolated, being surrounded on three sides 
 with moorland and on the other side shut in by the 
 sea; and though his distant neighbours would willingly 
 have driven twenty miles to him, he gave them no in- 
 vitation or permission to do so. The gx&zX fetes which 
 had celebrated his majority some fifteen or sixteen 
 years before had been the last time in which the recep- 
 tion-rooms had been illuminated for a great party. 
 
 He was an idol of the great world, which always 
 considered him capricious but charming; but his county 
 saw only the caprice and none of the charm, and 
 thought him rude, eccentric, and misanthropical. In 
 his father's and forefather's time the hospitalities of 
 Ladysrood had been profuse and magnificent; the clos- 
 ing of its doors was an affront to the wliole country- 
 side, against the unpo[)ularity of which the good sense 
 of Lady Sunbury had in vain often protested. 
 
 "I have no desire to be popular," Guilderoy in- 
 variably replied. "There is nothing on earth so vulgar 
 as the craze for popularity which nowadays makes 
 people who ought to know better only anxious to be 
 fawned on by the crowd." 
 
 "'Vox populi vox Dei,'" said Lady Sunbury. 
 
 "It always was in the esteem of the vulgar them- 
 selves," replied her brother. "Myself, I wholly decline 
 to believe that the gods ever speak through the throats 
 of any mob."
 
 28 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "Can you call your own county people a mob?" 
 
 "Oh yes. A well-dressed mob, but a mob de- 
 cidedly. If you let them in by the great gates I shall 
 go out by the garden-door." 
 
 And they never were let into Ladysrood, infinitely 
 to their disgust. A few men dined with him oc- 
 casionally, that was all. It was not wonderful that his 
 neighbours thought Lady Sunbury would have been 
 better in his place. 
 
 When he looked out on to the terrace now and saw 
 the little red leaves blowing, he rang and ordered his 
 horse. He was fond of riding in the dusk for an hour 
 or two before dinner. But as he was about to mount 
 his horse he heard the sound of wheels coming up the 
 avenue which led to the western door of the house: a 
 petite entree only used by intimate and privileged per- 
 sons. 
 
 "Who can it be?" Guilderoy wondered to himself, 
 for no one then in the county, to his own knowledge, 
 was on sufficiently friendly terms with him to come 
 thither uninvited. A moment after he caught sight in 
 the distance of the invader, and with pleasure and 
 astonishment recognised his cousin Lord Aubrey. 
 
 A few moments later he welcomed him at the west 
 door. 
 
 "My dear Francis, how glad I am!" he said with 
 perfect sincerity. "To what good chance do we owe 
 this happy surprise?" 
 
 "If you bestowed a little attention on the politics 
 of your own county," replied Lord Aubrey, "you would 
 know that I had to attend a meeting in your own town 
 yesterday. I heard you were here, and I did not like
 
 GUILDEROY. 2g 
 
 to be so near Ladysrood without passing a night with 
 you. If I had known sooner the date of the meeting 
 I would have sent you word, but it was made a week 
 earlier than I expected at the eleventh hour." 
 
 "I am delighted to see you, and there could be 
 never the slightest occasion to let me know beforehand. 
 Ladysrood is yours whether I am in it or not. Would 
 you like to go direct to your rooms, and I will take 
 you to Hilda afterwards?" 
 
 "With pleasure," said Lord Aubrey. "I am hoarse, 
 dusty, and stupid, for I have been declaiming for three 
 hours on policy to some five thousand people of whom 
 four thousand probably would spell policy with an s, 
 if they could spell it at all." 
 
 "Spelling is a prejudice, like a love for ground 
 leases," said Guilderoy. "Come and have a bath and 
 forget Demos for a day." 
 
 "You continue to forget him always," said Lord 
 Aubrey. 
 
 Francis de I^isle, Lord Aubrey, was a cousin-german 
 of Guilderoy's, and some few years older than himself. 
 He was a tall man, with an air of great distinction and 
 an expression at once melancholy and amused, cynical 
 and good-humoured. He carried his great height some- 
 what listlessly and indolently, and his grey eyes were 
 half veiled by sleepy eyelids, from which they could, 
 however, flash glances which searched the inmost souls 
 of others. He was heir to a Marquisate, and had de- 
 dicated his whole life to what he considered to be the 
 obligations of his station. He did not like public life, 
 but he followed it with conscientiousness and self- 
 sacrifice. He was not a man of genius, but he had
 
 30 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the power of moving and of controlling other men, and 
 his absolute sincerity of character and of utterance was 
 known to the whole country. 
 
 "How is your sister?" he asked now, as he came 
 to the tea-room. "And what are you doing in the west 
 of England in autumn, you who hate grey skies and 
 cold winds?" 
 
 "I am delighted to be in the west of England 
 since it affords me a quiet day with you," said Guilde- 
 roy with perfect truth, for he liked and admired his 
 cousin. He had indeed a warmer feeling towards Lord 
 Aubrey than Aubrey had for him. A man who has 
 combated his own indolence and become excessively 
 occupied is apt to have slight patience with a man who 
 has allowed his indolence and his instincts to be the 
 sole controllers of his life. Guilderoy's existence was 
 a union of contemplation and pleasure; to Lord Aubrey 
 it appeared the existence of an unconscionable egotist; 
 and yet he had a friendly regard for the egotist. 
 
 "You have much more talent than I have," he said 
 once to his cousin, "and yet your voice is never heard 
 by the country;" and Guilderoy gave him much the 
 same reasons for his silence which he had given to his 
 sister. 
 
 "You believe in a great many things, and you care 
 about others," he added. "Now I do not believe, and 
 I do not care. Talent, even if I possess it — which I 
 doubt — cannot replace the forces which come from con- 
 viction. Those forces I have not." 
 
 "Here is your model hero; the one perfect person 
 endowed with all the virtues and moral conscientious- 
 ness in which I am so sadly deficient," said Guilderoy
 
 GUILDEROV. 3 1 
 
 to his sister, as he entered her presence with his cousin 
 as the sun descended over the western woods. 
 
 "I admit that I wish your life were more Hke his; 
 you would probably be happier and certainly more use- 
 ful," said Lady Sunbury as she welcomed Aubrey with 
 more cordiality than she showed to most people. 
 
 "I am by no means sure," said Aubrey, "that when 
 one does choose Pallas one is always right in the choice, 
 if Hercules were; and if one is as intolerant of being 
 bored as Evelyn is, it is no kind of use to take her; a 
 divorce would be sued for immediately." 
 
 "You do not regret your choice, surely?" said Hilda 
 Sunbury in some surprise. Aubrey always seemed to 
 her to be as absorbed in public life as other men are 
 in pleasure. 
 
 "I did not say that I regretted," he replied, "but 
 misgivings visit one inevitably, yl qiioi hon? One can- 
 not help thinking that now and then. I dare say a 
 man of absolute genius does not have that doubt, but 
 when one is a very ordinary personage one must feel 
 now and then that one might as well have enjoyed one- 
 self and let the nation alone." 
 
 "You are too modest; your example alone is of the 
 most infinite benefit. There is something so noble in 
 a man who has nothing to gain and everything to lose 
 devoting himself to political life. It is those sacrifices 
 which have made the strength of England and of the 
 aristocracy of England." 
 
 Aubrey smiled, a little sadly: "We shall not last 
 very long, do whatever we will." 
 
 "I do not believe the principle of aristocracy will 
 ever die out," said Lady Sunbury resolutely. "It is
 
 3 2 GUILDEROY. 
 
 rooted in human nature and in nature itself. All 
 governments drift towards it whatever they call them- 
 selves. Even savage tribes have a chief. Where our 
 party has been so culpable has been in pretending to 
 agree with those who deny this. Toryism should have 
 the courage of its opinions." 
 
 "Certainly the first virtue of an aristocracy should 
 be courage," said her cousin. "An aristocracy is no- 
 thing without it. A democracy in England would have 
 sent a humble deputation and the keys of the Cinque 
 Ports to Napoleon after Austerlitz. What stood against 
 him and prevailed against him were the valour and the 
 stubborn patriotism of the English nobility. Aristocratic 
 governments are often faulty; they may be arrogant, 
 illiberal, prejudiced; they may be so, though they are 
 not so necessarily; but there is one fine quality in them 
 which no democracy ever possesses: they have Honour. 
 A democracy cannot understand honour; how should 
 it? The caucus is chiefly made up of men who sand 
 their sugar, put alum in their bread, forge bayonets and 
 girders which bend like willow wands, send bad calico 
 to India, pay their operatives by the tally shop, and 
 insure vessels at Lloyd's which they know will go to 
 the bottom before they have been ten days at sea. 
 Honour is an idealic and impersonal thing; it can only 
 exist in men who have inherited its traditions and have 
 learned to rate it higher than all material success." 
 
 "I quite agree with you," said Guilderoy. "Unless 
 we honestly believe that we are the natural leaders of 
 the nation by virtue of the honour which we uphold 
 and represent, we have no business to attempt to lead 
 it, and we ought not to conceal or to disavow that we
 
 CUILDEROY. So 
 
 have that behef in ourselves. Lord Salisbury has been, 
 often accused of arrogance; people have never seen 
 that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, 
 candid consciousness of a great noble that he is more 
 capable of leading the country than most men com- 
 posing it would be. If a man have not that belief in 
 himself he has no business to assume command any- 
 where, whether in a cabinet or in a camp or in a 
 cricket field. I have no sort of belief in myself, and 
 therefore I have always let the State roll on without 
 help or hindrance from me in any way." 
 
 "You may be a hindrance without knowing it," 
 murmured Aubrey; "a boulder in a highroad does not 
 move, but sometimes it overturns the carriage as effec- 
 tually as if it did." 
 
 "By which you mean " 
 
 "That when the Radicals of your county are dis- 
 posed to point to great landowners who lead their lives 
 to very little purpose except that of their own enjoy- 
 ment, you, my dear Guilderoy, are conveniently at hand 
 to be pointed at, and to sharpen the moral of their 
 tale." 
 
 "It is wholly impossible for them to know what I 
 do with my life," said Guilderoy with some anger. 
 
 "Clearly; but they judge from Avhat they see; and 
 you may be sure that they lose no time in making your 
 country-side see with their eyes. For aught they can 
 tell, no doubt, you may be visiting prisons like Howard, 
 or capturing slave dhows like Gordon, all the time you 
 are away from England, but they do not think so, and 
 all they tell the county is that you have an immense 
 income, which you don't earn, and that you spend it 
 
 Cuildeioy. I. 3
 
 34 GUILDEROY. 
 
 anywhere sooner than in England. I am not saying 
 that they have any business to make such remarks; I 
 only say that they do make them." 
 
 "Let them make them and be damned!" said 
 Guilderoy. 
 
 "With all my heart," said his cousin. "Only it is 
 not they who ever are damned; it is always the poor, 
 stupid, hungry, gullible crowd, which is led astray by 
 them, and is made to believe that it would mend 
 matters to burn down great houses and cut down old 
 woods. 
 
 "You are always saying," continued Lord Aubrey, 
 "that you wonder why I bore myself with public life. 
 It does bore me endlessly, immeasurably, that I grant; 
 but apart from all other reasons you know, Evelyn, I 
 must consider that men in our position owe it to the 
 country not to leave politics wholly in the hands of 
 professional politicians. The professional politician may 
 be honest, but his honesty is at best a questionable 
 quality. The moment that a thing is a metier it is 
 Avholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in 
 the pursuit of it. To the professional politician na- 
 tional affairs are a manufacture into which he puts 
 his audacity and his time, and out of which he ex- 
 pects to make so much percentage for his lifetime. 
 I say that we have no business, because we are lazy 
 and fastidious, to let the vast mass of the uneducated 
 and credulous who make up the mass of our nation be 
 led by false guides, who only use them to climb up on 
 their shoulders to power. If we found a man persuad- 
 ing a child to eat poison by telling him that it was 
 honey, we should be as guilty as the intending mur-
 
 GUILDEROY. 35 
 
 derer if we did not strike the cup down and tell the 
 child of the danger it ran. That poor, overgrown, ill- 
 educated child, the people — the People with a big P — 
 is always having poison thrust on it under the guise of 
 honey. If we do not try to show it what the cup really 
 holds, I think we are to blame. That is the feeling 
 which has moved me to endeavour to do what I can. 
 I should be uneasy if I did not do it. After all, one 
 can only act according to one's light." 
 
 "You are a very conscientious man, my dear 
 Aubrey," said Guilderoy, "and I admire if I do not 
 imitate you. The overgrown child will, however, always 
 prefer the deceiver, who tenders it the poison, to you 
 who are so careful over its health." 
 
 "That must be as it may," said Aubrey, "I cannot 
 help the results. Men never know their best friends in 
 public life or private. That instinct is reserved for 
 dogs." 
 
 "I can well believe that you are indifferent to in- 
 gratitude," said Guilderoy, "and I am convinced you are 
 the servant of your conscience. But will you tell me 
 how you stand the vulgarity of public life? It has be- 
 come so hopelessly vulgar!" 
 
 "That I grant. And it is just its vulgarity which 
 will, I fear, every year alienate the higher minds from 
 it more and more, and send them instead to their 
 bookcases and their inkstands. I confess when I have 
 shouted for an hour or two on a hustings before a 
 general election, I have felt myself on no better intel- 
 lectual level than a Cheap John. To be compelled to 
 'go on the stump' is a prospect which may fairly make 
 a man who has any refinement or delicacy about him 
 
 3*
 
 30 CUILDEROY. 
 
 shun political life as he would shun a collier's pot- 
 house. There is too great a tendency to govern the 
 world by noise." 
 
 "On the whole I think I have the better part," said 
 Guilderoy. 
 
 "So far as your own ease goes, not a doubt of it." 
 
 "Evelyn does not admit that there is such a thing 
 as duty," remarked Lady Sunbury from her tea-table. 
 
 "I do not like tlic word duty," said Guilderoy. "It 
 is puritanic and illogical. If we are what science seems 
 to prove, mere automata formed of cells and fibres ac- 
 cidentally meeting, we clearly are wholly irresponsible 
 creatures. Nero is as innocent as St. Francis." 
 
 "What a shocking theory!" 
 
 "As shocking as you please. But it is the only 
 logical outcome of the conclusions of physiology." 
 
 "I do not enter the lists with physiology," said 
 Aubrey, "but it may say what it will, it cannot prevent 
 my consciousness of an Ego which inclines to evil, and 
 an Ego which tells me to avoid it. It is nothing very 
 great to claim. A dog has it. He longs to steal a 
 bone and he refrains from stealing it; he longs to bite 
 a hand which hurts him and abstains from doing so if 
 he finds the hand is a friend's. I do not think con- 
 science is exclusively a human possession, though it 
 may have become larger in human than in other ani- 
 mals. But it is strong enough in me to make me sen- 
 sible that I am in a very great measure responsible for 
 my actions, and all the philosophies on eartli will never 
 talk me out of that belief." 
 
 "And the belief has sent you to the House of Com- 
 mons?"
 
 GUILDEROY. 37 
 
 "Just so; I admit the bathos — I admit the justice 
 of your implied satire. But I go to the House of Com- 
 mons because, feehng as I feel, I should do violence to 
 my conscience not to go to it. That sounds horribly 
 priggish, but I cannot express what I mean otherwise." 
 
 "I wish the country had a great many more men 
 who felt like you," said Guilderoy. 
 
 He walked about a few minutes restlessly, then, his 
 sister having left the room, he asked with some abrupt- 
 ness: 
 
 "You came last week from the Veneto? Did you see 
 the Duchess Soria?" 
 
 "Yes, I saw her. She wondered very much not to 
 see you." 
 
 "Did she say so?" 
 
 "She said so with considerable bitterness. Why 
 were you not there?" 
 
 "I do not care to do what I am expected to do," 
 replied Guilderoy with some impatience and some suUen- 
 ness. "There can be no pleasure where there is no 
 impre'vu; where there is nothing voluntary. Women 
 never understand that. Half the passions of men die 
 early because they are expected to be eternal. Half 
 the love which women excite they destroy because they 
 stifle it by captivity in a hot-house, as a child might 
 kill a wild bird." 
 
 Aubrey looked at him with some amusement. 
 
 "You are undoubtedly right. Even I, who have no 
 pretensions to much experience in the soft science, am 
 aware that you are most undeniably right. But how 
 do you propose to get any woman — and any woman in 
 love — to understand that?"
 
 38 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "I do not even hope it," replied Guilderoy, wearily. 
 "I remark that the utter inability of women to under- 
 stand it brings about their own unhappiness much 
 sooner than it would otherwise come to them. If they 
 comprehended that the bird wants fresh air, he would 
 very possibly often return of his own good will to the 
 hot-house." 
 
 "And tell the tale of his amours en voyage? My 
 dear Evelyn, the lady would have to be as wise as Pene- 
 lope and as amorous as Calypso to receive him on such 
 terms." 
 
 "It would be love; whereas now it is only love of 
 possession." 
 
 "You certainly ask a great deal of love, and seem 
 to me inclined to give very little." 
 
 "One can only give what one has. Women reproach 
 us with ceasing to care for them. Is it our fault? We 
 cannot control impulse." 
 
 Aubrey looked at him once more. 
 
 "Poor women!" he said, involuntarily. 
 
 Guilderoy moved impatiently. 
 
 "There is no doubt of the Duchess's devotion to 
 you," added his cousin. "On my honour, I think she 
 suffers a great deal. She has been a coquette, no doubt, 
 but she has never been a coquette with you." 
 
 "I do not think we ought to speak of her," said 
 Guilderoy. 
 
 "Certainly not, unless you wish it. You introduced 
 her name first." 
 
 "My dear Aubrey," said Guilderoy with some 
 violence, "of all intolerable things on earth a passion 
 which survives on one side and dies on the other is
 
 GUILDEROY. 39 
 
 the worst. There is no peace possible in it. You feel 
 like a brute, whilst honestly you are no more to be 
 blamed than the sea is to be blamed because after high 
 tide its waters recede. No man is accountable for the 
 flow and reflow of his own emotions. Women speak as 
 though the heart were to be heated at will like a stove 
 or a bath. Now of all spontaneous, capricious, change- 
 ful, and ungovernable things, the passions are the most 
 wayward and the least reasonable. Why do you love? 
 You cannot say. Why do you cease to love? You 
 probably cannot say either. The forces of your emo- 
 tions and desires are wholly beyond your own control. 
 They are not electric machines — mere Leyden jars which 
 you can charge at will. Why then is it a reproach to 
 cease to love? It is as involutary as it was to love at 
 all in the beginning." 
 
 Aubrey smiled a little dubiously, 
 
 "Excellently reasoned! I should be disposed to 
 admit your arguments, but I doubt very much whether 
 the Duchess Soria would see the force of them." 
 
 "You think she was annoyed that I was not there?" 
 
 "She was much more than aimoyed; she was in- 
 dignant and wounded. That was easy to see. She is 
 not a woman who cares to conceal what she feels. Why 
 were you not there, by the way?" 
 
 "I dislike everything which is made an obligation 
 — I told you so. What is feeling worth if it degenerate 
 into a habit?" 
 
 "All feeling runs to seed in that fashion, unless it 
 is broken off sharply whilst it is still in blossom: a 
 painful fact, but a fact. Here and there perhaps there 
 is a sentiment strong enough to endure through all the
 
 40 GUILDEROY. 
 
 changes of its growth, so that inslcad of decay it 
 reaches almost perfection; but it is very rare, and can 
 only be the issue of an unique character." 
 
 "The ideal love, of course, does so; but it does not 
 exist out of the dreams of boyhood and of poets," an- 
 swered Guilderoy, impatiently. "There is attraction, 
 and there is its reaction; and between the two the 
 time is more or less short, according to temperament 
 and circumstances. ]>ut the end is always the same." 
 
 "What you call attraction I should not call love; I 
 should give it an uglier name." 
 
 "Give it any name you like; it is all there is. It 
 becomes poetic, however, in poetic natures." 
 
 "My nature is absolute prose, so I cannot pretend to 
 understand," said Aubrey; but although he said so, it 
 was not quite so sincerely spoken as was his wont. He 
 had a vein of romance in his character, beneath the 
 coldness of his exterior and the prosaic nature of his 
 occupations. When he had been quite a boy he had 
 made a secret marriage from i)ure love. It had lasted 
 a brief space, and had ended ill. The woman for 
 whom he had sacrificed much had been false to him in 
 a gross and brutal intrigue. He had not made his 
 wound public, and she had died not long after his dis- 
 covery of her infidelity. No one had been aware of 
 this unfortunate drama in his life, but it had made 
 him at once indifferent to women and sympathetic with 
 all sorrows of the affections. He never laughed at those 
 who suffered. His own w^ound had healed, indeed, 
 long ago, but now and then a nerve still thrilled under 
 the remembrance of its pain. Love had little place 
 now in his busy and laborious life, but his estimate of
 
 GUILDEROY. 4 1 
 
 it was higher than his cousin's, the doors of whose life 
 stood wide open to it all seasons through. If there 
 was anything in human nature which made him irri- 
 table, it was to hear men speak of the passions of life 
 as Guilderoy spoke of them. "If they are playthings 
 they are not passions," he was wont to say, "no more 
 than the fireworks on the Arc de I'Etoile are the flames 
 of the Commune." 
 
 For errors which were the birth of passion he had 
 ii^finite sympathy, but with the mere caprices of the 
 senses and the fancy he had little patience. 
 
 "He should marry," said Lady Sunbury to him of 
 her brother, repeating her favourite lament. 
 
 Aubrey laughed. 
 
 "I should certainly pity his wife," he replied. 
 
 "Why?" said Lady Sunbury, irritated, "She would 
 have a very agreeable position." 
 
 "Oh, no doubt," assented Aubrey. "If she were 
 satisfied with position. Perhaps she would not be." 
 
 "Women are not romantic nowadays," said his cou- 
 sin, in the tone with which she would have said that 
 women did not wear patches. 
 
 "I suppose that there are as many — or as few — 
 dmes d' elite now as then," replied Aubrey. "There 
 never can have been very many. Why should you want 
 him to marry?" he continued; "you know you would 
 hate a saint if he married her." 
 
 "I am sure I should be delighted," said Lady 
 Sunbury, and was fully persuaded that she spoke the 
 truth. 
 
 Aubrey smiled. 
 
 He spent that day at Ladysrood, and then took his
 
 42 GUII.DEROY. 
 
 departure for his own place — Balfrons, in the north. 
 Balfrons was a mighty border castle which had with- 
 stood raids and sieges from the days of Hotspur, and 
 it gave its name to the Marquisate which he would in- 
 herit on the death of his father, already a very old 
 man of feeble health, who was but seldom seen by the 
 world. 
 
 "I wonder what he would do with his life if he 
 allowed himself to do what he wishes?" said Guilderoy, 
 when his cousin had gone. 
 
 "He would never leave Balfrons, and he would 
 collect early Latin manuscripts of Virgil," replied Lady 
 Sunbury. 
 
 "Almost as dreary a paradise as his present pur- 
 gatory." 
 
 "That is a matter of taste. You prefer to collect 
 a number of erotic memories which soon grow as fusty 
 to you as if they were used tea-leaves." 
 
 "They are at least as amusing as old Italian manu- 
 scripts." 
 
 "Not as harmless," said Lady Sunbury.
 
 GUILDEROY. 43 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The next day, after his cousin's departure, very 
 early in the forenoon Guilderoy rode out whilst the day 
 was still young. Riding was the only active exercise 
 which pleased him; he rode well, and with great bold- 
 ness and sureness; his sister sometimes told him that 
 it was the only English taste he possessed. He could 
 ride many miles without passing the limits of his own 
 land, and much of this was the wild moorland lying 
 high and wind-blown between the woods of Ladysrood 
 and the cliffs by the sea. Over the short elastic turf 
 he could gallop for hours and meet no fence, or boun- 
 dary-mark, or human habitation. The western wind 
 came straight in his face from the Atlantic, and there 
 was nothing but salt water between him and the coast 
 of Maine. The world had been too much with him to 
 leave him great leisure for the enjoyment of nature, but 
 he had a vague feeling for her which resisted the 
 opposing influences of the world, and revived in the 
 force it had had in his boyhood whenever he was 
 alone in the open air, on moor or shore or mountain. 
 
 The moor and the shore and the mountain could 
 not hold him very long, but, while it lasted, his sym- 
 pathy with them was sincere and his pleasure in their 
 loneliness very real. It was not the love of Wordsworth 
 or of Tennyson, but it was genuine in its kind, and 
 gave momentary seriousness and romance to his tem- 
 perament and his thoughts. In the heart of a man who
 
 44 GUILDEROY. 
 
 loves nature there are always some green places where 
 the caravan wheels of the world have not passed or the 
 hoofs of its carnival coursers trodden. 
 
 It was so seldom that he saw anyone or anything on 
 these moors beyond a pedlar or a turf-cutter, a carrier's 
 cart creeping slowly across the track which led from one 
 hamlet to another, or a cottager carrying on her head 
 a bundle of cut furze or a basket of bilberries, that he 
 looked curiously at a little crowd of people which he 
 saw on the edge of the moor, their figures black against 
 the light of the sky. From them, as he drew nearer, 
 there came to his ear an angry screaming noise, the 
 ugly noise of irritated roughs, and he could distinguish 
 the vmcouth figures of village lads about whom several 
 lurchers and other dogs were jumping and yelping ex- 
 citedly. The centre of the excitement was a hut or 
 cabin made of wattles such as was used by the turf-and 
 bog-cutters of the moors; generally such places were 
 only used for shelter in bad weather, but this one was 
 stronger than most, and braced with beams, and had a 
 door of wood, having served as the home of some 
 squatters at one time, though of late it had been empty. 
 
 "They are after some barbarous sport or another," 
 thought Guilderoy, as he heard the hoarse shouts. 
 "Torturing some beast, very likely, or perhaps some 
 half-witted human creature." 
 
 He turned his horse to the left and rode towards 
 the little mob, which was a very rough one, composed 
 chiefly of lads from the other side of the moors, where 
 the scattered and uncared-for people were more savage 
 and uncouth than those on the domains of Ladysrood. 
 
 "Let un fire her out!" he heard one of them cry,
 
 GUILDEROY. 45 
 
 as he rode nearer, and the welcome shout was echoed 
 with noise and glee. "Let un fire her out!" 
 
 "Who is she?" asked Guilderoy, "and what are you 
 going to do? What do you mean by your threats about 
 fire?" 
 
 The ringleaders looked at him sullenly. 
 
 "'Tis the lord," they muttered. 
 
 They were some score in number, lads ranging from 
 fifteen to tAventy, beetle-browed, coarse-featured, with 
 jaws like their own bulldogs, and small dull savage eyes, 
 items of that enlightened and purified democracy to 
 which is henceforth trusted the realm of Britain. 
 
 It was a Saturday morning, and they had nothing 
 useful to do, and so were doing mischief. 
 
 "What are you about?" asked Guilderoy again more 
 imperiously. 
 
 What struck him as singular was that whilst the 
 young men and their dogs were in uproar, jostling, 
 hallooing swearing and yelping, from the hut not the 
 faintest sound came. 
 
 "Have they frightened to death whatever it is they 
 are persecuting?" he thought, with difficulty keeping 
 his horse quiet amidst the hubbub and the menacing 
 gestures of the youths. 
 
 "What are you about?" he demanded; "answer me 
 at once. What devilry are you doing?" 
 
 He had little doubt that they had hunted in there 
 some poor old creature whom they thought a witch. 
 Witchcraft was firmly believed in on the moors, and 
 often rudely dealt with by village superstition. 
 
 Their clamour ceased a little while , and one of 
 them called to him;
 
 46 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "She's shut herself in with it, and it's ours, and 
 we're going to burn 'em both out; she's kept us here 
 foohng us three hours." 
 
 "What is it? and who is she?" asked Guilderoy, 
 and he struck with his riding-whip out of the hand of 
 the man who spoke a wooden box of hicifer matches. 
 There was a quantity of dry furze already piled against 
 the wall of the hut, which if set alight would have 
 flared like straw. 
 
 They did not reply, but some of them roared like 
 animals deprived of prey which they had thought safe 
 in their jaws. 
 
 "Answer me," he repeated; "you know who I am. 
 I have a right to be answered, you are on my land." 
 
 "'Tis a tod," one of them shouted, "and we turned 
 it out to hunt it with the dogs, and Ave'd run it into a 
 cranny, and she come up and catch hold of it and tear 
 away, and we hunted of her then, in here, and she's fleet 
 of foot as any hare, and she hied in quick as thought, 
 and banged the door, and barred it, and she's kept us, 
 making fools of us, three hours if one, and she knows 
 we'll burn her out, and she won't give it up, and she 
 knows we bought it at the public at Cherriton for we 
 told her so, and brought it in a bag and turned it down, 
 only it run bad because it's such a little un." 
 
 "You have lost a fox-cub, I understand," said 
 Guilderoy when the narrator ceased. "But who is it 
 that you have in there, and that you are brutes enough 
 to want to burn out?" 
 
 "It's the young un of Christslea," said the youth 
 sullenly. 
 
 "Who do you mean?"
 
 GUILDEROY. 47 
 
 "'Tis the Vernon girl," cried another of the rioters. 
 "She's a spirit she have, but we'll break it. We'll have 
 the tod if we have him roasted." 
 
 "You unutterable beasts!" cried Guilderoy, in the 
 passion which cowardice and tyranny together rouse in 
 a man who is both courageous and merciful. "Do you 
 mean to say that there is a child or a girl in there?" 
 
 "She went in with the tod," said the lad sullenly; 
 and those around him yelled in chorus, "How dared 
 she go and take the beast and spoil our sport? The 
 tod was ours, not hers. And she cuddled it up in her 
 neck as if it was a baby. We'll burn her out, and then 
 we'll toss up for her," cried another voice, and the sug- 
 gestion was received with shouts of applause. 
 
 "You are on my land, and I am a magistrate," said 
 Guilderoy, controlling with difficulty his fury of disgust 
 as he dismounted, and, holding his plunging horse with 
 one hand, with the other struck the handle of his whip 
 on the door of the hut. 
 
 "My dear, do not be alarmed," he said to the 
 unseen occupant within. "These brutes shall not hurt 
 you. Open the door. I will take care of you. I am 
 Lord Guilderoy, and these moors are mine." 
 
 A very clear young voice with a tremor in it an- 
 swered through the door: 
 
 "I cannot open it, because if I do they will take the 
 little fox." 
 
 "No, they shall not take the cub," said Guilderoy, 
 and he turned to the men. "You have behaved worse 
 than your mongrels, but I will consent to believe that 
 you would have failed to carry out your dastardly and 
 brutal threats. There is a sovereign for the loss of the
 
 48 GUILDEROY. 
 
 cub; now go back to wherever you came from, and do 
 not forget that your miserable sport is illegal on these 
 lands. Go!" 
 
 The little mob wavered, growled and swore under 
 its breath; then one of them picked up the gold piece 
 where it lay on the ground to slink off with it un- 
 remarked. 
 
 "Share fair!" yelled the others, and they fell 
 on him, and wrestling, quarrelling, yelling, and casting 
 shamefaced and sullen glances over their shoulders at 
 "the lord," they slunk away across the moor in the 
 warm amber light of the full noonday. 
 
 The ground sloped slightly downwards to the north- 
 east, and thither they went; the rise soon screened their 
 forms from view, though the echo of their voices in 
 rough and fierce dispute came to the ear of Guilderoy 
 as he stood by the cabin door. 
 
 "Admirable persons to have been made our masters 
 by Act of Parliament ! " he thought, as the sullen mut- 
 terings of their oaths came to his ear on the westerly 
 wind. 
 
 Then he turned to the door of the cabin and rapped 
 on it with the handle of his whip. 
 
 "The brutes are gone," he said through the keyhole. 
 "You may come out quite safely." 
 
 He heard a wooden bar lifted and dropped; the 
 wooden door opened, and on the threshold in the warm 
 glow of the sunset stood a young girl with a very 
 beautiiul face, which was pale but resolute; a Gains- 
 borough face with wide opened questioning eyes and 
 tumbled auburn hair, of which thick waves were es- 
 caping from a gipsy-shaped straw hat. A grey woollen
 
 GUILDEROY. 49 
 
 dress was fastened round her waist by a leather beU; 
 it had been obviously made by some simple country 
 sempstress, but there was an aristocracy in the look of 
 the wearer which made him feel that, whoever she 
 might be, she was thoroughbred. She was not nervous 
 or agitated, only pale. She had placed the fox-cub on 
 the ground that she might undo the bar of the door, 
 and the little animal was shivering and trembling 
 behind her. She took it up before she spoke to him. 
 
 "You are sure they are gone?" she asked, looking 
 out across the moor. 
 
 "Perfectly sure," returned Guilderoy. "But, my 
 dear child, did you not hear them? They were inciting 
 each other to fire the hut." 
 
 "Oh yes, I heard them," she replied tranquilly. "I 
 think they would have done it too. They are very 
 rough and savage, those Cherriton people. It was very 
 kind of you to interfere." 
 
 "And what would you have done if I had been rid- 
 ing another way, if the fellows had carried out their 
 word? You would ten to one have been burnt alive." 
 
 "Oh, perhaps not," she answered. "I daresay they 
 would not have let me be really burnt, they only wanted 
 to frighten me." 
 
 "And you would have run the risk rather than give 
 up that cub?" 
 
 "Oh yes! I could not have given him up; and, 
 besides, I would never have given in to them." 
 
 Guilderoy bowed to her with grave respect. 
 
 "You have a great courage, and you have another 
 quality growing rarer still — scorn for the mob." 
 
 She did not reply to the words. 
 
 Guilderoy. I. 4
 
 50 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "I will go now," she said; "and I thank you very 
 much, though I do not know who you are." 
 
 "I am a neighbour of yours, I think. I live at 
 Ladysrood." 
 
 "Ah, I heard them say 'It's the lord.'" 
 
 She looked at him with more attention and interest 
 than before. 
 
 "Ladysrood is such a beautiful place they say," she 
 said. "But you are never there. Why are you always 
 away?" 
 
 "I really hardly know," he replied; she seemed to 
 him too young to be answered with a compliment. 
 "You see the English climate is so detestable. I dis- 
 like rain, and there is scarcely anything else here." 
 
 "I do not mind rain at all," she said as she left the 
 cabin, still clasping in her arms the draggled and 
 shivering fox-cub. "Pray do not come with me. Our 
 place is ten miles from here." 
 
 "Neither my horse nor I mind ten miles," replied 
 Guilderoy, "and I most certainly insist on being al- 
 lowed to attend you to your father's gates. Let me 
 carry the cub for you. How is it he is so tame?" 
 
 "They take little foxes from their earths and bring 
 them up; and then, when they are a few months old, 
 they are carried out to some waste place and hunted 
 with dogs; not hounds, you know, but any kind of dog. 
 I could tell this was a tame cub by the way it behaved. 
 It did not know how to run; and was not even afraid. 
 The young men chased it and lashed it, and threw 
 pebbles at it to make it run, but it did not know- 
 how. Then, when I saw that it got behind a stone, 
 I took it up and would not let them have it, and
 
 GUILDEROY. 5 1 
 
 I ran as hard as I could, and they ran after me. I got 
 in there just in time to bar the door. Men arc so 
 mean," she continued, with the same scorn in her voice. 
 "There was a fox — a grown fox — that the real hounds 
 hunted last year, and he ran down to the shore and 
 took to the sea, and swam — oh, so gallantly! The 
 hounds could not get him nor the hunters; but what 
 do you think some men did who were in a boat, and 
 saw him? They rowed so that they crossed his path, 
 for he was making for a tongue of land, and they beat 
 him to death in the sea with their oars — the cowards! 
 That I saw myself, for I was up above on the cliffs, and 
 I could not do anything to save him," 
 
 "Men are very ignoble; and the new worship of 
 humanity has a beast for its god," replied Guilderoy, 
 
 She went on walking, holding the little fox to her 
 with both arms, Guilderoy walked beside her, with 
 the bridle of his horse over his arm, 
 
 "But how can your father allow you to wander 
 about so far all alone?" he asked, looking at the profile 
 of his companion, and thinking of Romney's Emma 
 Hamilton, which it resembled. 
 
 She laughed; a child's careless laughter, 
 
 "I do not think he even knows I do roam about: 
 he is so much absorbed in books and papers. He is 
 so good to me — oh so good ! but he would never think 
 to ask where I was all day; and, besides, the moors 
 are as safe as our garden. Nothing has ever happened 
 till to-day; and to-day the men would not have annoyed 
 me if I had not taken away their cub. Of course I 
 had no business, really, to take it," 
 
 "Why did you, then?" 
 
 4*
 
 5 2 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "Because I would much sooner do wrong — yes, 
 even a crime, I think — than see any helpless little thing 
 hurt. Would not you?" 
 
 "Yes, I would, certainly; I like animals. They are 
 great mysteries; and men, instead of endeavouring to 
 win their way into their closed souls, have only beaten 
 the owners of the souls into captivity." 
 
 The girl paused a moment, and looked at him 
 earnestly. 
 
 "I like you very much," she said, with gravity, as 
 a child of five years old might have said it. 
 
 "I am exceedingly pleased," said Guilderoy, in- 
 clined to smile; for he was adored and flattered by all 
 women of the great world, and used to the most subtle 
 compliment, the most charming homage. "You have 
 not told me whom I have the honour of speaking to. May 
 I ask what is your father's name?" 
 
 "Our name is Vernon. Vernon of Llanarth." 
 
 "Is it possible that your father is John Vernon of 
 Llanarth?" he asked, in intense surprise. 
 
 He remembered the name, though vaguely. When 
 he had been a very young man the story of Vernon of 
 Llanarth had been the theme of society for a season. 
 He had forgotten it utterly for years; now its me- 
 mories rose before him, shadowy, but full of reviving 
 interest. 
 
 "Yes, he used to be rich, but he lost all his money. 
 It is many years ago. I do not remember his being 
 rich at all. You seem surprised. Did you never know 
 that we were here, then? We are your tenants, I 
 think." 
 
 "I know so little of the neighbourhood."
 
 GUILDEROY. 53 
 
 "Yes; and my father says it is very wrong of you. 
 He says you play into the hands of democrats; that at 
 the Radical meetings in the great towns they always 
 cite you as an example of those who have all the fruits 
 of the land without toiling for it, and take their sub- 
 stance from the poor to spend in foreign countries. 
 Why do you?" 
 
 "I did not look for a political lecture," said Guil- 
 deroy. "I am always having one at home from my 
 sister, and I am not aware that I take any substance 
 from the poor. I believe, on the contrary, that the 
 poor are better off on the lands of Ladysrood than they 
 are anywhere else in the south-west of England. Is it 
 possible that your father holds these opinions? The 
 Vernons were always Whigs, but never Radicals." 
 
 "He does not hold them. He is sorry that anyone 
 holds them, and he is sorry that the great nobles who 
 stay away from their estates, as you do, give agitators 
 an excuse to make the people hold them." 
 
 "I am not sure that my example would be more 
 edifying if I lived on them. If you will not let me 
 carry that poor little beast for you, will you let me 
 mount you in my saddle? You are tired, though you 
 will not own it, and you will be able to carry the 
 cub much more comfortably for himself, which is no 
 doubt the argument Avhich will have most weight with 
 you." 
 
 It was not easy to persuade her, but she did at last 
 consent, and sprang with rapidity on to the horse's 
 back, scarcely touching Guilderoy's hand. He put the 
 little fox up in the saddle in front of her, and, thus
 
 54 GUILDEROY. 
 
 laden, the horse paced slowly over the elastic turf, his 
 master walking at his head. 
 
 "What a beautiful child!" thought Guilderoy, as 
 he studied her features and her form. She was tall 
 and lithe, and admirably made, like a young Diana; 
 her feet were small and slim, her throat beautifully set 
 upon her shoulders, all her features were harmonious, 
 and her eyes were so large and lustrous that they 
 would have made a plain face handsome; her expres- 
 sion had a curious mingling of innocence, self-will, 
 candour, pride, intelligence, and childishness; her smile 
 was like sunlight, frank and lovely. 
 
 "In a year or two she will be the most beautiful 
 woman in England," he thought, "and what a fine cha- 
 racter, too!" 
 
 He was not in the habit of noticing young girls at 
 all. He, on the contrary, shunned them. He liked 
 women who amused him, who could treat him de puis- 
 sance a puissance, who could bring into their conflicts 
 with him wit, finesse, and experience. This was the 
 first very young woman of his own rank at whom he 
 had ever seriously looked, and there was something in 
 her which charmed and interested him. The tranquil- 
 lity in danger which she had showed, and the self-pos- 
 session and simplicity which were characteristic of her 
 manner seemed to him to be the acme of high breed- 
 ing, whilst joined to them were a naivete and a childish- 
 ness only possible to one who had led the simplest of 
 rural lives, and been little amongst women. 
 
 He knew the name of John Vernon, though ever 
 since his own boyhood it had been unspoken in his 
 world. He remembered hearing what fine scholarship,
 
 GUILDEROY. 55 
 
 what rare accomplishments, and what elegant dilettan- 
 teism had vanished with this man from society when a 
 total and voluntary loss of fortune had sent him into 
 seclusion and oblivion, by the world forgot if not the 
 world forgetting. And this was his child — it was not 
 wonderful, he thought, if she had rare and delicate 
 excellencies both of form and mind. 
 
 "And have you always lived here? and on my 
 land?" he asked her, as he led the horse along through 
 the golden haze by the morning sun. 
 
 "No, only ten years. We lived by the sea, thirty 
 miles away, first of all. That is what I first remember. 
 The sea ran very high one winter's night and washed 
 away our house, and my father had only just time to 
 save me and some of the books. I can recollect it. 
 They woke me and carried me out wrapped up in 
 the blankets, and I saw the great wall of water rising 
 up above me; and I heard the crash of the house 
 sinking; yes, I have never forgotten it. I was five years 
 old. My mother died of the cold of that night, and 
 soon after we came to Christslea. My father likes it 
 because it is so solitary, and has such a big old garden. 
 I think we pay you forty pounds a year for it with the 
 orchard." 
 
 "I am shocked not to know my tenants." 
 
 "How should you know any tenant when you are 
 never here?" 
 
 "I am here sometimes." 
 
 " Oh, yes, when you have a number of great people, 
 now and then, once in four years. Myself, if I had 
 Ladysrood, I would live there all the year round." 
 
 "How happy Ladysrood and its master would be!"
 
 56 GUILDEROY. 
 
 The compliment made no impression on her. 
 
 "I am as happy at Christslea," she answered; "but 
 I should like to see your great galleries, and the beautiful 
 ball-room with the frescoes, and that staircase with the 
 carving by Grinling Gibbons — it must be an immense 
 pleasure to own a beautiful old house. I have heard a 
 great deal of yours, though I have never seen it." 
 
 "You will now come and see it very often, will you 
 not?" 
 
 "It is a long way off, and I have no pony." 
 
 "I will send you a team of ponies, or I will come 
 and fetch you myself." 
 
 She laughed a little. 
 
 "You say that, but you will not do it, because you 
 always go to Italy." 
 
 "Perhaps I shall not go to Italy this year." 
 
 "Then I will come and see you," said Gladys Ver- 
 non frankly. 
 
 In such innocent interchange of speech they wended 
 their Avay across the moor to where the moors became 
 meadow land and orchard land, and a hilly uneven 
 road went up and down between high hedges of bil- 
 berry and briony. 
 
 "That is our house," she said, as she pointed to 
 some twisted chimneys and a thatched roof rising above 
 a tangle of apple trees, elder trees, and hawthorn trees. 
 The ground all about was orchard, and the strong sweet 
 scent of the ripe fruit filled the air. 
 
 Guilderoy stopped his horse at the little wooden 
 gate which she had pointed out to him, overtopped 
 with luxuriant undipped shrubs, between tall privet 
 hedijes.
 
 GUILDEROY. 5 7 
 
 "You are safe now," he said to her, as she sprung 
 down from the saddle. "I will bid you good-day here, 
 and will call on your father later. Give him my com- 
 pliments, and say how much I am indebted to the 
 fox-cub for having led me to the knowledge of my 
 tenants." 
 
 "You have been very kind," said the girl, with her 
 hand on the latch of the wicket. 
 
 "I have been very fortunate," said Guilderoy; "but 
 if you will allow me a parting word of advice, do not 
 wander so far alone. It has ended well this time, but 
 it might end not so well. You are too"' — he was about 
 to say too handsome, but checked himself, and said 
 instead — "too young to roam about unattended. Demos 
 is about everywhere, you know. By the way, what will 
 you do with yoViX protege, the cub?" 
 
 "I shall keep him in the garden." 
 
 "Like Sir Roger de Coverley's hares." 
 
 She smiled as at the mention of a dear old friend. 
 
 She gave him her hand with another of those smiles 
 which made her more than ever like the Romney, and 
 disappeared into the green twilight of the untrimmed 
 garden ways behind the wicket. 
 
 "What a charming child!" he thought; "and she 
 treats me much as she might treat the old carrier who 
 crosses the moors, or the huckster who buys the orchard 
 apples!"
 
 58 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 "Where have you been, my dear, all these hours?" 
 a voice said from the green twilight of the tangled 
 boughs and bushes. 
 
 "That is my father! Wait a moment," said the 
 girl. And she pushed the branches aside and ran 
 to him. 
 
 Guilderoy heard her rapidly narrating her adventure 
 and speaking of him by name; and in a few moments' 
 time John Vernon came through the leaves and the 
 shadows. He was a slight well-made man, with a 
 scholar's stoop in the shoulders, and a scholar's brow 
 and eyes; he was very pale, and his step was feeble, 
 but he had a smile which was infinitely engaging in 
 its brightness, and there was humour, too, about the 
 delicate lines of his mouth; he had once, like Ulysses, 
 known well the cities and the minds of men. 
 
 "My dear Lord Guilderoy," he said, as he stretched 
 out his hand, "I am infinitely obliged to you for having 
 brought home my truant. She is growing much too 
 old to wander like this, but I cannot get her to believe 
 it; and her education, in some ways, has been sadly 
 neglected. Come in the house — your house, by the 
 way— and let me understand better what has happened. 
 Gladys has gone to carry this new protege to the cow's 
 stable."
 
 GUILDEROY. 59 
 
 Guilderoy, won by the tone of the voice which 
 addressed him, followed the speaker indoors, leaving 
 his horse at the gate. 
 
 He said something to the effect that whatever the 
 means of education the result obtained was admirable. 
 
 "You must not say that," replied her father, with a 
 smile, "You are very kind if you think it, for my 
 poor little girl, though she is not unpossessed of some 
 learning, is wholly ignorant of all that a polite society 
 requires in children of her age, and I make no doubt 
 that she treated you with very scant ceremony. I 
 ought, you know," he continued with a sigh, "to send 
 her to my people to be instructed in all the decencies 
 of society, and brought out into the world. But I 
 hesitate to do so. The child would be wretched 
 amongst a number of distant relatives. I am poor, as 
 you know. She would have to take the position of a 
 Cinderella, and she would not take it; she is too proud, 
 too used to freedom, and, in her own way, to sove- 
 reignty, for she does precisely as she pleases in this 
 cottage." 
 
 "She has an admirable manner," said Guilderoy, 
 "only such a manner as high-breeding gives untaught. 
 Is it indeed true that I have the honour to be your 
 landlord, Mr. Vernon?" 
 
 "Quite true; and we have had your house ten 
 years; it would not suit many people because it is so 
 far away from civilisation, but it does suit me chiefly 
 for that reason. You appear to be very little acquainted 
 with the extent of your property. It is well that you 
 have so good a steward." 
 
 "I cannot think it safe for her to be alone," said
 
 6o GUILDEROY. 
 
 Guilderoy. "She has not even a dog with her. Would 
 you allow me to send you a mastiff or a deerhound?" 
 
 "There is a dog; we have a fine one; but he had 
 lamed himself, and so was not about with her as usual. 
 No; she must learn to stay within bounds, and pay the 
 penalty of losing the happy immunity of childhood. 
 She will be seventeen in another month. It is your 
 luncheon hour, I imagine. We are primitive people 
 and we dine at this time. If you will stay I shall be 
 very pleased. My old housekeeper can roast a capon, 
 and I have some good Rhenish wine still to offer you. 
 Divitlas mis eras:'' 
 
 Guilderoy consented with much more willingness 
 than he displayed to the invitations of the great world. 
 
 The dining-room was a small, square plain room, 
 which had been coloured grey by a village plasterer; 
 but John Vernon, in idle moods, had covered the walls 
 with classical figures drawn in black and white, and it 
 had a look of good taste, enhanced by the old silver 
 plate on the round dining-table and the autumn flowers 
 set in a grey Flemish pot, which filled the centre. 
 
 "When you have only sixpence to spend you may 
 as well buy a well-made thing as an ill-made thing," 
 said John Vernon, as his guest complimented him; 
 "and if you have only Michaelmas daisies and dahlias 
 to set out, you may as well see that they harmonise." 
 
 He did the honours of his homely table with per- 
 fect grace and simplicity. His guest understood whence 
 the girl had taken her high-bred repose. The repast 
 was very simple; a plain soup, fish fresh from the sea, 
 prawns stewed in sherry, and the capon Vernon had 
 spoken of; but he had seldom enjoyed any banquet
 
 GUILDEROY, 6 1 
 
 better. The keen air of the moors head given him an 
 unwonted appetite. Gladys had changed her gown to 
 a frock of white serge, and had tied back her abundant 
 hair with a pale ribbon. She spoke very little in her 
 father's presence, but she had so lovely a face, with a 
 colour in her cheeks like that of the wild rose, that 
 Guilderoy almost preferred her silence; it became her 
 youth; and the reverence she showed her father was 
 touching and uncommon in days when English girls are 
 chiefly conspicuous by their insolence and their for- 
 wardness. However self-willed or high-spirited she 
 might be to others, to John Vernon she was gracefully 
 deferential and submissive in an unusual degree. 
 
 He was stirred to a novel sympathy with this lonely, 
 scholarly gentleman, shut away from the world under 
 the boughs of Somerset apple orchards, and the child 
 who had the beauty of the Romney Hamilton and the 
 life of a young peasant. Her personal beauty pleased 
 him; the one as much as the other. She knew nothing 
 of the complications of life; she had lived on these 
 lonely moors, as Miranda on her isle, and she had the 
 intrepidity and the independence of a Rosalind. 
 
 "Are you never dull here?" he asked her. 
 
 "Oh, never," the child answered, with some in- 
 dignation. "There is the garden, and the orchard, and 
 I have a great many books, and I have a boat all my 
 own down on the sands. If people are dull," she 
 added with the happy certainty of youth, "they must 
 be stupid themselves." 
 
 "I am often dull," said Guilderoy. "I do not wish 
 to accept your theory of the cause of it."
 
 62 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "Why should you be dull? Have you had any 
 misfortune?" 
 
 "One big one, perhaps." 
 
 "The death of any one?" 
 
 Her voice was full of ready sympathy. 
 
 "Oh, no; only that I enjoyed all things too early, 
 and too completely; a reason with which you would 
 have no patience, even if you could understand it, 
 which you could not." 
 
 "My father says when we cannot have understand- 
 ing we should at least have indulgence." 
 
 "A gentle doctrine; few practise it. Would you be 
 indulgent to me?" 
 
 "Gladys does not understand how you can want 
 indulgence," said John A^ernon. "The lord of Ladys- 
 rood seems to her to be higher and happier than 
 kings." 
 
 "When will you bring her to Ladysrood?" 
 
 "We never leave home." 
 
 "You must make an exception for me," said Guilde- 
 roy, as he saw how the child's face changed in a mo- 
 ment from eager expectation to disappointment. 
 
 "We are hermits," replied Vernon. "I have for- 
 gotten what the outer world is like, and Gladys has 
 never seen a glimpse of it. We count time by the 
 blossoming and the gathering of our rennets and king 
 pippins. There are more unpoetical ways of reckoning 
 its flight. I forgot; we have a sun-dial, but it stands 
 in the shade and is no use to us, like some people's 
 lives to their possessors. 
 
 "Please do not suggest discontent here," he added 
 in a low tone. "It is the curse of modern life. As
 
 GUILDEROY, 63 
 
 yet it has not passed this little wicket, and I shall 
 thank you not to raise the latch for it." 
 
 "Forgive me," said Guilderoy; "I spoke thought- 
 lessly. I should indeed regret a meeting which has 
 given me so much pleasure if I were the means of let- 
 ting a snake creep into your orchard grass." 
 
 He found in his host the most captivating of com- 
 panions. Although long self-exiled from the world, 
 Vernon had lost none of his interest in its changing 
 fortunes; a great scholar, he yet had no disdain for the 
 topics of the hour, and from his solitude under the 
 apple-boughs of his orchard had never ceased to follow 
 with keen eyes the movements and the portents of the 
 political world. He was pleased to find himself once 
 more in the company of a man of the world, and his 
 conversation fascinated and interested his guest in no 
 little degree; it had a flavour as rare and as pure as 
 the old wine which he had brought up from his cellar. 
 
 After dinner they sat awhile in the little garden 
 overhung with reddening leaves and full of autumnal 
 blossoms. The sun had come out and shone on the 
 warm, red brick-work of the cottage where the thick- 
 ness of the ivy parted. Guilderoy was unwilling to 
 take his departure; the scene was novel though simple, 
 and his newly-made acquaintances aroused his interest. 
 Moreover, John Vernon talked well, with a depth of 
 thought, an aptness of quotation, and a freshness of 
 opinion which had its charm, and would have had it, 
 even had his guest not had always before his eyes the 
 picture of Gladys seated a little way off on a beehive 
 chair, with the head of the lame dog leaning fondly 
 against her knee. With reluctance he left Christslea as
 
 64 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the clock in the church tower half a mile off tolled 
 four. 
 
 He was pleased, interested, and angered with him- 
 self tliat such a man should have been resident on his 
 own lands so long and wholly unknown to and unnoticed 
 by him. As he rode through the cold, dusky shadows 
 of the moors, fitfully lighted by a moon which played 
 at hide and seek with the clouds, he saw always before 
 him the child's face of Gladys Vernon, with its brilliant 
 resolute eyes, which grew so soft when she looked at 
 her father. 
 
 "Since I must marry, why not marry her?" he 
 thought with a complex impulse, made up half of 
 physical attraction and half of a higher admiration. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GuiLDEROY made a brief apology to his sister for 
 being so late, and sat down to dinner; throughout it he 
 was silent and abstracted. When the coffee had been 
 brought and the servants had withdrawn, he said ab- 
 ruptly, as he walked up and down the room: 
 
 "You say a woman is wanted in this house. Well, 
 I have seen one whom I shall marry." 
 
 "Good heavens!" cried Lady Sunbury, as she rose 
 from her chair in the intensity of her amazement. 
 
 "At least she is a child," he added. 
 
 "A child! I suppose you mean some jest. I am 
 so stupid that I cannot guess the point of it." 
 
 "No; I am not joking at all. I have seen a per-
 
 GUILDEROY. 65 
 
 fectly beautiful person whom I am disposed to marry. 
 I imagined that you would be pleased," replied Guilde- 
 roy, which showed that, despite his experience in wo- 
 men, he knew but little of their characters. 
 
 "Good heavens!" cried Lady Sunbury again. "Is 
 it a turf-cutter's daughter, or one of the gypsies?" 
 
 "No; it is neither. Do not alarm yourself. She is 
 the daughter of John Vernon, a very noble gentleman 
 who has been living here ten years without my know- 
 ing it." 
 
 "As you never take the trouble to visit your neigh- 
 bours " 
 
 "I shall visit one neighbour to-morrow and take 
 you with me." 
 
 "Good heavens!" said Lady Sunbury a third time. 
 "You actually speak as if you were serious!" 
 
 "I am quite serious." 
 
 He proceeded to tell her the story of the fox-cub 
 and the cabin. 
 
 She listened with astonishment in her eyes mingled 
 with a look of strong censure. She saw nothing but 
 absurdity in it. She was a courageous woman and a 
 humane one, but neither quality as evinced in the nar- 
 rative touched her. It seemed to her high-flown, 
 idiotic, altogether in bad taste. 
 
 "Girls who live with their fathers alone always run 
 so wild and become so queer," she said, when he had 
 ended his tale. It was the only remark which she 
 considered it called for from her. 
 
 Guilderoy laughed, with some sense of anger. 
 
 "What ill-natured things a woman always contrives 
 
 Guilderoy. I. 5
 
 66 GUILDEROY, 
 
 to say! I should have thought the fine courage of the 
 child would have pleased you." 
 
 "I suppose she is pretty?" she inquired stiffly and 
 with significance. 
 
 He laughed again. 
 
 "She is very handsome," he answered. "You will 
 see her to-morrow. We will go over to Christslea." 
 
 "How very impetuous you are! One would think 
 you were a boy of eighteen!" 
 
 "It is delightful to be stirred to impetuosity. It is 
 a relic of youth. I feel very young since five o'clock 
 this evening." 
 
 "It is really intolerable!" said Lady Sunbury; she 
 could not yet bring herself to believe that he was in 
 earnest. 
 
 "You must remember the story of Vernon of 
 Llanarth better than I, since you are older than I, 
 You were in the world at the time and I was a boy." 
 
 "I have no recollection," said his sister coldly, an- 
 noyed at the allusion to her increasing years. 
 
 "You will have, if you think a moment. He was 
 a very clever and popular man, a great scholar, and 
 rich; all the family are rich; and he gave up everything 
 he possessed, wholly, voluntarily, and with magnificent 
 magnanimity, to dower the widows and orphans of four 
 hundred men who were drowned by an underground 
 river bursting into a coal mine which he possessed in 
 South Wales. He considered that he had been to blame 
 in never visiting a property which was on a portion of 
 his lands, and that if he had given more personal at- 
 tention to it his engineers and superintendents would 
 have been more vigilant, and the catastrophe might not
 
 GUILDEROY. 67 
 
 have occurred, as the weakness of the side next the 
 river would have been known and provided for. The 
 mine itself was totally destroyed, of course — an immense 
 loss to him; and he gave up all the rest of his fortune 
 to provide for over a thousand helpless people. Every- 
 one called him a madman; but neither the world nor 
 his family changed his intentions. He disappeared from 
 society, and has maintained himself ever since, I be- 
 lieve, by writing for scientific and historical reviews and 
 other learned works. When I heard his name I re- 
 membered the generosity and quixotism of an action 
 which I very much admired in my boyhood." 
 
 "It was no more than his duty," remarked Lady 
 Sunbury, coldly, when his enthusiasm was spent. 
 
 "And how many of us do our duty?" said Guilderoy. 
 "And is it not always easy to find sophistries which will 
 relieve us of it? I do not believe either that it was 
 anything so cold as a sense of duty; it was a gentle- 
 man's instinct to sufier anything rather than let others 
 suffer through him." 
 
 The heritage of such fine and sensitive honour as 
 Vernon's seemed to Guilderoy the richest dower that 
 any young girl could bring with her to any race; and 
 he said so with some vehemence and reproach. 
 
 "You are always Athenian in knowing what is right," 
 said Lady Sunbury, dryly. "Certainly you would be 
 the last man on earth to do anything in any way 
 similar." 
 
 "I do not presume to pretend that I should. But 
 if there be one thing which I admire more than an- 
 other," said Guilderoy angrily, "it is men who sacrifice 
 themselves to what they consider the duties of property. 
 
 5''
 
 68 GUILDEROY. 
 
 John Vernon did it; Aubrey does it; I do not do it 
 because I have neither the force of character nor the 
 strength of belief which would move me to do it. But 
 I admire it; and when I saw John Vernon to-day, I saw 
 a hero." 
 
 "Because the hero has a good-looking daughter!" 
 
 "What a disagreeable person you can be, Hilda!" 
 
 "When I do not flatter you." 
 
 "No. I detest flattery; when you throw cold water 
 on any rare enthusiasm which may be fortunate enough 
 to revive in one's chilled soul." 
 
 "You are generally enthusiastic when you have seen 
 a new face which pleases you for the moment." 
 
 "Here it was courage which pleased me quite as 
 much as beauty." 
 
 "He has been here ten years, and the cottage is 
 rented at forty pounds," continued Guilderoy with anger 
 at himself. "He must have paid me actually four 
 hundred pounds! Good heavens! A man to whom I 
 should have been charmed and honoured to give the 
 best estate that I possess rent free!" 
 
 "Many things may happen on our properties that 
 we regret, if we never inquire into what is done on 
 them," said his sister coldly. 
 
 "Pray spare me a sermon; I had one yesterday 
 from Aubrey, and one from this child to-day. After 
 all, Mr. Vernon would certainly not consent to live rent 
 free however much I wished it; and had I been aware 
 he was there, perhaps he would not have stayed. He 
 will know no one, they say." 
 
 "All is for the best, no doubt," said Lady Sunbury 
 in a tone which strongly suggested the contrary. "If
 
 GUILDEROY. 69 
 
 he had known the county people like a reasonable 
 being, his daughter would not have been likely to in- 
 terest you by her adventures." 
 
 When the morning came she declined to go to 
 Christslea. 
 
 "Whatever follies he may commit now or hereafter 
 they shall not have my countenance," she said to her- 
 self in that spirit of which women of her character con- 
 sider the display to be due to their dignity and their 
 families. Guilderoy restrained a passionate inclination 
 to use the same language to her that her husband did, 
 and went over to Christslea alone. 
 
 Lady Sunbury remained at home, having done what 
 prudence and dignity required of her. Yet she had 
 an uneasy consciousness that more real prudence, if 
 less dignity, might have been shown in accompanying 
 her brother. 
 
 She might have prevented or mitigated some folly. 
 Anxiety and apprehension made her restless, and she 
 wandered in a desultory manner, wholly unlike her 
 usual energy and decision, to and fro through the great 
 house which had been her birthplace, from whose future 
 mistress, whosoever she might be, she would exact such 
 superhuman and innumerable virtues. 
 
 She could not believe, seriously, that Guilderoy 
 would make himself so utterly absurd as he had 
 threatened, and yet intimate knowledge of his character 
 had told her that on occasion he could be capable of 
 dangerous and incredible cojips de tete; a weakness in- 
 herited from the warm Gascon blood of his mother's 
 race. 
 
 Indolent, nonchalant, and easily swayed as he was
 
 yO GUILDEROY. 
 
 usually, he became at such moments both strong-willed 
 and deaf to all argument and persuasion. 
 
 "Any woman who has to pass her life with him will 
 need the wisdom of the serpent and the gentleness of 
 the dove," she thought, mournfully conscious that re- 
 markably few women ever possess either. 
 
 Lady Sunbury never perceived why it was that she 
 utterly failed herself to influence the men belonging to 
 her; but she had much perception into the character 
 of other women, and she saw clearly enough the causes 
 of their failures. 
 
 Meanwhile she passed the forenoon pacing up and 
 down the numerous galleries and salons of Ladysrood. 
 
 In the middle of the morning she sent for the land 
 steward, and interrogated him as to the occupants of 
 Christslea. 
 
 All that he told her only served to make her more 
 angry, because it made the quixotic folly of Guilderoy 
 assume a more possible shape. She heard that John 
 Vernon was of irreproachable character if of eccentric 
 habits, and that the causes of his poverty were of the 
 highest honour to him. 
 
 "There is a child, is there not — a daughter?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "There is. I have seen her occasionally. She 
 promises to be very handsome," replied the steward, 
 wondering whither these questions tended. 
 
 "But very odd, is she not?" 
 
 "Not more so than any young girl must be who is 
 educated by a recluse, and deprived of all the natural 
 amusements and companionships of her age and sex." 
 
 "I understand," said Lady Sunbury, with a shudder.
 
 GUILDEROY. 7 1 
 
 She could see the girl exactly as she was: a wild 
 creature without gloves, her brain filled very likely with 
 godless philosophies, and her hair never properly 
 brushed; handsome, no doubt, or Guilderoy would never 
 have looked at her or thought twice about her, but 
 untrained, impudent, and irreligious. 
 
 Guilderoy meanwhile was riding through the woods 
 and across the moorland to the modest residence of 
 John Vernon. 
 
 He was so possessed with one idea, one desire, that 
 the folly of his errand altogether failed to occur to 
 him; the possibility of its end being disappointment 
 and dismissal never passed through his mind. All his 
 life women had taught him and told him that the offer 
 of his hand would be a favour which could only be 
 met by the most ardent gratitude. It was not vanity 
 which moved him, but the sense that he had a great 
 gift to give, and one which no living woman would 
 reject. 
 
 As he rode his thoughts grew fervid, and his ima- 
 gination heated; he saw ever before him the face of 
 Gladys Vernon, and a thousand excited emotions rose 
 in him as he rode through the brilliant wind-moved 
 autumn air. 
 
 He was certainly about to commit an unspeakable 
 absurdity in offering his whole future to a child whom 
 he had seen but once the day before. But the ab- 
 surdity of his intentions did not strike him; he was 
 too enamoured of the poetry and romance of them, and 
 the opposition of his sister had stimulated him to a 
 promptness of action far from common to an indolent 
 and undecided temperament.
 
 72 GUILD EROY. 
 
 When he sent in his card at Christslea, he was at 
 once ushered into the back study, which John Vernon 
 used, a small room made dusky by the ivy which 
 shrouded the window, and with books lying five or six 
 deep on the floor, while crowded bookcases lined each 
 of the four walls. 
 
 "This is very kind to come so soon again to a 
 solitary," said Mr. Vernon with his pleasant smile. 
 
 Guilderoy pressed his hand and answered without 
 any preface whatever: 
 
 "It is you who will, I hope, be kind to me. My 
 dear sir, I come to beg from you the honour of your 
 daughter's hand in marriage." 
 
 "What! Good God, are you out of your mind?" 
 cried John Vernon: he fell backward a few paces and 
 stared at his visitor with the blank stupidity of a be- 
 wildered and incredulous amazement; he had always 
 heard that his neighbour of Ladysrood was capricious 
 and eccentric. Was he left now, he asked himself, in 
 the presence of a madman? 
 
 "It is not complimentary either to her or to me 
 that you should be so greatly astonished," said Guilderoy 
 with annoyance. "Allow me to repeat my words. I 
 have come over this morning to solicit the honour of 
 your daughter's hand. My position is known to you, 
 and on my character, though it might not satisfy pre- 
 cisians, you will not find any very serious stain. I 
 venture to think that my proposals may not be alto- 
 gether intolerable to you." 
 
 "It is not that," said John Vernon, still breathless. 
 "It is — it is — the child is a child — she is not of 
 marriageable years, she is a baby — and good Heavens!
 
 GUILDEROY. 7 3 
 
 you have only seen her for ten minutes yesterday. My 
 dear Lord Guilderoy, if this be not a joke; if it be not 
 part of some comedy, of some enigma to which I have 
 not the key " 
 
 "Can you suppose that I should insult you by jests 
 on such a subject? I was never more serious in my 
 life." 
 
 "Then I must gratefully and respectfully decline 
 the honour you propose to do myself and my daughter," 
 replied John Vernon with the tone and air of a person 
 who closes a subject which cannot be reopened. 
 
 "Why?" asked Guilderoy, coldly. 
 
 "Why?" — Vernon repeated the word in vague be- 
 wilderment. "Why? Why, I have a thousand reasons. 
 I have said, she is the merest child. She knows no- 
 thing of you; you know nothing of her. How can you 
 ask me why? My dear lord, it is a kind of insanity. 
 I may appear discourteous and ungrateful in declining 
 your overtures so abruptly, but it is in truth a question 
 which does not bear discussion." 
 
 "Every question bears discussion if it carries no in- 
 sult with it, and you cannot consider that my desires 
 insult you," replied Guilderoy, who controlled his temper 
 with effort. 
 
 "Insult — no. I am sure you do not mean it as 
 that," said Vernon, infinitely amazed, troubled, and 
 annoyed. "But the mere idea is intolerable, insane, 
 preposterous. You were kind to a child yesterday, and 
 this morning you wish to marry her. Good God! it is 
 only a few months ago that she was a baby playing 
 with a toy lamb. My dear Lord Guilderoy, if indeed 
 you are serious, this is midsummer madness. You have
 
 74 GUILDEROY. 
 
 eaten of the drug of Love in Idleness, and Titania and 
 her crew have played with you. Go home and laugh 
 at your freak to-morrow, and thank the Fates that I am 
 not a man to take you at your word and keep you to 
 it. Good day." 
 
 "I shall not go away until I have received from 
 you such answer as I wish," replied Guilderoy. The 
 unlooked-for opposition fanned his new desires into 
 double warmth. 
 
 "As a visitor you are most welcome to my house, 
 but it is the only welcome I can give to you," replied 
 Vernon. "I doubt my own senses when I think of the 
 things you have said, of the amazing errand on which 
 you have come here. I still feel as if it must be only 
 in jest that you are speaking, some jest of which I am 
 as yet too stupid to see the point." 
 
 "My dear sir," said Guilderoy impatiently, "you 
 think me very ill-bred if I could possibly presume to 
 jest on such a subject. I have never seen anyone mar- 
 riageable whom I admire so much as I admire your 
 daughter, and I told my sister last evening that I should 
 come here to solicit her hand in all seriousness." 
 
 "Her hand! She is a baby I tell you. A little 
 rustic. A mere country mouse, with not a penny to 
 her fortune." 
 
 "The daughter of Mr. Vernon, of Llanarth, has one 
 heritage at least which kings might envy," said 
 Guilderoy with his courtliest grace and an accent of 
 reverent sincerity. 
 
 "I thank you," said Vernon with some emotion. 
 
 He had never supposed that anyone remembered
 
 GUILDEROY. 75 
 
 an act which had ahvays seemed to him very simple 
 and ahvays absolutely enjoined by duty and honour. 
 
 "But there is nothing more for me to do," he 
 added, "than in all seriousness to reply that I must 
 with regret decline the honour of the alliance which 
 you propose to me." 
 
 The face of Guilderoy flushed with anger and 
 offence. 
 
 "I repeat that you cannot refuse to allege your 
 reasons, at least." 
 
 "Certainly not: they are simple and obvious. The 
 child is too young, and you are a stranger to us both." 
 
 "If these be your only reasons they are both defects 
 which time will cure, if you will allow me the privilege 
 of intimacy here." 
 
 John Vernon, vexed, perplexed, and uncertain how 
 to reply to so much persistency, drew lines with a paper- 
 knife on the blotting-paper before him and was silent. 
 He did not approve of what he had heard of the lord 
 of Ladysrood; the various stories of the country-side 
 depicted Guilderoy as strange, capricious, and negligent 
 of the duties of his station; but, on the other hand, he 
 was admired and esteemed in that great world which 
 John Vernon had once known so well, and no graver 
 sins than those of caprice and self-indulgence had ever 
 been attributed to him; he might have been a voluptuary, 
 but he had always been a man of honour. It was diffi- 
 cult to reject such a suitor, and yet he was wholly deter- 
 mined to reject him inexorably. 
 
 "Give him Gladys!" he thought; "why, he would 
 tire of her in three days ! " 
 
 "I know what you are thinking," said Guilderoy
 
 76 GUILDEROY. 
 
 abruptly. "You are thinking that I should treat her 
 ill. I should not; I do not treat women ill even when 
 they annoy and weary me. There is not a woman liv- 
 ing who could complain of my want of regard for her 
 even when she had lost all power to please me. On 
 your daughter I will make any settlement that you 
 please, and place it entirely out of my power to injure 
 her were I inclined " 
 
 "To injure her materially — yes, I do not fear that 
 you would ever do that. But there are so many things 
 that none can promise to do or not to do; we may 
 control our actions but we cannot control our feelings, 
 and we often make others unspeakably wretched through 
 no fault whatever of our own; against the wounds of 
 the affection no possible guarantee can be ever given; 
 the laws of marriage are constructed on the absurd 
 idea that it is possible to do so, and that is why mar- 
 riage is the almost universal failure that we see it is. 
 But you do not want a disquisition, you want an ansAver. 
 My dear lord, I can only repeat what I said before, 
 that I thank you for the compliment you pay me, that 
 I apologise to you if astonishment made me appear dis- 
 courteous, but that what you wish is wholly and for 
 ever impossible." 
 
 Guilderoy rose and bowed with a faint smile: 
 
 "Forever is a large word. You tempt me to de- 
 ceive and to defy you, and to endeavour to make what 
 I wish wished also by your daughter against your wish. 
 You refuse me; but you could not refuse her." 
 
 John Vernon looked up startled and impatient: 
 "You mean that you will make love to the child un- 
 known to me? It is possible. She is not a prisoner.
 
 GUILDEROY. 7 7 
 
 But I doubt very much if, with all your power over her 
 sex and your experience of them, you would be able to 
 persuade her to have any secret whatever from me." 
 
 "Why force me to try then?" said Guilderoy. "I 
 come to you in all openness and fairness. If you will 
 let me visit you on the footing of friendship, I will take 
 no advantage of it without your knowledge and con- 
 currence. But I shall hope, of course, in time to con- 
 vert you — and her — to my views." 
 
 John Vernon threw his paper-knife down with a 
 roughness rare in so gentle a person and walked to the 
 window. In a few moments he turned to his visitor: 
 "I suppose it must be as you wish," he said unwillingly. 
 "But give me your word that if I admit you here you 
 will take no advantage of it; that you will not see the 
 child out of my presence." 
 
 "I promise that," replied Guilderoy. And he was 
 himself astonished at the sudden intensity and warmth 
 which his own desires had obtained from the fanning 
 wind of opposition. 
 
 "I am perfectly certain that you will not keep in 
 the same inclinations," added Vernon. "It is wildly 
 improbable that you should do so, and I cannot permit 
 the mind of as young a girl as Gladys to be disturbed 
 by ideas of which she has no more thought at present 
 than any one of the red deer fawns on your moorlands. 
 I am sure you will understand that I should prefer that 
 you dismissed this strange fancy altogether from your 
 own mind, and accepted once and for all my rejection 
 of your proposals; but, if you will not do that, all I 
 can admit is that you should come here occasionally 
 as my landlord and neighbour without allowing the
 
 78 GUILDEROY. 
 
 child to have any suspicion of any ulterior motive in 
 your visits." 
 
 " Your stipulations are humiliating," said Guilderoy, 
 "but I suppose I must accept them." 
 
 He was amused despite his annoyance at the un- 
 willingness with which his proposals were received. 
 No one else in all the world, he thought, would have 
 failed to accept them with ardour and gratitude. John 
 Vernon's attitude moved him to respect and esteem. 
 Here was at least one man to whom the good things 
 and the great ones of the world were as dross. 
 
 He left Christslea a few moments later without 
 seeking to see Gladys that day.
 
 GUILDEROY. 7 Q 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 When he met Lady Sunbury in the small Queen 
 Anne drawing-room before dinner she was infinitely 
 too proud and too offended to ask him any question, 
 though inquisitiveness and anxiety were never so 
 strained well-nigh to bursting in the breast of woman. 
 Guilderoy, however, did not keep her very long in 
 suspense. 
 
 "You will be very glad for me to pass the winter 
 here instead of in Italy," he said, as he took his cup 
 of tea. "That is what I am going to do," 
 
 Lady Sunbury was not glad. Human nature is full 
 of contradictions. 
 
 "You will never pass the winter here!" she said, 
 with some violence. "Never. For you will never keep 
 in the same mood or the same mind for two weeks!" 
 
 "I shall keep in this," he answered. "And you 
 will oblige me very much if you will drive over to 
 Christslea to-morrow. John Vernon is quite a respect- 
 able person, though he has lost all his money; indeed, 
 more respectable perhaps than if he had multiplied it." 
 
 "And why should I call on Mr. Vernon?" said Lady 
 Sunbury, holding a feather screen between her and the 
 wood fire with an unamiable and ominous look upon 
 her high straight delicate features. 
 
 "Only because it is usual in the conventional state
 
 8o GUILDEROY. 
 
 of the world to do that sort of thing," said Guilderoy, 
 carelessly, "and I shall marry his daughter in February: 
 I told you last night that I should do so." 
 
 His sister was silent for a few moments. Her lips 
 turned pale with rage. 
 
 "And I do not even know her!" she said, in a suf- 
 focated voice. 
 
 "Really that is no one's fault but yours," said 
 Guilderoy. "I asked you to drive there this morning 
 and you refused. I do not know her very much my- 
 self." 
 
 "You must be mad!" 
 
 "So Mr. Vernon said, but I believe not; of course, 
 one can never be quite sure. There are insidious 
 lesions in the brain which do not declare themselves. 
 Many statesmen's actions which appear unaccountable 
 are really caused by unsuspected protognosis " 
 
 Lady Sunbury interrupted him passionately. 
 
 "Do you mean to tell me, with all this fooling, that 
 you are about to enter on the most serious act of your 
 life with less consideration than you would show in 
 buying a dog?" 
 
 "It is not so very serious," murmured Guilderoy. 
 "It used to be thought so in old-fashioned days, but 
 not now." 
 
 "Do you mean that you marry only to abandon 
 your wife in a week?" 
 
 "Mr. Vernon said three days. Nobody abandons 
 their wife nowadays, I think, except working-men who 
 empty the savings out of the tea-caddy and go off to 
 Australia." 
 
 "If Mr. Vernon, whatever else he be, is a man of
 
 GUILUEROY. 81 
 
 the slightest sense, he will forbid so abnormal, so un- 
 natural, so insensate a folly." 
 
 "Mr. Vernon has all the will in the world to forbid 
 it; but his power is not equal to his will." 
 
 "What! Does he feel no gratitude, no sense of 
 honour received, no consciousness of the immense 
 compliment you pay him?" 
 
 "You are exacting. You desire him at once to be 
 servile and furious. He was neither. He had an ad- 
 mirable manner for which I respect him, and a very 
 slight opinion of myself, with which I do not quarrel. 
 My dear Hilda, do not force me to quarrel with you. 
 It would be so much to be regretted. I abhor dissen- 
 sions, and if they are forced on me I do not very soon 
 forget them. If a man, well-born and well bred, has a 
 charming child, who is both lovely and innocent, he 
 would surely not be guilty of the intolerable vulgarity 
 of thinking her the inferior of any suitor who could 
 present himself. What I desire to do may be, as you 
 say, an insensate folly. Very possibly it is, and that I 
 shall tell you so one day, when you will have the only 
 mortal happiness which never palls — the pleasure of 
 being in the right. But at present leave me to my 
 illusions. You may be quite sure they will not last 
 long. You have never approved of my ways of life. 
 You probably never will approve of them, whether I 
 take the paths of virtue or the paths of vice." 
 
 Lady Sunbury sat silent, pale, and stern. She 
 would at all times with any other person pour out in 
 pitiless crescendo the most bitter and violent reproaches, 
 and bear off the triumph of the last word at any cost. 
 But with Guilderoy she was conscious that there were 
 
 Cuilderoy. /,
 
 82 GUILDEROY. 
 
 limits which she could not pass and retain his affection; 
 that a quarrel, if forced upon him, would have no re- 
 Conciliation possible summoned in its train. The sense 
 of that certainty restrained her bitterest words, for in 
 her own manner she loved him almost more than she 
 loved the sons that she had borne. 
 
 "Of course it is all a jest," she said, with much 
 self-control, as she rose and moved away; but her lips 
 quivered with anger, and her eyes were dark with it. 
 
 "Not in the least a jest," replied Guilderoy, but he 
 said it carelessly, and did not pursue the theme, which 
 was mentioned no more between them that evening. 
 
 In the morning Lady Sunbury received her letters 
 in her own room; there was nothing of the very smallest 
 importance in them. They consisted of circulars, peti- 
 tions, political gossip, with a little note from one of her 
 sons at Eton asking for fifty pounds; but they sufficed 
 her as an excuse, and she sent word to her brother 
 that she was extremely sorry, but news had reached 
 her that morning which would oblige her to go home 
 at once, taking London on her way. 
 
 "I am extremely sorry too," Guilderoy wrote on a 
 slip of paper. "But you know I always wish you to 
 please yourself." 
 
 And she went at noonday. 
 
 "I wonder you have not more curiosity," he said 
 with a smile, as he bade her farewell on the steps of 
 the terrace. 
 
 She deigned to give no reply. But she had not 
 gone many miles upon her homeward way before she 
 became conscious of how utterly her usually ever-pre- 
 sent wisdom of judgment had played her false at this
 
 GUILDEROY. 83 
 
 moment. If pride had not forbade it, she would gladly 
 have returned. 
 
 As the train swept round a bend on the rocks she 
 saw in the distance the grey spires and towers of 
 Ladysrood rising from their reddening forests and purple 
 moorlands, with the soft sunlit mist of the September 
 morning shrouding the hills at their back. Little given 
 to such emotions as she was, Lady Sunbury saw them 
 through another mist, which was of tears, 
 
 "There is one consolation, however," she thought; 
 "even if there were anything serious in what he said, 
 one week of wet November weather will drive tliis 
 fancy from his thoughts and see him in Paris going 
 southward. He will no more endure an English winter 
 than the nightingales," 
 
 And yet she regretted more and more that she had 
 left Ladysrood with such precipitancy as the train flew 
 on farther and farther over the breezy downs and 
 wooded wolds of Somerset and Wilts. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The days which succeeded the departure of his 
 sister were the quietest which Guilderoy had ever 
 passed in the whole course of his life. He had too 
 effectually slighted and rejected the society of his county 
 for anyone of his neighbours to venture to intrude on 
 him. He was disinclined to invite any guest male or 
 female: the evenings found him sitting alone at dinner 
 and reading alone in his library afterwards; twice or 
 
 6*
 
 $4 GUILDEROY. 
 
 thrice a week he rode over to Christslea. He was 
 astonished himself at the attraction the place had for 
 him, at the force with which this caprice being op- 
 posed had now become the one present object of his 
 life. He had given his word to John Vernon not to 
 attempt to speak to the child save in his presence, and 
 he kept his word; but the restriction annoyed him, and 
 by its annoyance stimulated the fancy which had en- 
 tered into him until it became something kindred to 
 passion. 
 
 Gladys Vernon captivated his imagination; his ideal 
 had always turned towards some mind wholly untainted 
 by the world; some character fresh and candid and 
 untouched by conventionality. He had created in ima- 
 gination a thousand qualities from women which he had 
 never found in them; he had wanted at once passion 
 and purity, high spirit and submission, romance and 
 ignorance of all the emotions which make up romance; 
 he had desired innumerable utterly opposed and con- 
 tradictory instincts and characteristics. Only in this 
 child he found, or at the least he fancied that he found, 
 them united. Her courage, her indifference and her 
 physical beauty were great, and the unstudied indiffer- 
 ence and frank repose of her habitual manner attracted 
 his taste and stimulated his vanity. 
 
 Her eyes were as unclouded, her cheeks as cool, 
 her candour and her serenity as undisturbed, as when 
 he first crossed the moorland with her; to move her 
 from this repose became to him a matter of intense mo- 
 ment and interest: a pleasure which he could not deny 
 himself. 
 
 Vernon was very proud. He felt as bitterly as
 
 GUILDEROY. 85 
 
 though it were some merited indignity the certainty of 
 all that those who had once known him would say of 
 the marriage of his daughter to such a man as Guilde- 
 roy. The world always attributes bad motives, and to 
 the world it would naturally appear that he had chosen 
 his residence at Christslea with the ulterior view of 
 gaining his landlord's title for his only and portionless 
 child. 
 
 For a thousand intensely personal reasons his pain 
 and irritation at Guilderoy's proposals were most sin- 
 cere, and even for his child's own sake he would have 
 infinitely preferred that her path in life should lie in 
 those quieter and more obscure ways in which he 
 honestly believed the most content and the least tempta- 
 tion to lie for any woman. But opposition and warn- 
 ing only increased the desires and determination of a 
 character which was used to immediate attainment of 
 all wishes with little consideration of who or what 
 might pay for them. 
 
 All the water which Vernon strove to throw on the 
 fires of this unreasonable caprice only served to in- 
 crease them. From being slightly enamoured Gladys' 
 suitor became ardently in love. He never once saw 
 her out of her father's presence, and John Vernon would 
 permit him to offer her no present or homage of any 
 kind. 
 
 "I have told you," he said to Guilderoy, "more 
 than once that you will not keep in the same mind 
 over the turn of the year, and I will not consent to 
 your sowing the seeds of ever so slight a regret in the 
 heart of the child. Youth is short enough, you know, 
 without its being cut prematurely in two by the knife
 
 86 GUILDEROY. 
 
 of disillusion. She might care nothing at all for you, 
 but on the other hand she might care much. She has 
 no idea of what the emotions of life are, and she shall 
 not make their acquaintance first through pain. You 
 are one of those who love and ride away; you can 
 ride away as soon as you please, but love here you 
 shall not make." 
 
 The doubt of his stability and sincerity so often 
 expressed stung Guilderoy into becoming more stable 
 and more sincere than he had ever been in his life. It 
 was not the result John Vernon either contemplated or 
 desired, although it was one for which the waywardness 
 of human nature might have prepared him. But he 
 had a little forgotten what human nature was like, liv- 
 ing in his hermitage under the orchard boughs. He 
 had lived so entirely with the great spirits of the dead 
 that poor modern humanity, so fluctuating, so fitful, so 
 effeminate and so little reasonable, scarcely commanded 
 his sympathies or his understanding. Guilderoy seemed 
 to him a man unecjual to the great position and re- 
 sponsibilities to which he had been called by fate. He 
 honestly disliked the notion of giving over to him the 
 future and the happiness of his young daughter. "He 
 would not treat her ill; no, certainly not; nor with any 
 roughness or cruelty," he mused; "but there are so 
 many other ways of making a woman's heart ache, and 
 the child herself has her faults. She is not easy to 
 control or to understand, and then she is so terribly 
 young. Ten years hence she will be only at the age 
 when most women begin their life." 
 
 Thus he received his landlord and neighbour with 
 little cordiality, though he could not resist on his own
 
 GUILDEROY. 87 
 
 part a certain sympathy with which Guilderoy inspired 
 him personally. "If I were a woman I should be in 
 love with him," he thought; "but not being a woman 
 I see him as he is, and he has all the defects of his 
 generation. He mistakes the senses for the passions, 
 culture for wisdom, pessimism for philosophy, and 
 languor for superiority to ambition. It is the stuff of 
 which patricians are always made in a decadence. It 
 is interesting but it is powerless. Demos reigns over 
 it, and it avenges itself with an epigram instead of 
 drawing a sword." 
 
 "You think ill of me," said Guilderoy to him once 
 at Christslea. 
 
 "No," said John Vernon; "that is far too strong an 
 expression. You are what you cannot help being — you 
 are the issue of a time which does not produce great 
 men." 
 
 "I have certainly no pretension to be great," said 
 Guilderoy, not flattered. 
 
 "That is what I complain of. You ought to have 
 more than the pretension — you should have the inner 
 sense, the intimate persuasion that you are bound to be 
 so. Why does aristocracy everywhere recede before the 
 mob? Because aristocracy has lost faith in itself. In 
 England the Whig nobles began the surrender. They 
 have been unable to stop half-way. They have been 
 compelled to put the Phrygian Cap on their heads." 
 
 "I see no difference between Whigs and Tories or 
 between Tories and Radicals," said Guilderoy. "They 
 both and all spend their lives in buttering parsnips and 
 offering them on their knees to the mob. I will not
 
 88 OUILDEROY. 
 
 prepare such a platter, and therefore I have never en- 
 tered public life." 
 
 "Public life in England is a very poor thing, that I 
 grant," said Vernon; "but it used to be a very grand 
 thing, and if its nobility had been true to itself it 
 might perhaps have been so still. Democracy is unin- 
 teresting, unintelligent, untrustworthy, illogical. The 
 doctrine of the supremacy of mere numbers can never 
 be either admirable or stable. The crowd is like the 
 mud and sand of a foul sea shore — impotent to hold, 
 powerful only to stifle. I quite agree with you, I wholly 
 agree with you, that when a great Nobility took off its 
 hat to the mud and the sand, and said 'We are your 
 servants,' it deserved to be kicked as it is being kicked 
 by its master." 
 
 "Why blame me for not doing it, then?" 
 
 "I am not aware that I ever did blame you. I 
 quite admit that where public life has become such a 
 parody of government that the Premier must scream 
 like a Dulcamara, or every Minister make a tour of the 
 provinces like a negro minstrel, it has come to such a 
 pass that the scholar must scorn, and the gentleman 
 must shun, and the proud men of every class refuse it. 
 But I say that a time Avhich makes its statesmen mounte- 
 banks, and would send a Pitt and a Burke, if it had 
 them, to be only the mouthpieces of a caucus, is a 
 time which can produce nothing great; and in which 
 its nobles, if they are too proud to be delegates, be- 
 come inevitably what you are." 
 
 "And what is that?" 
 
 "A man perfectly accomplished and perfectly use-
 
 GUILDEROY. 8g 
 
 less, to whom property is a burden and the world a 
 dull comedy." 
 
 Guilderoy's face flushed slightly. 
 
 "I do not dispute the justice of your verdict. My 
 sister, I^ady Sunbury, is always telling me the same 
 things; so is my cousin Aubrey. But what would you 
 have me do? Public life, you yourself admit, justifies 
 my dislike of it. I have no genius with which to make 
 myself remarkable. My property is left to those who 
 have much more talent for managing it than I have. 
 What do you call being useful? Breeding prize-cattle? 
 opening town-halls? lecturing on poetry to the most 
 unpoetical race on earth? sending youths to the univer- 
 sity who will live to regret that they were ever taken 
 from the plough? giving money to build palaces of 
 pleasure and art for the most ludicrous and coarsest 
 democracy that ever made pleasure loathsome and art 
 grotesque, who would play Aunt Sally with the Venus 
 of Milo, and grin in horseplay at the Laocoon? or yield- 
 ing up good land out of fear to be cut up into chess- 
 boards of vegetables to appease the labouring man, in 
 the illogical belief that people hungering for all I have 
 will be contented because out of cowardice I offer them 
 a cabbage? Which of these things do you think is use- 
 ful? I beg leave to doubt that any of them would be. 
 Everything which men of my order do of this kind is 
 done out of fear. It is a motive by which I will not 
 be inspired. They are like children trying to make a 
 dyke against a flood with wooden spades. The flood 
 is coming on us, and we shall not escape it, but we 
 may at least await it with dignity. To consent to fell 
 your ancestral oaks that Hodge may plant a cabbage
 
 QO CUILDEROY. 
 
 the more in its place is not dignified, and it will do 
 nothing against the deluge." 
 
 "You should say that to the country," reflected John 
 Vernon, as Guilderoy continued with some warmth: 
 
 "The Greeks only let their helots loose once a year; 
 we have given ours every day of the year, whether feast 
 or fasting. Never before was there such abject ab- 
 dication of birth, breeding, property, and learning be- 
 fore ignorance and greed, and the sheer brute force of 
 numbers. I do not think that any human force can 
 arrest the ugly rush down hill of democracy wlien once 
 it has begun, but I tliink that we may abstain from de- 
 grading ourselves by swearing that we consider it a 
 heavenward flight. Democracy is envy — envy of every 
 kind of distinguished excellence. There is nothing 
 noble, stimulating, or heavenwardly about it; men only 
 pretend that there is, to obtain a little ephemeral and 
 fictitious popularity. I do not supi)osc I am what is 
 called a Tory, for I care nothing at all about the House 
 of Hanover or the Church of England, but I do care 
 about the supremacy of the fittest, and I do not re- 
 cognise the fittest in the howling mob of a manufac- 
 turing city, or the crowds of hinds gathered at a 
 hiring." 
 
 "J am altogether with you," said John Vernon, 
 "but I should like you to show them that you are of 
 the fittest. Living in Italy, making love to innumer- 
 able women, and buying statues and pictures, do not 
 prove it." 
 
 "If I distressed myself ever so I should not affect 
 the result," said Guilderoy. "All the public functions 
 of English life are become grotesque. Parliamentary
 
 GUTLDEROY. Q I 
 
 government compels every statesman to be nothing but 
 a delegate. There is no real leadership possible. Even 
 the great Cecil is compelled to bawl to mass-meetings. 
 Public speaking has extinguished statesmanship. Can 
 you imagine a Richelieu or a Warwick, a Sully or a Halifax, 
 consenting to scream out the explanation of his projects 
 and his motives to a mob? Would the solitary of Var- 
 zin rule Europe as he does if he had to solicit the 
 applause of Bremen porters, and describe his designs 
 to Liibeck clothsellers? What nation in the mass could 
 ever be capable of comprehending the delicacy, the in- 
 tuition, and the prophetic vision which alone make up 
 great statecraft? What mob could ever be able to 
 measure the unseen forces of life, the science of history, 
 the powers which govern men? None; and democracy, 
 instead of being an era of peace, will be an eternity of 
 little peddling wars, because nothing is so pi-oductive 
 of war as ignorance, and then each little war will be 
 hurried up and ended in a disgraceful and costly 
 peace, because nothing is so soon frightened as a crowd, 
 and no one is so willing to spend as a mob which pays 
 no taxes." 
 
 "Quite true," said Vernon. "But I wish you would 
 say this in the Lords, and not only in this garden."
 
 92 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Vernon had been very unwilling to visit Ladys- 
 rood. He had refused continual invitations and entrea- 
 ties from its owner. But at the last his own wishes 
 were overborne by the wishfulness of his daughter to 
 see the place which had so long filled so large a place 
 in her childlike imagination. He could not resist the 
 mute entreaty of her eyes, longing and expressive as a 
 dog's, and at last, in the ruddy autumn weather, he 
 consented to be driven over the moors and through its 
 forest to the great lime-tree avenues which led to the 
 front entrance of the house. 
 
 The light sparkled over the sculptured pinnacles, 
 the high metal roofs, and the lofty towers of the com- 
 posite but noble pile, and the whole residence wore an 
 air of welcome and gaiety as they entered it. 
 
 Vernon sighed impatiently, as he stood in the great 
 central quadrangle. Could not the master of this palace 
 find some suitable mate in all the nobilities of Europe, 
 that he must needs come and take a lonely man's one 
 ewe-lamb? His was not a selfish nature, but his heart 
 hardened within him at what seemed to him the wanton 
 waywardness of Guilderoy's caprice. 
 
 It was a brilliant day, though cold, and the red- 
 dened woods were glowing in a sun less pale than 
 usual in an English autumn. The great house had
 
 GUILDEROY. g^ 
 
 the sunshine sparkhng on all its many casements, and 
 on its pinnacles, and crockets, and spires, and on 
 the folds of the flag drooping above the central tower. 
 The gardens were still gay with dahlias, and fuchsias, 
 and tea-roses, and the fountains were all playing, while 
 the peacocks drew their plumes over the ten^ace pave- 
 ment. All that the place held, from its armoury to its 
 hot-houses, from its State apartments where Tudor and 
 Stuart sovereigns had slept, to its secret hiding cham- 
 bers in the thickness of its walls, were all open to the 
 sunlight and to Gladys Vernon. 
 
 She went through them enchanted and reverent, as 
 though she turned the pages of some illuminated volume 
 of Froissart or the Sire de Joinville. It was the first 
 historic house which she had ever seen. 
 
 "It is a very noble home," said John Vernon. 
 "Really you ought never to be wearied of it." 
 
 Guilderoy did not reply. 
 
 He was conscious that he did weary of it, and he 
 regretted it. 
 
 "It is so bad a climate," he said after a pause. 
 "Rain is depressing despite oneself; if the house were 
 in Touraine or in Tuscany it would be perfect." 
 
 "Our fathers did not mind climate. I do not know 
 why we are so sensitive to it," said Vernon. "I am 
 not sure whether it shows emasculation or increased 
 sympathy with nature." 
 
 "Both, perhaps," answered Guilderoy. "And then, 
 probably, their England was in no way so bad as ours. 
 The centre of it was not one vast furnace as it is now. 
 You have only to go to Venice to see how rapidly 
 smoke changes atmosphere."
 
 94 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "Well, you have no furnaces within a hundred miles. 
 Be thankful," said John Vernon. 
 
 Meanwhile his young daughter was gazing about 
 her, with her violet eyes wide open in eager interest 
 and brilliant with pleasure. The old house fascinated 
 her. Though she had seen nothing but the sea and the 
 orchards by Christslea, she had a passionate love of all 
 beautiful and ancient things. Of art she knew nothing 
 by sight, and had only heard of it through books and 
 her father's conversation, but she had the instinctive 
 and unerring sense of its beauties and excellencies 
 which is born in some temperaments. 
 
 Ladysrood was a treasure house of art; every 
 generation which had passed away there had left some- 
 thing to increase the glories of its heirlooms; and the 
 present lord himself had spent half a million of money 
 in adding to its sculptures, and bronzes, and pictures. 
 It was one of those palaces of the arts which have so 
 long honoured England, hidden modestly away under 
 her woods and in the folds of her low hills; and which 
 are now in so many places being emptied and defiled, 
 that the sound of the auctioneer's hammer may ring 
 in unison with the death-knell of great races and of 
 national honour. 
 
 The child looked suited to the house; she wore a 
 plain grey frock with a pale blue sash, and a wide- 
 brimmed grey felt hat, and she might have sat to 
 Romney or Sir Joshua. She had put in the bosom of 
 her frock some roses which Guilderoy had given her; 
 her face, alternately serious and pensive, and gay and 
 animated, was as lovely as any face in the marbles or 
 the canvasses of his galleries. She was only a child,
 
 GUILDEROY. 95 
 
 but he thought that in the mere girl, fresh with the 
 dews and the breezes of the country, it was easy to 
 discern the great lady, the patrician beauty, of the 
 future. She was now like a crayon sketch of Watts' or 
 Leighton's, but a few years would make her a portrait 
 in court dress by Carolus-Durant. 
 
 She was entirely a child; the solitude of her life 
 and its rural pleasures and pursuits had kept her in- 
 finitely younger in many things than children reared in 
 the world can ever be, whilst on the other hand the 
 conversation and companionship of her father had made 
 her mind graver and more thoughtful than her years, 
 John Vernon had liked that simplicity and rusticity and 
 had always forborne from causing any change in them. 
 He abhorred the new theories of education for women, 
 and he had preferred to see his child care for roses, 
 for birds, for the sea and the moors, for all outdoor 
 things and outdoor movements, than to see her dissect 
 a rabbit or hear her discuss protogenesis. He had 
 always thought of her as a mere baby; he had never 
 been disturbed about her future or her right to see 
 something of that world to which she by birth belonged. 
 "It will always be time when she is grown up," he had 
 always reflected; and that time had always seemed to 
 him so far off that there could be no immediate need 
 to think of it. 
 
 The habit of being always treated by him as a 
 child had kept her perfectly childlike, while on the 
 other hand the deference with which she was treated 
 by the few rustics and fisher-people who made up her 
 little world had developed in her the habits of com- 
 mand and of decision. The opposing influences sur-
 
 96 GUILDEHOY. 
 
 rounding her had made her as little fitted for actual 
 life as Tennyson's Princess or Coleridge's Christabel; 
 but it had made her courageous and candid in an 
 unusual degree; it had left her an infantine sweetness 
 and innocence united to a great daring and seriousness; 
 it had rendered her indeed so entirely unlike all other 
 girls or women that Guilderoy was not merely yielding 
 to a romantic exaggeration Avhen he thought he saw in 
 her an embodiment of Shakespeare's heroines, with the 
 freshness and the frankness, the simplicity and the 
 strength of a more unsophisticated and heroic time than 
 her own. 
 
 "How charming is a young creature who has seen 
 nothing, and is ready to understand everything in- 
 stinctively," he said to her father when she had lingered 
 behind them to look at a scene which had especially 
 charmed her fancy. 
 
 Vernon smiled a little dubiously. 
 
 "You think so now because you happen to be in 
 the mood to appreciate it, but in a little while you 
 would find it monotonous, insipid, and uncultured. 
 You would grow very tired of a mind which needed to 
 have everything explained to it, and you would sigh 
 for somebody who could catch your allusions flying." 
 
 "You speak of your daughter as though she were 
 a dairymaid," Guilderoy said with indignation. 
 
 John Vernon laughed. 
 
 "Oh no; I appreciate her, perhaps more thoroughly 
 than you do. I even grant that she is a charming- 
 child in many ways, and the kind of ignorance she has 
 pleases me; if it had not done so I would have taken 
 steps to change it. But if you ask me whether I con-
 
 GUILUEROV. 97 
 
 sider her a companion for a man of the world who 
 hves in the world, I must say I do not. She would 
 grow to his height in time no doubt, but he would 
 have got fatigued of waiting for her long before she 
 had reached there." 
 
 "You are very obstinate." 
 
 "Nay, I am not more obstinate than you, and I 
 have more reason to be so, for I have more at stake." 
 
 "You will persist in regarding all I feel as a 
 caprice." 
 
 "It is a caprice," said Vernon with some impatience 
 as his young daughter came up to them. 
 
 She had been enchanted with a little picture, a 
 David Cox, which chanced to represent the creek below 
 Christslea with its apple orchards and its red sandstone 
 cliffs, and this sudden finding and recognising of a 
 piece of her own home landscape had seemed to her 
 a miracle which she could in no way forget. Her en- 
 thusiasm amused her father, and touched and charmed 
 her host. 
 
 "It would make the old painter happy in his grave 
 if he could hear you," said Guilderoy. "David Cox 
 loved England as you do. Most of his green lanes, 
 and gorse-covered commons, and moss-grown watermills 
 are swept away by the curse of modernity, but that 
 little creek of Christslea is not changed, I think, by so 
 much as a wind-blown tree, the less or the more; even 
 the boat he has drawn on the sand looks like an old 
 red boat which is used to fish with, there to-day. The 
 man is dead, and the boat is there." 
 
 "It is wonderful," said Gladys in a tone of awe. 
 "It is not six inches long this little picture, and yet 
 
 Guilderoy, I, 7
 
 9 8 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the whole creek is there, and one sees miles, miles, 
 miles, out over the open sea, just as one does when 
 one stands on the sands." 
 
 "That is Art the Magician," said Guilderoy. "We 
 are so used to the sorcery that we forget the wonder of 
 it. We want fresh eyes like yours to see it for us." 
 
 "You will surely let me give her that little water 
 colour?" he asked of Vernon when she was again a few 
 yards away from them. 
 
 "No, by no means," said the other almost rudely; 
 the persistency of Guilderoy annoyed and irritated him; 
 he was provoked that a man who had the whole world 
 of women to choose from, must needs take a fancy to a 
 country child who was as simple and untrained as a 
 plant of sea lavender. 
 
 Luncheon was served in the small dining-room be- 
 longing to the Queen Anne suite of apartments, and 
 when it was over John Vernon asked leave to return to 
 the library, through which he had only passed hastily, 
 and which was celebrated for its collection of State 
 papers of the Tudor time, made by a learned earl in 
 one of the previous centuries. 
 
 It was a noble room, though somewhat dark. It be- 
 longed to the oldest part of the house, and had deep 
 embrasured windows, and walls and ceiling of carved 
 oak. The catalogue of the books and manuscripts was 
 a work of learning and care, as famous to bibliophiles 
 as the collection itself. John Vernon was soon absorbed 
 in its pages. It was a large folio lying open on a 
 brass lectern. Guilderoy took advantage of his pre- 
 occupation to lead the girl to the other end of the 
 room, where there was a beautifully illuminated Horee
 
 GUILD EROY. QQ 
 
 of the fifteenth century under lock and key in a glass- 
 case. While he turned the leaves over and explained to 
 her the miniatures and allegorical borders he looked at 
 her with a lover's eyes. She had taken off her hat, 
 and the rebellious waves and curls of her hair shone 
 in the pale light from one of the windows. Her eyes 
 looked at him with the single-minded regard of a child 
 of five years old. Her lips were parted as she listened, 
 and the fairness of her throat looked like a lily beside 
 the grey wool of her frock. 
 
 "After all," he thought as he gazed down on her, 
 "there is nothing so bewitching as the morning of life; 
 and old Herrick is right — 
 
 Gather your roses while ye may, 
 Old Time is still a-flying! 
 
 With scant regard for the priceless Horse he had 
 taken it from its double case and carried it into the 
 embrasure of one of the windows, and he sat beside 
 her, while the missal lay on her lap. 
 
 One of the miniatures was the marriage of St. 
 Catherine with the child Jesus. Lilies and roses formed 
 the border, and doves nested in twisted olive boughs 
 above. 
 
 "That is very beautiful!" said Gladys; "and the 
 doves are just like my doves at home." 
 
 "There is a dove which rests in the hearts of all of 
 us some time or other," he answered. "Its name is 
 love. Have you ever thought whether you would give 
 it welcome?" 
 
 She looked at him in perplexity. 
 
 7*
 
 100 GUILDEROV. 
 
 "No," she said, slowly. "At least, I am not sure. 
 I love my father. Is that what you mean?" 
 
 "That is not at all what I mean," said Guilderoy 
 with a smile as he glided on to one knee before her, 
 and held the missal on her lap. He was in no haste 
 to dispel this unconsciousness, it pleased him. It was 
 so wholly simple and sincere. Any counterfeit of it 
 would have been odious and contemptible, but the 
 reality was lovely, grave and frank and sweet; as natural 
 as the innocence of the dove. 
 
 "Tell me more stories," she said, turning a page 
 of the Book of Hours. 
 
 His attitude did not trouble her; she thought he 
 kneeled there to hold the heavy missal better. 
 
 Guilderoy did not reply; his eyes were dwelling on 
 the youthful face above him, and he felt a passionate 
 desire to cover it with kisses and to change the cool, 
 faint colour of its lips and cheeks. He cast a rapid 
 glance to where John Vernon at the other end of the 
 room stood, with his back to them, bending over the 
 lectern. The sun of the autumnal afternoon came 
 through the leaded panes behind her, and shone about 
 her head, giving it a shining nimbus and changing the 
 grey of her fawn to silver. Her face was in shadow, 
 and her dropped eyelids as she looked dow^n on the 
 book showed the deep dark line of the lashes, and gave 
 her the grave and religious loveliness of some young 
 saint. 
 
 "Would you love me a little?" he asked, leaning 
 nearer, while his voice had the persuasive appeal in it 
 which no woman to whom it had ever been addressed 
 had ever resisted.
 
 GUILDEROY. I O I 
 
 She was a little startled. Her eyes left the study 
 of the HorjE and looked with bewilderment at him. 
 
 "I do not know," she stammered, while, without 
 her knowing why, her cheeks grew hot; "I do not know. 
 What do you mean? Why should I?" 
 
 "Because I love you," he answered, with an infinite 
 caress in the words, which are so old and yet are ever 
 so new. "Will you love me?" he asked her 3 "and live 
 with me here?" 
 
 She looked at him with serious and doubtful eyes. 
 
 "Live here — at Ladysrood?" she asked. 
 
 "Well, yes; a few months out of the year — not more. 
 I will be honest with you. But could you be happy 
 with me, do you think?" 
 
 "I should like the house," she said with hesitation, 
 but with unflattering honesty. 
 
 "Would you not like me also?" said Guilderoy. 
 His words were light, but his eyes were eloquent, and 
 startled the child's calm soul. Quite suddenly, and for 
 the first time in her life, a blush like the rose of dawn 
 spread over her face and throat. She could not have 
 told why, nor said what she felt. 
 
 "I do not know," she stammered, and her eyelids 
 fell. 
 
 "I will teach you to know," murmured Guilderoy, 
 and he drew her gently towards him, and kissed her.
 
 102 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Five minutes later John Vernon closed the cata- 
 logue, and turned and saw them. 
 
 "Lord Guilderoy, I had your word," he said with 
 great anger. "Could I suppose that you would betray 
 me in such a manner as this? It is wholly unworthy 
 of you — and in your own house also! For shame!" 
 
 Guilderoy's face flushed a little. 
 
 "You are very severe. Can you make no excuse 
 for temptation? I quite admit that I have broken my 
 word in the spirit, although not in the letter — since 
 you were present. Is it worth while to make a quarrel 
 of what cannot be unsaid now? Ask your daughter." 
 
 The child stood looking from one to the other with 
 some timidity. She did not wholly understand even 
 now what it was which made her the subject of dissen- 
 sion. She was bewildered; afraid, and yet happy. The 
 dark library seemed to her full of golden light. 
 
 "Gladys, is it possible that you wish to leave me — 
 and for a stranger!" said her father, with pain and re- 
 proach in his voice and his heart. 
 
 She hung her head, and her face burned with 
 changing blushes. 
 
 "It is not very far away," she murmured almost in- 
 audibly. 
 
 John Vernon understood that she was lost to him, 
 and that to strive against fate any longer was useless.
 
 GUILDEROV. 1 03 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 "I SWEAR that I will make your daughter happy, if 
 human means can command happiness," said Guilderoy 
 a few days later when they were alone. 
 
 "For six months perhaps," said Vernon with im- 
 patience. 
 
 "Why do you doubt me so?" said Guilderoy, 
 offended and pained. 
 
 "I do not doubt you in especial. You are possibly 
 gentler and kinder than most men. But you are mortal, 
 and you cannot prevent the divergence of character, 
 the satiety of habit, the destruction of illusions, the 
 growth of new passions — all that is inevitable in 
 human nature, and in utter defiance of which marriage, 
 the supreme idiotcy of social laws, has been made 
 eternal ! " 
 
 "You are not encouraging." 
 
 "I desire so little to encourage," said John Vernon 
 with some violence, "that if you will take back this 
 evening the promise you have given my child this after- 
 noon, far from blaming or reproaching you, I shall 
 thank you. She does not care for you. You flatter 
 and dazzle her, and she is in love with your house, 
 but she would forget you in a week if you withdrew 
 your word. Withdraw it; both she and you will be 
 spared much sorrow." 
 
 "Your prophecies are painful to me," said Guilde- 
 roy; "but I will risk their realisation, I think she
 
 104 GUILDER OY. 
 
 loves me already as far as a child of her years can 
 understand love. She would be less innocent than she 
 is if she loved me more. I have had enough of passion 
 — too much of it. I desire repose." 
 
 "And in six month's time you will say, *I am tired 
 of repose; give me passion.'" 
 
 "And do you think so lovely a creature incapable 
 of inspiring it?" 
 
 "I think she will be incapable of inspiring it in you 
 because she will be your wife," replied John Vernon. 
 
 His heart was heavy and his forebodings were 
 founded on his knowledge of mankind. He was well 
 aware that his dislike to such a marriage for his child 
 was ingratitude to fate, and would have seemed to most 
 men a kind of madness. He was well aware that the 
 future of his young daughter had been often a subject 
 of disquietude and anxiety to him, and that, in a 
 worldly sense, no destiny more brilliant than this now 
 offered could be desired for her. 
 
 But he despised worldly advantages. He had 
 learned to know that happiness comes from within, not 
 without. He considered that the contentment which 
 she had learned with himself to feel amongst simple 
 things and homely joys was worth more than the pomps 
 and vanities of a great position. He did justice to the 
 generosity and gentleness of Guilderoy's temperament, 
 but he did not believe in its stability or in its loyalty; 
 nay, he believed in no man's, because he knew that 
 the affections, like the senses, are beyond our own 
 control. He saw a thousand reasons why this union 
 should become a source of ultimate regret and un- 
 happiness to both of them. He saw few probabilities
 
 GUILDEROY. I05 
 
 that it would end otherwise than in estrangement and 
 disappointment to both of them. 
 
 "The child is wholly unfit for your position," he 
 said angrily. "She knows the names and qualities of 
 all the apples in England, and she knows something of 
 the history of England from first sources; but she knows 
 next to nothing more, and no one wants to hear of 
 pippins and russets or of Hengist and Horsa in your 
 world. Go away, my dear lord, and you will have for- 
 gotten that she exists in ten days' time. 
 
 "She has not an idea of what you mean," he added 
 bitterly, "Marriage is only a word to her. She thinks 
 of living in Ladysrood as a child of five years old 
 would think of it — as a delightful and roomy play- 
 place. All that ignorance will excite you and interest 
 you entirely for a few weeks — I know that — but at the 
 end of those weeks you will ask yourself angrily why 
 you took a country child to make you ridiculous. When 
 you have dissipated the ignorance, what remains be- 
 hind will not interest you in the least. You will begin 
 to expect a woman's wisdom and patience in her, and 
 you will not find them — children are never patient or 
 wise. You think me a prophet of ill. I am one, 
 certainly. It is utterly impossible that a girl like her 
 and a man like you can live together without bitter 
 disappointment and endless friction." 
 
 "She is too young! She is too young!" he repeated 
 to himself again and again that night on his return 
 from Ladysrood. He had said nothing to the child 
 alone — what was the use of questioning her? She did 
 not know her own heart: how could she answer for it? 
 
 "You are not glad?" she asked him wistfully when
 
 Io6 GUILDEROY. 
 
 she came to bid him good-night. He looked away 
 from her and drew her head down on his breast and 
 kissed her curls. 
 
 "I hope you may be as happy, my darling, with 
 him as you have been with me. I do not think you 
 can be more so," he said tenderly, and said nothing 
 more. What use was it to alarm her young soul with 
 suggestions of perils and sorrows which she would be 
 wholly unable to understand? Life looked to her like 
 the gilded and illuminated pages of the Ladysrood 
 missal. Why tell her that these pages would be stained 
 and blotted by tears? 
 
 In the little parlour of Christslea Guilderoy and 
 John Vernon sat long in conversation that evening. 
 
 Neither convinced the other. 
 
 The incipient friendship which had begun to grow 
 up between them had been disturbed and diminished 
 by the precipitancy of the one and the opposition of 
 the other. Vernon considered himself dealt with in 
 bad faith, and Guilderoy grew impatient at the discon- 
 tent with which his proposals were received. 
 
 "Does he think it would be a happier fate to have 
 all her youth pass away in this little combe by the sea 
 with no companions but the gulls and the rabbits?" he 
 thought, with a not unnatural sense that the immense 
 gifts brought in his own hands were too little ap- 
 preciated, whilst yet he respected all the more a man 
 who accounted material and social advantages as of so 
 little avail. 
 
 It was in vain that he offered the most princely 
 presents to her and promised to render her, as far as 
 fortune went, wholly independent of himself.
 
 GUILDEROY. IO7 
 
 John Vernon heard all this with little patience. 
 
 "I do not doubt your generosity or your justice," 
 he said more than once. "I have told you before, I 
 am convinced that you are not a man to injure or to 
 defraud a woman. But against what I fear you can 
 give no possible guarantees. You wish for Gladys at 
 this moment as you have Avished for a hundred women 
 before her and will wish for a hundred Jwomen after 
 her. You will tell me that you feel differently to her 
 to what you have done to others, and no doubt you 
 believe it; but you are mistaken. You feel precisely 
 the same, and your caprice will pass as all your other 
 caprices have done." 
 
 "Will you not allow me even to know my own 
 emotions?" said Guilderoy with anger. "And will you 
 tell me Avhat greater proof any man can give of the 
 honesty of his emotions than to desire to make anyone 
 his wife whom he loves?" 
 
 "That is quite true," replted her father, "and I do 
 not question your present sincerity — I cannot do so in 
 face of the evidences you are willing to give of it. But 
 I do not think that your emotions are of the kind you 
 fancy them, and I am wholly certain that my poor child 
 will not have the knowledge, the character, or the 
 education in her which could alone enable a woman to 
 keep her hold on the affections of such a man as you. 
 Remember what the Master of Love said — 
 
 Ut levis, absumtis paulatim viribus, ignis 
 Ipse latet, summo candet in igne cinis; 
 
 Sed tamen extinctas, admoto sulphure, flammas 
 Invenit, et lumen, quod fuit ante, redit. 
 
 My child will not know how to throw the sulphur on
 
 1 08 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the fading flames, and your fire will die out on her 
 altar." 
 
 "I am tired of the sirens who throw the sulphur," 
 replied Guilderoy. '"Et puer est, et nudus Amor.' I 
 want the innocence of extreme youth and the divine 
 nudity of a soul which has nothing to conceal. Give 
 them to me and I will respect them." 
 
 John Vernon sighed impatiently and abandoned the 
 argument. 
 
 He did not doubt the entire good faith of his com- 
 panion, but he was none the less certain of the truth 
 of his own predictions. Guilderoy wished for these 
 things as a child wishes for playthings, but they would 
 have no more power to secure his constancy than the 
 toy to charm the child for ever. Cut with love, as with 
 anger, he knew that it was waste of breath to argue. 
 
 Guilderoy had received another letter that day 
 from Italy which had also irritated him excessively; a 
 letter full of those useless reproaches, those unwise re- 
 bukes, those injudicious and violent demands which are 
 the whips wherewith women think to scourge to activity 
 a dead or dying passion. They are usually as futile as 
 a whip of nettles used on a marble statue. They were 
 not absolutely ineffective here, for they succeeded in 
 stinging his soul into anger and rebellion; but they 
 utterly failed to accomplish the purpose for which they 
 were intended. On the contrary, they confirmed him 
 in the wish which, half in jest half in earnest, had 
 moved him to give his life into the hand of Gladys 
 Vernon. 
 
 He was a man of sudden impulses, romantic fancies, 
 and very hasty action which was united with an in-
 
 r.UH.Di'.RdV. 109 
 
 dolent and vaguely philosophic temper. The letter was 
 imperious, reproachful, and passionate. It produced 
 on him the opposite effect that it was intended to 
 jiroduce on him. It made him angry, irritated, and 
 desirous to assert an independence which every word 
 in it refused to him. Guilderoy, like many men who 
 are tender of heart and yet unconsciously selfish, was 
 easily led but was difficult to drive. If he felt coerced 
 he rebelled instantly. Tact and persuasion might lead 
 him long, but the instant he felt that there was any 
 effort to coerce him by force he grew restive, and men 
 much less amiable and gentle Avere much easier to 
 direct and to command than he. His correspondent 
 made the supreme error of exacting as a right what had 
 no charm unless it were voluntary, and claiming as a 
 due what was nothing if it were not a gift. The wood- 
 dove was right in his choice, he thought, but only right 
 as long as his companion pleases him and leaves him 
 free. If she fasten a fetter on his foot the very fussing 
 and fretting of the sparrows were better than the colum- 
 barium in the clouds. 
 
 He shrank from the intent to rule and hold him 
 which was so visible in the letter he had just received; 
 he felt a vehement desire to vindicate his liberty against 
 the claims which she so obviously showed her intention 
 to lay upon it forever, or at least for such a "forever" 
 as her pride and her passion might desire and demand 
 from the future. He was a Launcelot whom Guinevere 
 might have bound forever to her girdle if she had 
 never let him feel that there was a chain under the 
 silken leash. But as every Guinevere had been so 
 rash and so blind as to let him feel it and be galled
 
 I I O GUILDEROY. 
 
 by it, each had in turn had his allegiance but a brief 
 while. The Duchess Soria had had it longer than any 
 other. 
 
 She had many advantages. She lived farther away 
 from him than most; she had greater beauty than most; 
 and she had that eminence of social position which 
 raises a woman so high that no lover can doubt her 
 sincerity in her selection of him, or her facilities for 
 replacing him by others if she chose. These advantages 
 had made her reign over his passions and command 
 his allegiance longer than any other woman had done. 
 It had been always understood that if Hugo Soria died, 
 Guilderoy would ratify his devotion by marriage; but 
 he himself had never cared to contemplate that pro- 
 bability; for the rest, Soria was almost as young as he 
 was himself, and there was no apparent likelihood of 
 his freeing his wife of his presence on earth, unless 
 some unforeseen accident or some duel ending fatally 
 were to prematurely cut short the measure of his days. 
 Had he died, the world and Beatrice Soria herself 
 would have expected her lover to replace him; the 
 certainty with which she would have expected this 
 allowed a too dominant and insistant tone of appropria- 
 tion to show now through the lines of her letter, and raised 
 in the feelings of its reader that instinct of rebellion 
 which lies in the breast of all men. His intimacy with 
 her had lasted years enough for many faults in her 
 character to have become revealed to him. He had 
 had time to outlive the belief in those perfections which 
 every man who is much in love attributes to his 
 mistress; he knew her to be imperious, exacting, and 
 disdainful when offended. They were defects which
 
 GUILDEROY. I I I 
 
 in daily life poison peace more cruelly than any 
 others. 
 
 Beatrice Soria in Paris or Naples, visited at inter- 
 vals, and seen only in her superb bloom of beauty, had 
 a great and irresistible sorcery for him, but Beatrice 
 Soria as the eternal companion of his fate would have 
 alienated and have irritated him unbearably. 
 
 Or, at the least, he thought so now, as his con- 
 science smarted and his impatience rebelled under the 
 lash of her impassioned reproaches and recall. 
 
 He read her last letter many times when he sat 
 in the solitude of the library on the evening of that 
 day. It did not touch his heart; it disturbed his temper. 
 It made him feel blameable and selfish, but it did not 
 make him feel regretful or repentant. He laid the 
 paper down before him under the light, and then looked 
 up from it to the window far off where Gladys had sat 
 a week or two before and he had held the great missal 
 upon her knee. 
 
 The embrasure of the window was shrouded in the 
 dark velvet curtains which the servants had drawn at 
 nightfall, but he seemed to see her tall, slender, stooping 
 form seated there, her golden-haired head, her face 
 with its first sudden blush. He was not in love with 
 her; no, it did not seem to him that even yet his new 
 feeling merited that name, but he was haunted by the 
 thought of her, distressed by the desire of her. She 
 was unlike anything of her sex that he had ever known, 
 and she seemed already a part of Ladysrood, like its 
 marble figures of Florence and its old sweet roses of 
 France. 
 
 He hesitated no more, but drew pen and paper to
 
 It 2 OUlLDEROY. 
 
 him and began to answer the letter which lay under his 
 hand. It was not an easy task. To say to a woman 
 who loves him that he not only loves her no longer, but 
 has transferred his allegiance elsewhere, is painful to 
 any man who has a conscience and a memory. 
 
 He had those vague sentiments of inclination to the 
 refreshment of repose, of pure affections, and of family 
 ties which visit at times all men who have imagination 
 and emotions, and which are perhaps the most utterly 
 delusive and misleading of all their fancies. 
 
 Again and again has the mirage of innocent and 
 lawful joys passed alluringly before the eyes of a tired 
 man of the world, and has been followed by him only 
 to bring him to the desert sands of monotony, of 
 weariness, and of thraldom. 
 
 He was perfectly sincere when he assured John 
 Vernon of his indifference to the passions and the 
 pleasures of which his life had hitherto been so full, 
 and of his wishes for a simpler, purer, and more 
 legitimate attachment than those which he had known. 
 But though he had not any intention of deceiving others, 
 he did so because he deceived himself, and took what 
 was a mere passing phase of imagination for a lasting 
 alteration in his temperament. 
 
 Was it true that of this child he really knew no 
 more than of a shut book, of which the exterior pleased 
 him? Was it possible that with the passing of the years 
 he would grow farther and farther from her rather than 
 she nearer and nearer to him? His reason and his ob- 
 servation of the lives of others told him that it was very 
 possible. 
 
 Fancy and admiration had hurried him into an action
 
 GUILDEROY. I I 3 
 
 in which opposition had confirmed his persistency. But 
 now that in cold blood he looked at his future, he could 
 not feel sure that he would never repent an act which 
 gave power over it into the hands of a child whose 
 affections even were scarcely his, and of the tenacity of 
 whose character he had had evidence. 
 
 He desired to possess her beauty, and he was fas- 
 cinated by the courage and the simplicity which he saw 
 in her; but the prophecies of John Vernon haunted and 
 disquieted him, and his knowledge of his own tempera- 
 ment told him that they were not unlikely to be true 
 hereafter. 
 
 How much of mere caprice, of sheer waywardness, 
 of momentary impatience of existing ties, and of amuse- 
 ment at irritating the opposition of his sister had there 
 not been mingled with the more poetic and personal 
 feelings which had first sent him to Christslea? 
 
 "After all, it is the folly of life which lends charm 
 to it," he thought, but he felt that if John Vernon had 
 been able to know his thoughts he would have told him 
 that the love which does not blindly believe itself to be 
 the highest wisdom of life has the seeds of death in it 
 at its birth. 
 
 Indeed, he was well aware of it himself. 
 
 The warning words produced a vague effect upon him. 
 
 He felt vaguely that the future might justify them, 
 and although he had been so self-willed in following 
 out his caprice, he almost regretted now that fate had 
 granted him his wishes. 
 
 Had he mistaken a momentary desire for a strength 
 of feeling such as was needed to outlast the stress of 
 time? 
 
 Guilderoy, /, O
 
 I 1 4 GUILDEROY. 
 
 In vain he told himself that Beatrice Soria had no 
 claim of any sort upon him; he knew that the mere 
 absence of claim constituted her strongest title to his 
 fidelity; he knew moreover that his relations with her 
 had touched her heart and her passions profoundly 
 whatever they had done to his own. 
 
 He was tired of those relations; they had a side to 
 them which wearied and irritated him; he had resolved 
 in his own mind to go back to her no more, because 
 recrimination and reproach had of late formed the 
 staple of her welcome. Yet the announcement of his 
 marriage was very difficult to him to make, and now 
 and again he pushed the paper from him and leaned 
 his head upon his hands and saw the eyes of his for- 
 saken love burning on him through the dark. She had 
 not been alone in his affections, but she had been chief 
 in them; and he knew that he had reigned supreme in 
 hers. The letter of farcAvell which he was compelled 
 to compose seemed a cowardice. It was the kind of 
 letter which a gentleman cannot write without feeling 
 that he loses something in his own self-esteem by writing 
 it; indeed, the more truly he is a gentleman the more 
 acutely he will feel this. 
 
 But despite his reluctance and the difficulty of the 
 task, it was written at last, and when it had gone away 
 from him irrevocably in the post-bag with which a lad 
 rode fifteen miles over the moors every morning, he had 
 a sense of relief: of such relief as comes from a decision 
 taken without power to undo or to modify it. 
 
 What would she answer? 
 
 He counted the days which must elapse before a 
 reply could reach him, and opened the letter-bag with
 
 GUILDEROY. I 1 5 
 
 anxiety when those days had passed. To his astonish- 
 ment he received no answer at all; days became weeks, 
 weeks months, and silence alone followed on his de- 
 claration of self-chosen and deliberate inconstancy. Such 
 silence made him uneasy and apprehensive. He knew 
 that it was not the silence of indifference; and, if not 
 that, then what must it portend? 
 
 Once or twice he was tempted to break it by writing 
 again himself. But this he felt it was impossible to do; 
 no man can insist on, or emphasise by unasked re- 
 petition, his own avowal of mutability and voluntary 
 faithlessness. Silence was, at least, acquiescence and 
 permission. 
 
 He had sought these and he could not quarrel with 
 receiving them. Meanwhile he felt free to do what he 
 was bent on doing, and used all his power of persuasion 
 to induce Vernon to shorten his probation. 
 
 Vernon was very reluctant to do so. 
 
 "She does not love you. She does not know what 
 love is. You mistake if you fancy she does," he said 
 to Guilderoy, who smiled. 
 
 "I will teach her," he answered. 
 
 "Yes," said John Vernon with pain and impatience, 
 "and when she has learned the lesson it will have 
 grown dull to you, and the teacher will go elsewhere. 
 AVliat is the cause of half the misery of women? That 
 their love is so much more tenacious than the man's; 
 it grows stronger as his grows weaker. He desires one 
 thing which is quickly satisfied; she desires innumerable 
 things which can never be satisfied, and among them 
 as the most mythical and the most impossible she de- 
 sires — poor soul! — the man's constancy." 
 
 8*
 
 I I 6 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Where other men would only have seen the gain 
 and honour of such a marriage he saw the grey cloud 
 of possible, of most probable, unhappiness. As he 
 walked in calm dark evenings by the little bay beneath 
 his house the murmur of the waves sounded mournfully 
 on his ear; and as he looked up at the attic window of 
 his daughter's room shrouded in the ivy of the eaves, it 
 was no mere selfish sense of his own coming loneliness 
 which made him wish to heaven that Guilderoy had 
 never come across her path. 
 
 Happiness is not a thing to be commanded, he 
 thought with sadness and anxiety, to be obtained by 
 any ingenuity, or retained by any obedience to precept 
 or to duty. It is the most spontaneous thing on earth; 
 born only of the sympathies of two natures which 
 mutually supply each other's needs; it is like the sun- 
 shine and the shower, and can no more be brought into 
 human life by any endeavour than they can be brought 
 on earth by the efforts of science. Happiness is the 
 dew of the heart, making all green things spring where 
 once the soil was barren; but it is not in human nature 
 to create it at will, and it is a gift of destiny like 
 genius or beauty. 
 
 True, ingrates mar the gift, as in the fairy story 
 the talisman is lost by careless keeping; but it comes 
 to none at prayer, at exercise of will: it is a treasure 
 of the gods, and alas! "Deus ridere credo, quum 
 felix vocat." 
 
 But Vernon's wishes and his regrets could not stay 
 the flight of time, nor change a caprice which opposi- 
 tion or warning only served to inflame; and before he 
 was wholly sensible that the winter was gone, violets
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 1 7 
 
 and hepatica were abloom in his orchard grass, and 
 the little fishing fleet was setting out for its springtide 
 harvest of the sea, and March was ended, and Guilde- 
 roy claimed from him a promise which he had no 
 choice but to fulfil. 
 
 They were married in the private chapel of Ladys- 
 rood with no one present, by her father's wish, except 
 himself and the old servants of the house, and she 
 wore the white cambric frock which she had for her 
 best for summer Sundays at Christslea, and about the 
 throat of it were strings of pearls which Guilderoy had 
 given her and which were worthy a queen's regalia. 
 
 The heart of John Vernon was heavy as he left them to 
 themselves, and took his way back to his solitary house 
 through the budding woods, over the wide moors lying 
 in the pale afternoon sunlight, while the sound of the 
 more distant sea came like human sighs through the 
 rural silence to his ears. There was the scent of violets 
 on the wind and the golden gleam of gorse in the land- 
 scape; ever and anon he came in sight of the sea, grey 
 and still, red sails and white crossing it noiselessly. 
 The day was clear and soft and mild, the scene was 
 fair, and yet the sense of a great sadness weighed upon 
 him as he left his child the mistress of all these spread- 
 ing woods and stately towers and pleasant gardens which 
 lay behind him under the pale grey skies. 
 
 The world, he knew, would tell him with all its 
 myriad voices that he had, in his solitude and poverty, 
 had a stroke of the most marvellous good fortune, a 
 social triumph such as most would prize and covet be- 
 yond all things. But John Vernon did not see as the 
 world sees, and he would with much surer confidence
 
 1 1 8 GUILDEROY. 
 
 and greater joy have known that his daughter had gone 
 to a lowlier fate, where the world would have never 
 given her that crown of envy which is so often a crown 
 of thorns. Never again would the little simple things 
 of life make her happiness; never again would she run 
 through the wet grass a mere careless child, happy be- 
 cause a lamb was born, or a sea mouse was washed up 
 by the tide, or the first daffodils were blowing under 
 the trees of the orchard. 
 
 The world despised such simple things, but then 
 was the world right? Would that collar of pearls which 
 was fit for a queen give her in truth half the pleasure 
 that her daisy chains had given her in the meadows 
 under the apple bough? 
 
 "Nay, I grow old and shall feel lonely, and so see 
 all things in shadow. Life can stand still with none of 
 us, with her no more than with others," he told him- 
 self as he walked over the moors, and he looked at the 
 yellow gorse shining before him in the light of the 
 afternoon, and tried to hope that "straight was a path 
 of gold" for her. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 "My dear Hilda," wrote Guilderoy to his sister, "I 
 am about to marry the daughter of Mr. Vernon of 
 Llanarth, as I told you in September that I should do. 
 You have been always exceedingly desirous that I should 
 marry, only it was on condition that you should be em- 
 powered to choose the companion of my destinies. 
 As I am the more interested of the two in such a
 
 GUILDEROY. I I Q 
 
 choice, I have ventured to make the selection without 
 applying to you. I should be sorry if you should per- 
 sist in quarrelling with me about it, because there is 
 really no valid ground whatever for a quarrel. Gladys 
 Vernon is not a kitchen-maid, a femme tare'e , or an 
 American adventuress in search of a title, the only three 
 persons to whom you would, I think, be justified in ob- 
 jecting vi ct armis. She is quite a child, and I venture 
 to hope that you will be kind to her. When will you 
 return to Ladysrood and let her see you?" 
 
 The letter concluded with some allusions to other 
 matters of less personal interest, and was signed with 
 affectionate expressions. 
 
 It reached Lady Sunbury when she was staying with 
 a large party with her uncle at Balfrons. The shock 
 of the intelligence was increased by her knowledge of 
 her own error in leaving her brother's house : who could 
 tell what influence she might not have had if she had 
 remained with him? The fact that she had not the 
 very slightest kind of influence on Guilderoy at any 
 time did not occur to her remembrance. She was a 
 clever woman, but like many clever people she had no 
 just estimate of her power over others; because she 
 felt the ability to guide them she imagined that she 
 had the means to do so, an error common enough in 
 human nature. 
 
 "Evelyn is going to marry a country girl because 
 she beat some village boys off a fox!" she cried with 
 intense bitterness to her cousin Aubrey, who chanced 
 to be in the library at Balfrons at that moment. " Good 
 heavens ! a man who has declined half the best alliances 
 in Europe goes and throws himself away in some mo-
 
 I20 GUILDEROY. 
 
 ment of mad caprice on a rustic. Somebody with 
 brown hands, and lean elbows, who will make me look 
 ridiculous when I have to present her! Somebody 
 whom he will get divorced from with some horrible 
 esclandre and uproar that will be the talk of London a 
 whole season!" 
 
 "A country girl?" said Lord Aubrey, raising his 
 eyebrows; ''''Je lui donJie iine quinzaiiie !" 
 
 "Is it not just like him?" cried Lady Sunbury, with 
 a quiver of unutterable scorn in her voice. "Is it not 
 exactly the kind of thing we might be sure he would 
 do? After all these years of hypercriticism , of super- 
 ciliousness, of disdain, all these years of romantic 
 caprices aud impossible passions, after rejecting all the 
 most charming women in Europe, to go and throw his 
 life away on a rustic hoyden, a vixen whom he saw 
 fighting with a mob of village boys!" 
 
 Aubrey laughed; he was accustomed to his cousin's 
 manner of arranging circumstances according to her 
 own views of them. 
 
 "I don't think it can be quite as bad as that," he 
 said, turning over the letter, which she had thrown to 
 him. "One can trust Evelyn's taste in women and 
 pictures. But if you knew there was any danger of 
 this affair, why did you not stay on at Ladysrood?" 
 
 "Would to heaven I had!" said Lady Sunbury, 
 with infinite bitterness. "I should have seen her at 
 any rate!" 
 
 "I wouldn't make a quarrel if I were you," said 
 Aubrey. "You see, he writes very well; he is evidently 
 anxious you should countenance the afiair, and that is 
 a good deal for him to admit."
 
 GUILDEROY. 121 
 
 "Countenance it! Never!" 
 
 "Then you will make a great blunder," said her 
 cousin very sensibly. "There is nothing for anyone 
 seriously to object to, we may be sure; he is not a man 
 to marry anybody beneath him, and it is merely a 
 matter of good feeling with him to ask your approba- 
 tion; what you do cannot really matter two straws to 
 him. Come, write something pleasant. Why quarrel? 
 After all, it does not really concern you." 
 
 "Concern me?" repeated Lady Sunbury, in a voice 
 stifled by rage. "Not concern me? What should con- 
 cern me? What should concern me if not the honour 
 of my family, the reputation of my brother, the purity of 
 my father's name, the respect of my own native county?" 
 
 "Those valuable things are all safe enough," said 
 Aubrey, carelessly. "Evelyn is a fool in some ways, 
 but he will not buy a ptkhe a qiiinze sous with his 
 family pride: in that kind of matter he is the proudest 
 man living. Of course it does not please you; it is 
 natural it should not please you; but if I were you I 
 would try to look as if it did. Pleasantness is always 
 the best policy before anything which we cannot alter." 
 
 "What is the matter?" asked the Earl of Sunbury, 
 coming in with a bundle of letters for his wife to 
 answer. 
 
 "Guilderoy is going to marry a country girl, and 
 Hilda takes it as an insult to herself," replied her 
 cousin. 
 
 Sunbury gave a long whistle. 
 
 "A country girl, and you will have to present 
 her?" he said, with zest in anything which annoyed 
 his wife.
 
 12 2 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "Others may present her. I shall not," said Lady 
 Sunbury. 
 
 "Ah! you mean to make a row of it? You always 
 make a row. Lots of people will present her. Perhaps 
 she has decent people of her own. Is she born, as the 
 French say?" 
 
 "You had better write and congratulate him," said 
 his wife. "He cares so much for your opinion!" 
 
 "I shall certainly congratulate him. I always like 
 him, though he monopolises all the amiability of his 
 family," replied Sunbury, who had often found the 
 generosity of his brother-in-law convenient and long- 
 suffering. 
 
 "Oh, yes; write and felicitate him, both of you," 
 said Aubrey, rising and going away before what he 
 foresaw would be a connubial quarrel. "He has done 
 a great folly, and of course he will regret it immeasur- 
 ably, and all that, but we cannot alter it; and after 
 all it is his own affair. And you would not like Ma- 
 dame Soria better, and it would be Madame Soria 
 some day if it were not someone else." 
 
 "A wholesome English girl is certainly better than 
 that , if she be a dairymaid," said Lady Sunbury; and 
 towards evening she wrote a letter which was almost 
 kind in tone, although the kindness was marred and 
 jarred by many prophecies of ill. 
 
 "It is strange how certain both she and John 
 Vernon are that we shall be miserable!" thought Guil- 
 deroy when he received it.
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 23 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 GuiLDEROY had a palace of his own in Venice, 
 placed on oi:ie of the curves of the Grand Canal, one 
 of the oriental palaces with Byzantine windows and 
 carved and painted walls, and a water-story of white 
 marble, with great pointed doors and wide flights of 
 water steps, and at its side one of the lovely luxuriant 
 green gardens of Venice with acacia and cereus droop- 
 ing over its low red wall. It was to this palace of his 
 every April that his thoughts turned longingly, and it 
 was thither that he took Gladys in the early spring 
 days of the year. It seemed to him the most fitting 
 place that love and youth could find. It was a spring- 
 time even more than usually radiant, fragrant, and mild, 
 and the Venetian air was full of the scent of the prim- 
 roses blooming on the Brenta banks, and of the bud- 
 ding narcissus in the meadow grass of the many is- 
 lands. 
 
 It was a change such as the wand of any Prospero 
 might have caused, which suddenly carried her from 
 the sea mists and bare orchards and channel winds of 
 the Christslea shore, to the shining waters, the liquid 
 sunshine, the gorgeous marbles, and the cloudless moon- 
 light evenings of the Adriatic city. 
 
 The charm of Venice is one of those emotions 
 which must be felt not told, which are too delicate,
 
 124 GUILDEROY. 
 
 too intricate and too romantic to be ever coldly dis- 
 sected and described. 
 
 Venice escapes alike the poet and the painter. They 
 may pourtray her past and paint her waterways, but 
 they cannot embody her fugitive and unutterable fascina- 
 tion any more than they can give on canvas that faint 
 red glow, those silvery dove-hued waters, that dreamy 
 and exquisite silence, those ethereal visions of evening 
 on sea and land. 
 
 The balmy air, the radiant light, the slow soft mo- 
 tion of the pliant gondola, the amorous music floating 
 down the moonlit water, the shadowy splendour of the 
 stately frescoed chambers, were all in the sharpest and 
 strongest contrast with the rude coast, the grey boisterous 
 water, the simple ways, and the narrow rooms, the 
 misty mornings and the chilly eves, the sober colours 
 and the sombre moorlands of her English home. It was 
 a sensation which charmed yet hurt her; she felt much 
 as one of her own pigeons from Christslea, brought from 
 the shady roost under the thatch to dwell amongst the 
 pigeons of St. Mark would have felt amongst the marble 
 lodges, the gilded pinnacles, the bewildering sunshine, 
 and the glittering mosaics. 
 
 She wished with all her soul that he had let her 
 spend these springtide weeks in the budding gardens 
 and the secluded rooms of Ladysrood. There she 
 would have felt less frightened, more familiar; here the 
 intense light seemed like a million curious creatures all 
 staring at her, and when the bold eyes of the gondoliers 
 looked at her with a smile in them she felt herself 
 colour scarlet as at some violating touch. 
 
 Guilderoy, who had felt from his earliest years the
 
 GUILPEROY. 125 
 
 magic of the Adriatic, grew impatient with his com- 
 panion that she seemed so little sensible of it and 
 sighed for the elm-tree boles and primrose roots of wet 
 dim English fields. 
 
 It was not insensibility, but for once his discern- 
 ment was not profound enough to let him see this. 
 The girl was bewildered and inarticulate, rather from 
 excess of emotion than of lack of it, and longed for 
 the familiar landscapes of her short past from the same 
 instinct as makes a stray animal seek its homing pas- 
 tures. 
 
 The scenes around her were too beautiful and 
 intoxicating for her to know how to bear them, even as 
 were the ardours of those new passions which had 
 whirled her from childhood into womanhood at a bound. 
 
 Guilderoy was as far from divining what she felt as 
 were the men whose oars took them through the shin- 
 ing waters. She remained shyer than he wished; he 
 was half impatient of it as insensibility, but all the 
 mute vague passions, the unspoken emotions, the 
 timidity at her own sensations, and the shrinking from 
 all observation which were in her, he knew and heeded 
 very little. 
 
 She never looked back in after times to those 
 weeks in Venice without a sense of them as of some 
 dream too beautiful and marvellous ever to be repeated, 
 and yet with a vague awe and terror touching its beauty 
 with a darkness that enhanced its light. She never in 
 after days saw the gold sunbeams ripple on the silvery 
 surface of the lagoons, or the marbles of St. Mark shine 
 white beneath the moon, without the remembrance of 
 the half-unconscious rapture, and the bewildered embar-
 
 I 2 6 GUILDEROY, 
 
 rassment and apprehension which she had feU in that 
 April time of love. 
 
 "You have never yet told me that you love me!" 
 he said to her once with some amusement and some 
 annoyance blended in his thought. 
 
 She looked up a moment, then her eyelids fell. 
 
 "I can feel but I cannot speak," she might have 
 answered had she not been too shy, but shyness held 
 her silent. 
 
 "I wonder what she does feel," he thought, rather 
 with curiosity than with emotion. "It is almost like 
 making love to a statue or a corpse, she is so irrespon- 
 sive. She is not cold, but she is so still one cannot 
 tell whether it is her senses which are still asleep or 
 her affections. She is rather alarmed by than moved to 
 any pleasure, and yet now and then, when I glance at 
 her unawares, there is a look in her eyes that is like 
 love. I suppose the truth is that John Vernon was 
 right — she is too young." 
 
 But however young she might be she was very 
 lovely, and her absolute passionlessness and stillness at 
 the present time had a seduction for him which was in 
 a manner morbid and yet sweet, tantalising and yet 
 alluring, enhancing his passions, though failing to arouse 
 in him higher and stronger emotions. He did not un- 
 derstand the intense shyness which enveloped her as a 
 frost encloses and sheets over a lake; the depths of the 
 water, with all their stirring and palpitating life are 
 there beneath, but so covered that none can see them. 
 He did not understand the mingled terror and ecstasy 
 which his own love was to her, and the bewilderment 
 her own feelings and agitation were to her. A man
 
 GUILDEROY. I 2 7 
 
 less impassioned and more patient might have alarmed 
 her less, and so succeeded in calling out the timid in- 
 tensity of her soul into actual expression; but he had 
 not the self-denial or the patience requisite, and he had 
 enveloped her in the fires of passion before he had 
 ever sought to penetrate the arcana of her waking soul. 
 She loved him with all the force of her nature, but she 
 could not have said so to save her life; and with this 
 love which had so suddenly surged up in her and over- 
 whelmed her there was a sense of fear mingled; the 
 only fear which had ever touched her dauntless and 
 courageous temper. The fear was sweet to her, but 
 still it was fear; not fear so much of him as of her- 
 self, and of all the strange emotions which had risen 
 in her. 
 
 If she could have spoken what she felt, she would 
 have poured out poems as sweet and as ardent as any 
 that ever poet penned. But timidity and ignorance of 
 what name to give her own emotions held her mute, 
 and he remained in doubt as to whether she were 
 physically cold or mentally unintelligent. Before he 
 had been in Venice a month he remembered with 
 regret the warning which her father had given him: 
 "You will soon wish for those who can throw the sulphur 
 on the fading flames." 
 
 His affection for her had increased since they had 
 been together, for he had recognised since then more 
 fully the delicacy, the honour, and the high breeding 
 of her character, but his caprice was already losing 
 something of its attraction, and his passions were de- 
 manding more response to them. 
 
 "I strive to make her happy," he wrote to John
 
 12 8 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Vernon, "but I am not as sure as I wish to be that I 
 succeed." 
 
 John Vernon wrote back to him, "You do not suc- 
 ceed because you have called on a child's soul for a 
 woman's passions; you have pulled open the rose-bud 
 to make a full-blown rose. It is impossible that your 
 rose should be perfect." 
 
 He felt some impatience of her entire passiveness. 
 He wished either for refusal and opposition or for re- 
 sponsive passion; but she yielded to him like a slave, 
 and yet responded no more in feeling than if she were 
 a form of ivory or wax. It was seductive from its strange- 
 ness; and yet it was, he foresaw, what in a few months 
 would fatigue him, and be insufficient for him. 
 
 "It is a pity that we need go home so soon," he 
 said once with regret. 
 
 She turned to him with a smile, "Oh, no! Ladysrood 
 is even dearer than this." 
 
 "We cannot go to Ladysrood," said Guilderoy with 
 a little impatience, "you must be seen in London, I 
 hate London. It is the antithesis of everything I like; 
 but, if you were not presented, they would say I had 
 married a gypsy or a gardener's daughter." 
 
 "Would that matter very much?" said Gladys, with 
 her delicate eyebrows drawn a little together. 
 
 "No, I do not know that it would; but Englishmen 
 are always conventional, even when they don't know it; 
 all men are, indeed, who belong to a certain world. I 
 do not care what people say — no man cares less; and 
 yet I feel that I should be irritated if they talked non- 
 sense about me." 
 
 Gladys was silent. Her feelings were all primitive
 
 GUILDEROV. I2g 
 
 and direct. She was for from understanding com- 
 plexity of sentiment or the existence of two morbid 
 yet contradictory feelings at the same moment. 
 
 "I love Ladysrood," she said, with a great longing 
 in her voice, "and I love the country. All the time we 
 have been here I have been thinking of that line of 
 Browning's, 
 
 "Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!" 
 
 Guilderoy looked at her in surprise. 
 
 "I did not know you had read Browning. He is 
 not a child's poet. And, my dear, do not set your 
 heart on living at Ladysrood. I told you honestly, you 
 will remember, that I could not promise to be often 
 there." 
 
 "Yes, I remember." A shadow passed over her 
 face — not of resentment but of disappointment, which 
 troubled him more. 
 
 "You will enjoy the world when you know it," he 
 said consolingly. "All women do. There are things 
 besides daisies and buttercups that will please you. 
 The country is infinitely soothing when one is ill or 
 unhappy, or has failed to attain anything one wanted; 
 but it is tedious, and its outlook is narrow. Imper- 
 ceptibly one adopts the small views which make up its 
 world, and the forces of one's mind get narrowed to 
 suit them. And the country in England is so much 
 more intolerable than anywhere else, because the weather 
 is so bad : to endure it long one must have the rusticity 
 of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as 
 homely." 
 
 Guilderoy. I, 9
 
 130 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Gladys did not reply. She looked down into the 
 water through which she was drawing her left hand, 
 taking pleasure in the brushing of the ribbon weed 
 against her fingers. 
 
 "Do you really dream of living at Ladysrood all 
 the year round?" he asked her, impatiently. 
 
 "I should like it," she said gently. "But then, of 
 course, I do not know any other life than that country 
 life." 
 
 "Ask me anything else," said Guilderoy, "but not 
 that, for heaven's sake." 
 
 "I will never ask you anything. My father told me 
 not." 
 
 "But I wish you to ask me for anything that comes 
 into your fancy," he said, vaguely irritated. "My dear 
 child, if you and I cannot say frankly to each other 
 any whim or folly that comes into our heads, who on 
 earth should do so? There is no happiness possible, 
 Gladys, where there is any reserve." 
 
 The girl was silent, her fingers playing with the 
 water weeds on the limpid shallows of the lagoon. 
 
 "Do you understand?" he continued, still im- 
 patiently; though tenderly, "I wish you to confide in 
 me all your desires, and, as far as it is mortally pos- 
 sible, I will do my utmost to gratify them." 
 
 "You are very good to me," said Gladys with a 
 little hesitation. 
 
 "That is not the language of love," said Guilderoy 
 with annoyance. 
 
 The girl coloured; her lips parted to speak, but 
 words failed her. She longed to tell him that she loved 
 him with all her soul so far as youth can love, but she
 
 GUILDEROY. I 3 I 
 
 was shy to utter anything she felt. She seemed to him 
 less intelligent, and far less tender, than she really was. 
 
 Guilderoy had himself the infinite expectations and 
 anticipations which belong to those whose feelings are 
 rather impassioned than profound, and whose imagina- 
 tion is more vivid than their constancy is durable. But 
 he had not the patience which is often necessary for 
 the full comprehension of character, especially of cha- 
 racter which is half develojDed and still growing. 
 
 Every day the memory of John Vernon's philosophic 
 warnings recurred more often to him, and he was more 
 persuaded of their truth. And yet he was still greatly 
 enamoured of her. Her physical beauty was too great 
 to let him be otherwise, and the sense of the absolute 
 freshness and innocence of all her nature Avere in a 
 sense very lovely to him after the many women, so un- 
 like her, whom he had known. 
 
 And yet there was something wanting. She under- 
 stood so little, she responded so little, she was still so 
 much more frightened than she was happy at the do- 
 minance of love. He felt that it had been unwise to 
 take her away from the simple, childish, unemotional 
 life which had been so far more suited to her years. 
 Her father had been thoroughly right. Guilderoy, be- 
 fore a week was out, acknowledged it to his own soul. 
 A man more patient and less voluptuous by tempera- 
 ment and habit than he was might have seen by in- 
 tuition into all the treasures of her unuttered feelings, 
 but he only thought her impatiently a child whose 
 slumbering senses and alarmed bashfulness irritated 
 and fatigued him. The startled nymph should, to please 
 
 9*
 
 132 GUILDEROY. 
 
 his taste, have grown suddenly at his touch into a 
 goddess, and she did not do so. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 There are few prettier scenes than the great Piazza 
 of San Marco on a summer's night. The gaiety of the 
 sauntering crowds, the sparkUng of the many Hghts, the 
 animation of the cafes and the colonnades, the sound of 
 the military music, and the ring of the spoons on the 
 platters of ice or the saucers of chocolate, are all of 
 them like Paris in June; but then there is something 
 else too, something that is not to be found in Paris or 
 anywhere else than in Venice; there are the mighty 
 walls and columns of marble towering up into the blue 
 darkness of the sky; there is the shaft of the bell-tower, 
 seeming to stretch and touch the stars; and there is the 
 sense and the sound of the sea waves close at hand; 
 while above — high above in the shadows — the twin 
 lights which have burned there every night for five 
 hundred years for the soul of a murdered man shine as 
 steadily as the twin stars of the Pointers. 
 
 So much has been rhymed and written of Venice 
 that nothing hardly is left to say, and yet with it all so 
 little has been said because so little can its singular 
 charm and grace be ever spoken in words; the spell 
 of the terrors of the past which lie so close to the 
 mirth of the present, the sense of the wide sea waste 
 and the wild sea winds which lie so close to the 
 jewelled altars and the porphyry palaces, and the sweet
 
 GUILDEROY. I 3 3 
 
 faces of the women of Titian, and the yellow sails of 
 the boatmen of Mazzorbo, pushing their fruit and their 
 fish up the market stairs by Rialto. 
 
 This is the subtle and marvellous charm of Venice 
 which has not been caught in the words of Consuelo, 
 nor in the volumes of Ruskin, nor in the verse of 
 Musset, nor in the tragedy of Shakespeare, nor in any 
 printed page of human genius save Shelley's. 
 
 One evening Guilderoy and Gladys sat before 
 Florian's, with the soft sea-born day fading in faint 
 roseate skies and the people coming up the water 
 stairs and in from the calle, wondering if there would 
 be any music there that night, for the season was as 
 yet early and the air cold after sunset. 
 
 "Do you mean that you would prefer Ladysrood to 
 this?" he asked her incredulously, while the pigeons 
 going to roost circled above the white pinnacles of 
 Sansovino's shrine. 
 
 "I could care very dearly for Ladysrood," she 
 answered with hesitation. 
 
 "And I am glad that you should since it belongs to 
 us; and I care for it myself But to prefer it to this! 
 Think what chilly, misty mornings, what stormy, dusky 
 sunsets it is surely having now. England might be 
 tolerable in the south were it not for two things — its 
 sea-fogs and its Nonconformists. We can keep the 
 Nonconformists outside our gates, but we cannot keep 
 out the sea-fogs." 
 
 "We have fogs here." 
 
 "Ah, but what different fogs! Light as gossamer, 
 dove-hued like mother-of-pearl, parting to show a rosy 
 sail with a Madonna's crown, or the marble saints of
 
 134 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the Salute dome! My dear, you cannot speak of this 
 fog and of those fogs in the same breath. The one is 
 a fihn of lace off the Virgin's altars, the other is 
 Hodge's smock hung up to dry!" 
 
 She looked at him with a certain expression which 
 he did not admire. 
 
 "And you do not care whether Hodge has a shirt 
 or not?" 
 
 Guilderoy laughed impatiently, 
 
 " I care very much when the shirt figures metaphoric- 
 ally as a fog! My dear child, pray do not become a 
 politician. Become anything else you like that pleases 
 you, but not that. We have too many of them already. 
 We have also already got too many undigested opinions. 
 All opinions require long rumination, only unfortunately 
 it is a process unknown to politicians. You are a very 
 lovely woman, Gladys. You will be handsomer still 
 every year for some time to come. Leave opinions 
 alone, my love. If you must have them, being your 
 father's true daughter, do not spoil your pretty mouth 
 by their utterance." 
 
 A shadow went over her face. She had acute in- 
 telligence and she did not like to be relegated to the 
 level which his words implied. 
 
 "Am I only to dress then like a lay-figure?" she 
 said a little angrily. 
 
 "And amuse yourself and look beautiful. Can you 
 want more?" 
 
 "There is so much more in life," she murmured 
 with timidity. 
 
 "In life, there is no doubt. But in yours it is best 
 there should not be more for many a long year. You
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 35 
 
 are so young, and I avow, my dear, that I have a horror 
 of women who study blue-books and correct one's 
 statistics by their own tables. The only office of every 
 woman who can be so is to be charming." 
 
 "I am not charming," said the girl, with colour in 
 her cheeks. 
 
 "You will be. You see I am quite frank with you. 
 In our relations mere compliments are a mistake. You 
 will be infinitely charming when you realise that you 
 are so. At present your power to charm is not more 
 intelligible to you than the use of a knife to an infant : 
 the infant has not the faintest idea of any difference 
 between the blade and the haft. Nor do you discern 
 between the natural beauties which you possess, which 
 are very great, and those which you can exercise by 
 taking thought, which will be still greater." 
 
 "I do not understand," said Gladys. 
 
 "No," reflected Guilderoy, "and that is why the in- 
 nocent woman is always hopelessly left behind in the 
 race for men's passions. She does not know, and she 
 does not make art supplement nature; and she says 
 what she thinks; and she shows what she feels; and 
 she cries when we would laugh and laughs when we 
 could cry, and is cold when we are hot and then 
 would warm us when we are cold — alas, alas; why is 
 virtue always like that?" 
 
 Aloud he said to her: 
 
 "You will understand when you go out in the world 
 and meet other women. You will observe then that 
 frequently the women who have least beauty but most 
 charm bear all before them. It is a question of mind, 
 of perception, of sympathies — perhaps of other things
 
 136 GUILDEROY. 
 
 less innocent, but certainly of them. A lovely woman 
 with perfect features and form (as you have) will be 
 admired, no doubt, always; but her admirers will pass 
 on unless she has some charm beside her beauty. 
 "Know thyself" was said by a sage for sages, but it is 
 quite as necessary a counsel to give to a lovely woman. 
 You do not know yourself. You are half asleep. When- 
 ever you become a little conscious of your power you are 
 frightened. Well, if your mirror teaches you so little, 
 look at other women and learn from them that you can 
 easily surpass them. I do not intend to shut you up 
 in a cabinet at Ladysrood like a Tanagra figure; I 
 want you to be admired by the world, by my friends, 
 by every one; and to be that you must not be afraid 
 of admiration." 
 
 He had no consciousness of the perils which might 
 lie in the counsels he gave; he was absorbed in his de- 
 sire to give the setting it wanted to this pearl he had 
 found, and to escape ridicule in the world as the hus- 
 band of a woman who was in love with him. He spoke 
 in entire sincerity. He did not, indeed, tell her that he 
 found her wanting himself; but he vaguely endeavoured 
 to imply it. She would be none the less innocent if 
 she gained in pliability, in facility, in power of charm, 
 and she would be a million times more interesting, and 
 more easily adapted to the world before her. 
 
 "You will have a great deal to do once you are 
 lance'c ,^^ he continued. "The life of society is full of 
 small things and of continual stir; it is a sirenua inertia, 
 but it leaves little time for contemplation. You will 
 find your hours gone before you have begun to count 
 them. Certainly it is very good of you to wish to be
 
 GUILDEROY. I 3 7 
 
 of use to others, but you will not find it easy; and all 
 the parade of philanthropy which women of rank deal 
 in is rather an insult to the poor than a kindness to 
 them. I do not wish you to be conspicuous in that 
 way; give all you please, my dear; give with both hands; 
 but pray avoid all appearance of political advertisement 
 and sentimental religion. Both are equally offensive to 
 good taste." 
 
 She did not reply; she looked at the crescents of 
 light which were beginning to kindle along the lines 
 and arches of the Procuratie. She was thinking pas- 
 sionately and painfully, "If I did not please him why 
 does he not let me alone?" 
 
 "I do not wish to vex you, my child, and youth is 
 always charming," said Guilderoy lightly, "but I want 
 you to realise that you are very lovely through the 
 grace of nature, and that you may become still more so 
 by the grace of art. That is all. I would rather teach 
 you this myself than let others teach it you. Your own 
 ideal, I know, is to live at Ladysrood and be kind to 
 Hodge. You shall be as kind to him as you please- 
 though he will like you none the better for it — but you 
 must live in the world, and the world does not care 
 even for Helen unless Helen has her girdle of charms." 
 
 "But if I please you?" 
 
 "Please others to please me," said Guilderoy aloud. 
 And he thought to himself: "As men are made, my 
 dear, unless you please others you will, alas! not please 
 me long." 
 
 "I quite admit, my dear child," he pursued, "that 
 a life passed in the country is infinitely easier and in- 
 finitely more likely to develop high thoughts and gentle
 
 138 GUILDEROY. 
 
 ones. I am convinced that the ^\Tetched fretful pessi- 
 mism, which is the curse of modern art and litera- 
 ture, comes from the men who follow literature 
 and art crowding together in cities, and leading the 
 feverish existence of the clubs and the streets. Their 
 blood grows poor and feeble, and their meditations and 
 views are all tinged with the hypochondria due to bad 
 air, overfeeding, and unending excitement. I am really 
 convinced of it. If cities continue to spread as they 
 have done in the last fifty years, there will not be a 
 book worth reading written, or a picture worth seeing 
 painted. For the majority of men who can never be, 
 and are never, rich or famous, life in great cities must 
 be pent up, jaundiced, deprived of all health, whilst for 
 those who are rich or who achieve fame life in cities 
 means incessant friction, emulation, bitterness, elation, 
 jealousy, and haste. Nothing great or good can come 
 out of the seething cauldron of life in London or 
 Paris, and all good men have loved solitude and nature. 
 Tusculum contributed more than Rome to the genius 
 of Cicero. 
 
 "And yet," he continued with a smile, "I who am 
 not Cicero and am not even a modern poet or novelist 
 or painter, I frankly confess that the life of the world 
 is necessary, and the climate of my own country in- 
 tolerable to me for nine months out of the year. You 
 will say, or if you do not say you will think, that like 
 so many others I can see what is good yet shun it. 
 Yes: in that I am a man of my generation. In no age 
 more than in our own, I think, did men see more clearly 
 all that life might and ought to be, and fail more ut- 
 terly in making it even tolerable to themselves."
 
 GUILDEROY. 139 
 
 He had forgotten that he was speaking beyond the 
 comprehension of his companion; that she knew no- 
 thing of the moral phthisis of pessimism and the 
 chronic typhoid of unrest. He forgot that the country 
 meant to her only red roses, green grass, a boat on a 
 summer wave, a swing between two orchard trees, 
 pet doves flying in the sunshine, and a pet kid nibbling 
 flowers — all the freedom, the playtime and the sport of 
 eager healthful limbs, which it does mean to all inno- 
 cent and vigorous early life, whether of the sheep-fold, 
 of the cattle-byre, or of the human race. 
 
 She did not contradict him, merely because she did 
 not understand. 
 
 "My father lives in the country, and you always 
 say that he is very clever!" she observed after a long 
 silence. 
 
 "Your father is above humanity," said Guilderoy 
 impatiently. "Nay, forgive me, my dear; I have the 
 greatest honour and regard for Mr. Vernon, but he can- 
 not be taken as a rule for anybody but himself, for no 
 one else has his wonderful power of self-denial, coupled 
 with the contradictory power of sufficing to himself. 
 He is a nalurc d' elite. I am made of less fine clay. I 
 admit that I weary myself consumedly when I have 
 been a little while in my own company. I have been 
 too used to the movement of the world." 
 
 "I think I weary you, too," said the girl in her own 
 soul, but she did not utter her thought aloud. 
 
 As he spoke he started and half rose from his chair. 
 He saw a lady dressed in black from head to foot 
 coming through the people, followed by a tall footman 
 in amber-coloured livery laced with silver, and accom-
 
 I.jO GUILDEROY. 
 
 panied by several young men, and one large Russian 
 greyhound. 
 
 "Crood heavens!" Guilderoy murmured uncon- 
 sciously aloud, as he mechanically lifted his hat as she 
 passed him. 
 
 She acknowledged the salutation with a slight bow, 
 and passed on through the throng towards the piazza. 
 She did not even glance at his companion. 
 
 "Who is that beautiful woman?" asked Gladys. 
 
 "Guilderoy did not reply. He had grown pale, and 
 his eyes had a startled look. 
 
 "She knows you," the girl persisted innocently. 
 "Do tell me who she is?" 
 
 "It is the Duchess Soria," he replied. 
 
 "Is she one of those I am to imitate?" said the 
 child a little sadly. 
 
 "No one could ever be like her," said Guilderoy 
 hastily; and if his companion had had a little more ex- 
 perience in such matters, she would have heard in his 
 voice that tone with which a man never speaks but of 
 some woman whom he loves, or whom he at least re- 
 members tenderly that he has loved. 
 
 She did not understand, but she vaguely com- 
 prehended that he did not wish to speak more on the 
 subject. 
 
 Very soon afterwards Guilderoy suggested a return 
 to their gondola on the score that the evening was 
 chilly. When they reached his palace he stayed be- 
 hind to say a few Avords to the gondolier. The man 
 brought him word an hour later, in answer to his com- 
 mand, that the Duchess Soria was staying at the Palazzo 
 Contarini.
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 4 I 
 
 Throughout dinner he was abstracted and inatten- 
 tive. After dinner he paced the long drawing-rooms 
 from end to end impatiently, wondering how he should 
 escape the girl's observation, and go where he wanted 
 to go. 
 
 "Might we not go on the water again?" she asked 
 him wistfully. They often Avent out after dinner, when 
 the moon was full as it was this night; and she had an 
 uneasy sense that he was wearied and impatient of her 
 company. 
 
 "It is too old," he answered as in a reverie; and 
 he continued to pace up and down the chambers. 
 
 "Cold!" — it seemed to her as warm as a midsum- 
 mer evening in England. 
 
 "I think it is too cold for you," he answered im- 
 patiently. "If you would not mind, I would go out 
 alone." 
 
 Her ear was quick and fine, and caught the accent 
 of petulance at any constraint. With great self-con- 
 straint she forbore to notice it. 
 
 "Oh, pray go!" she said willingly. "I am rather 
 tired; I should be glad to rest in my room." 
 
 He did not give her credit for the effort because he 
 did not perceive it: he was only glad that she did not 
 oppose his departure. 
 
 "Good-night, dear," he said with real tenderness, 
 for he was grateful to her, and he kissed her fondly; 
 yet he felt irritated at the kind of obligation inferred 
 by the semi-apology made for his absence. 
 
 True, it was no more than courtesy would have 
 made him offer to any woman dependent on him for 
 society and companionship; but the sense that he had
 
 142 GUILDEROY. 
 
 to account for his actions irritated and weighed on him. 
 The sweetness and simplicity with which she accepted 
 his excuses did not soothe away the sense of subjection 
 which fretted him in making them. It is because men 
 feel the necessity to explain that they drop into the 
 habit of saying what is not true. Their explanations 
 cannot be always true; it is impossible that they should 
 be so. Wise is the woman who never insists on an ex- 
 planation which if given must be, in the nature of 
 things, either an offence to her or an untruth. 
 
 Perhaps more than half the happiness of life, whether 
 in love or marriage, consists in having learnt the art of 
 gliding over, as though it were unperceived, that which 
 we are not desired to perceive. That few women have 
 this delicate art, or possess the self-control and self- 
 negation which are required for its exercise, is a fact 
 which lies at the root of a great deal of human un- 
 happiness and disunion. 
 
 The innate delicacy of John Vernon's daughter sup- 
 plied the place of tact in her, and her mind was too 
 childlike and unsophisticated to harbour jealousy, how- 
 ever vague. 
 
 "He would not have chosen me if he had not pre- 
 ferred me to all others," she would no doubt have said 
 had any Mephistopheles been there to pour into her 
 ear self-doubts and the restlessness of suspicion. 
 
 But a vague feeling, which was the most womanlike 
 of any which she had hitherto felt, came over her; a 
 feeling older and sadder than her years. She thought 
 to herself wistfully, "Why did he want me with him if 
 he be not happy anyAvhere with me?"
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 43 
 
 It was the pathetic, unwise wonder of the woman 
 in a child's heart. 
 
 She heard one gondolier cry to the other, "Palazzo 
 Contarini," and the oars fell with a gentle splash into 
 the water. She watched the gondola as far as she 
 could follow it with her eyes. The moonlight fell full 
 on the canal, and it was visible until the curve by the 
 Rialto hid it from sight. The slow, soft, noiseless 
 movement, which had something amorous in its languor 
 and caress of the water, was as unlike the abrupt and 
 noisy movement of her boat over the grey, salt water 
 at home, as her present life was like her past. 
 
 Her elbows rested on the silk cushions which 
 covered the marble and her head rested on her hands; 
 her eyelashes were wet with tears, she could not very 
 well have said why except that the vague impatience 
 in his tone and the demand on her to be something 
 other than she was seemed to weigh on her heart with 
 a heavy sense of her own inefficiency to content him. 
 His affections were hers; he had said so a thousand 
 times, and he had proved it as far as a man can do so; 
 and yet she felt that he was disappointed in her, im- 
 patient of her, wanted her in some way unlike what 
 she was. 
 
 She withdrew from the window, and bade her 
 woman shut the casement, though the moon was pouring 
 its radiance through the chamber, as on Christabel's. 
 She was too young to feel jealousy, and too accustomed 
 to obedience to feel rebellious; yet a vague, unanalysed 
 pain was in her heart. Would he be long? she won- 
 dered.
 
 1 44 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 GuiLDEROY meantime went on with a quickly beating 
 heart to the water-gate of tlie Palazzo Contarini. 
 
 "Is it possible that I love her still?" he asked him- 
 self uneasily as his boat glided through the green 
 shadowy waters, through the deep black shadows, and 
 the glistening breadths of light where the moonbeams 
 fell. He had thought not. An hour before he would 
 have sworn that he did not. 
 
 The noble palace, turning its Gothic buttresses 
 and machicolations to the little canal of the Priuli, 
 towered above him as his gondola touched its water- 
 stairs. 
 
 "Take up my name," said Guilderoy to a servant 
 whom he recognised at the entrance. 
 
 He stood on the edge of the steps and waited. The 
 water flowed past him bronze-green in the full moon- 
 light with a melancholy and monotonous sound in its 
 ebb and flow. With one of the strange contradictions 
 of human temper he passionately regretted a privilege 
 which he had abandoned of his own accord; a time 
 when the servants of Beatrice Soria showed him into 
 her presence unannounced and sure of welcome. Of 
 his own free will he had broken off those terms of 
 privileged intimacy, and he knew well enough that he
 
 GUILDEROY. 145 
 
 had desired to do so before he had taken the resolve 
 to do it. And yet he regretted, and would have had 
 these privileges once more if he had been able to com- 
 mand them. He despised his own inconstancy, but he 
 could not control its regrets and its forebodings. 
 
 He was kept waiting some little time standing there 
 on the top stair, whilst the gondoliers murmured and 
 laughed with one another, and the reflections of the 
 lamps trembled in the water. Then the servant returned 
 and said: 
 
 "Will my lord follow me?" 
 
 Guilderoy followed him up the steep stone staircase 
 and across the ante-chamber into a large, vaulted, 
 painted chamber in which the severe beauties of old 
 Venetian art were blent with the luxurious litter of 
 modern taste. The room was faintly lighted from wax 
 candles burning in the wall sconces; the air was odorous 
 with the scent of many lilies of the valley. The 
 Duchess Soria was reclining on a couch at the further 
 end. As he advanced the room seemed to him endless, 
 the time consumed in passing through it appeared a 
 century. He had never in his life before known the 
 sensation of embarrassment: he knew it now. 
 
 She aided him in no way. She turned her head 
 and looked at him as he came towards her, but she 
 did not move until he was quite close to her. Then 
 she raised herself slightly on one elbow and put out 
 her left hand; the one nearer him. 
 
 "My dear friend," she said with a little smile, "let 
 me felicitate you. I saw liady Guilderoy on the Piazza. 
 She is very beautiful, but surely she is very young? A 
 beau defaut; yes, we always say that. It would be 
 
 CiUldcroy. /. iO
 
 146 GUILDEROY. 
 
 phis bean if when we were young we had wit enough 
 to know the happiness we enjoyed. When did you 
 come? When will you go away? I have this house 
 for a fortnight. Then I go to Paris, as yovi know is my 
 habit at this season." 
 
 Guilderoy murmured something, he knew not what. 
 He was so surprised and troubled by the easy indiffer- 
 ence of a reception so different to the scene of pas- 
 sionate reproaches for which he had been prepared, 
 that he could not recover his composure. He remained 
 standing, gazing down at her while the colour came 
 and went on his cheek. 
 
 She was unmoved; she had been for days prepared 
 for such a meeting. Women are always in extremes. 
 '\\nien they lose their self-control they lose it entirely 
 in a terrible abandonment to all their passions; when 
 they are mistress of themselves they are, on the con- 
 trary, wholly under the domination of their colder and 
 their more merciless instincts, and all the storms of 
 emotions assail their composure in vain. 
 
 "You never answered my letter," he said almost 
 involuntarily. It was what a boy would have said and 
 he knew it, and yet he could not restrain the words. 
 
 "What was the use of answering it?" she replied 
 in the same even and languid tone. "'Cosa fatta capo 
 ha.' What is done is done. You know the proverb." 
 
 "But it was not done, then!" 
 
 "What did you expect? That I should entreat you 
 for my sake to pause and change your mind? My dear 
 friend, you were very vain." 
 
 "Vain!" repeated Guilderoy. 
 
 He knew that he could not recall to her passions
 
 GUILDEROV. 147 
 
 and affections which he had vokmlarily thrown back on 
 her hands. He could not remind her of her past love 
 for him, when that love had been wholly incapable of 
 retaining his allegiance. 
 
 "You must have but a paltry opinion of me," he 
 said, with a flush of mortification. 
 
 "You are not heroic. Men are not heroes except in 
 their own eyes. You wished to marry. You married. 
 There is no more to be said. I hope it may agree with 
 you. It does not agree with most people." 
 
 Guilderoy was silent and embarrassed. For more 
 years than one his greatest emotion with regard to her 
 had been impatience and readiness to dispute with her. 
 He had told himself a thousand times that, without 
 difficulty or danger or novelty or any future good in it, 
 passion became wearisome, and had no power to hold 
 him. And yet, now that this passion was altogether of 
 the past, it allured him back to it. It assumed a 
 thousand hues which it had never worn before. 
 
 Had he in truth, he asked himself now, always loved 
 her, though he had disliked her exactions, her despotism, 
 and her caprice? If he had not, how was it that the 
 mere sound of her name, the mere touch of her hand, 
 had had power to awaken so much in him that he had 
 imagined was dead? 
 
 She was still reclining on a pile of silk cushions 
 and oriental stuffs; her arms were bare to the shoulder, 
 and with one hand she moved up and down the coils 
 of an emerald bracelet on the other arm. His eyes 
 followed the movement of the jewel up and down the 
 soft pale flesh, polished as ivory, where his lips so often
 
 148 GUILDEROY. 
 
 had lingered. Paradise was shut to him now, and he 
 had closed the doors himself, and he regretted it. 
 
 She was a very beautiful woman, then eight-and- 
 twenty years old. She was tall and exquisitely formed, 
 whilst her Hice had the rich hued fairness of Titian's 
 women, warm as a sun-fed fruit. She had the blood 
 of many different races in her veins, Arragonese, Sici- 
 lian, Venetian, and French, and she had had for many 
 years all the habits, the experiences, the wisdom, and 
 the charms of a woman accustomed to reign in the 
 greatest of great societies. Her marriage could not be 
 called a happy one, but it was not positively unhappy; 
 she enjoyed a large fortune wholly secured to her, and 
 Hugo Soria was wholly indifferent to what she did so 
 long as she preserved an outward agreement with him- 
 self; they appeared in public or at great courts together 
 a dozen times a year, and he and the world were satisfied. 
 
 She was not. She was a woman of strong passions 
 and warm affections, which the habits of the world had 
 not destroyed in her. All the heart she had — and it 
 was much— she had thrown into her relations with 
 Guilderoy; and though those relations had before his 
 rupture with her been often strained and marred by 
 scenes of dissension, they had yet remained the central 
 interest of her life. When the tidings of his marriage 
 had reached her she had received the greatest blow that 
 it is possible for a proud woman to receive. The 
 wildest desires of vengeance had passed through her 
 disordered thoughts, only resisted because they seemed 
 too melodramatic, too common, and too poor. All her 
 empire had crumbled into dust, and she suffered as 
 lowlier and more patient women could not do,
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 49 
 
 She had not answered his letter because it had 
 seemed to her that there was no answer possible. You 
 do not answer an insult unless you can avenge it. 
 She could not avenge this because she was a woman, 
 and a gentlewoman, and she was conscious moreover 
 that she had often strained his patience to breaking by 
 her exactions and her caprices; that he had excuse if 
 not justification in his effort to secure for his future 
 more peaceable and more fruitful attachments. 
 
 So she had replied nothing to his message of fare- 
 well; and when now she had been asked to receive 
 him she had consented, and had done so as a friend. 
 
 She had no distinct motive or project in her mind; 
 she was actuated partly by pride, which moved her to 
 conceal her wound, and partly by a vague desire not 
 to lose sight of his life altogether. 
 
 She broke the silence at last. 
 
 "Your wife is very lovely," she said again. "Quite 
 an English beauty, but with something more sensitive 
 in it and more suggestive than there is in most English 
 girls' faces. Is she facile? Because you are not, my 
 dear friend, and in marriage it is extremely necessary 
 that one at least should be so. She is a child, you say? 
 Yes, I see she is a child at present, but she will not be 
 always a child; and in marriage so very often one is 
 so inconveniently in love for a long time while the 
 other has forgotten and rebels." 
 
 Guilderoy gave an impatient gesture. He had not 
 come there to discuss the philosophy of marriage with 
 the wife of Soria. 
 
 "You do not like to talk about her?" said the 
 Duchess.
 
 150 CUITJ)F.ROY. 
 
 "There is nothing to talk about; she is very young, 
 and she has seen nothing of the world." 
 
 "The real ingenue? It is so strange, but men of 
 the world are so often enamoured of that type; and 
 yet there are few things more tiresome than a mind 
 which is incapable of sympathy, because it has no 
 knowledge and no experience. Some women are tire- 
 some like that all their lives — they are the good 
 women ! " 
 
 She laughed a little, and added: 
 
 "I will come and see her to-morrow. What hour 
 suits her?" 
 
 Guilderoy coloured. He wished to Heaven that 
 they should never meet, and yet it was impossible to 
 prevent it; and perhaps it was merely a folly on his 
 part to feel that sensitiveness about it. The world was 
 full of such meetings. 
 
 "Any hour you will like to name; I will bring her 
 to you," he said, with a visible reluctance which his 
 companion did not choose to observe. 
 
 "To-morrow, then, at five." 
 
 Guilderoy bowed. He was thinking to himself — it 
 must be that she cares for someone else, or she could 
 never be so cold? 
 
 A swift and hateful suspicion flashed through his 
 mind also. Was it possible that she was in real truth 
 indiflerent because already she had replaced him? Was 
 that the explanation of her silence, of her apparent for- 
 giveness? Six months and more had gone by since 
 their last meeting. There was time — more than time 
 — for a woman of the Avorld to have substituted one 
 sentiment for another.
 
 GUILDEROY. I 5 I 
 
 He hated the thought. It seemed impossible to 
 him that the love she had borne him could have al- 
 ready gone elsewhere; and yet had not his own passion 
 faded and been false to her? Had he any title to ex- 
 pect from her a constancy which he had not given? 
 
 He sat beside her embarrassed and mute; and she 
 watched him under her dreamy long-lashed eyelids. A 
 great depression came over him like a weight of lead; 
 something seemed suddenly to have gone out of his 
 life and left it blank. For many months he had been 
 used to the thoughts of this Avoman wholly devoted to 
 himself, and suffering from his absence and his incon- 
 stancy. He had rebuked himself and hated himself 
 for what had been in his own eyes the cruelty of his 
 desertion of her. In a passionate scene he would have 
 been at his ease, because he would have had what he 
 expected, what he was used to; but before this cool, 
 languid, half- friendly, half-hostile reception of him by 
 a woman whom he had known alternately furious or 
 tender, exquisitely devoted or violently dominant, he 
 was at a loss what to do or what to say. He longed 
 to fall at her feet and implore her pardon, but he felt 
 afraid lest it should seem to her a greater insult than 
 the original offence. If she chose to treat his marriage 
 as a thing without import or interest to her, it was not 
 for him to force on her memories which should remind 
 her that it had been an infidelity to her which she had 
 every right to resent and to condemn. 
 
 She had played with him often when he was really 
 hers; she had created his jealousy and irritated his 
 temper; she had often been way^vard, despotic, and 
 disposed to overstrain the great power which she had
 
 152 GUILDEROY. 
 
 at one time possessed. At the beginning his love had 
 been much more passionate than hers, but soon the 
 proportions had been reversed, and gradually, as years 
 went on, it had become on her side much greater than 
 on his own. She had allov/ed her heart to be drawn 
 into what she had once intended should be only a 
 pastime, and she had, with all the fractiousness of 
 passion, set her soul more and more on her kingdom 
 as she felt that its sceptre was more and more likely 
 to slide with time from her grasp. She had really 
 loved him; and it was the knowledge of that which, 
 when he had thought of her, had moved him to the 
 pain of remorse. 
 
 And now he found that all his remorse had been 
 needless, all his self-reproaches the exaggerated ap- 
 prehensions of vanity; for it Avas evident that of all 
 indifferent matters his marriage had been the most in- 
 different to this woman, who for five years had seemed 
 to live only through his love! 
 
 A wave of hot anger rose over his soul. He re- 
 gretted his visit to her. He felt that he was insigni- 
 ficant in her eyes, and he longed to reveal to her a 
 thousand things which it was impossible for him even 
 to hint at, since she chose to ignore all their past re- 
 lations. He could not blame her; he had no possible 
 right to do so. He was aware that most men in his 
 place would have been grateful to her for passing over 
 with so much lightness a difficult and embarrassing 
 position. He knew that he ought to be thankful for 
 her forbearance and her indifference, and yet he felt 
 that he would have preferred that she should have up- 
 braided him, reviled him, struck him, done anything to
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 53 
 
 him rather than tell him in that tranquil mode to bring 
 his wife to see her. 
 
 "Women have no real feeling," he thought furiously; 
 and if she had met him with reproaches he would have 
 said "Women have no comprehension!" 
 
 It was one of those situations in which the man 
 must always be irritated with the woman, let her do 
 what she may, because, as he is conscious of having 
 acted ill to her, her forgiveness or her invective must 
 alike appear a rebuke to him. If she had indeed met 
 him with any of that constancy and fervour of passion 
 which had tired him in her, she would have reconciled 
 him to himself. As it was, he felt, with passionate an- 
 noyance at his own weakness, that it was quite possible 
 for him to become in the future as much in love with 
 her again as he had been five years before. He rose 
 abruptly, being afraid of what he might be betrayed 
 into if he sat much longer beside her in the silence of 
 this flower-scented, dimly lighted, painted chamber, 
 with no sound on their ear except the ripple of the 
 Avater below the windows, or the distant cry of some 
 passing gondolier. He had had many affections in his 
 life, but in some ways he had cared more for Bea- 
 trice Soria than for any other woman, and cared 
 longer. Now that he was again in her presence, it 
 seemed strange and unnatural that they should meet 
 and part as mere acquaintances. He was a man of 
 tender heart if of variable passions, and he could not 
 wholly restrain some of the emotion which he felt. 
 
 "You will, at least, allow me to be always your 
 friend?" he murmured, as he bent over her hand.
 
 154 CUII.DEROY. 
 
 "Why not?" she replied, with a charmed sweetness 
 in the words; but they were wholly calm, and had no 
 answei'ing emotion in them. 
 
 He held her hand a moment, then touched it with 
 his lips and left her. The heavy tapestry hanging be- 
 fore the door closed on him. Alone, she rose from her 
 couch with the feverish impetuosity of some wounded 
 animal, and paced to and fro the length of the chamber 
 with quick, nervous, agitated steps. 
 
 Strong passions and deep pain, scorn, regret, and 
 desire, and the wrath of a proud nature under insult, 
 all which she had successfully repressed and hidden in 
 his presence, over-mastered her in solitude. 
 
 As she heard the sound of the oars in the water as 
 his gondola left the palace steps, she threw herself face 
 forward on the cushions of her couch once more, and 
 with her head bowed on her beautiful bare arms she 
 wept bitterly. 
 
 She was a woman of the world, and she had worn 
 the mask of the worldly: partly from pride, partly from 
 desire to renew an association which would perforce be 
 severed for ever were any angry words exchanged. 
 She knew that the impetuosity and dominance of her 
 temper had wearied out a love which she had prized 
 more than any other she had ever enjoyed, and she had 
 subjugated her will and subdued her sense of passionate 
 resentment, to make them the slaves of her purpose and 
 her desire to regain her lost influence. 
 
 But the reaction was great, and when alone she 
 had no composure to affect, no indifference to simulate, 
 she abandoned herself to the convulsive and unrestrained
 
 CUILDEROV. I 5 5 
 
 grief of a woman who is only sensible ihat she has, for 
 the time at least, lost all which has made existence sweet 
 to her. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 The next day at five o'clock he was not at his 
 ease, and Gladys was timid and silent. The Duchess 
 Sorla alone was at her ease; full of charm and anima- 
 tion, graciously kind, and most brilliant, as she could 
 be when she chose. Nothing could be more admirable 
 than her manner to the young girl, and Gladys looked 
 and listened with a vague perception of what he had 
 meant by his warning to herself on the Piazzetta. 
 
 She could never be like this exquisite woman with 
 her perfect grace, her low sweet laugh, her easy glid- 
 ing from one language to another, her delicate touches 
 of wit which just brushed its subject and left an epigram 
 on it, as though her lips dropped diamonds like the 
 queen's of the fairy story. The sense of her own in- 
 feriority made the girl twice as shy and twice as self- 
 conscious as she had ever been before. All the child- 
 like frankness and courage which had been so naturally 
 hers before her marriage had evaporated. She was 
 almost mute, and blushed painfully whenever she was 
 forced to speak. 
 
 Guilderoy felt passionately angered against her. 
 
 "She will make the other think that I have married 
 a fool!" he said bitterly to himself, with the same rest- 
 less irritating consciousness that a man feels who has
 
 156 GUILDEROY. 
 
 bought a jewel at great price, and sees it subject to 
 the contemplation of a supreme connoisseur in gems, 
 only to be condemned as worthless. 
 
 There was a look in the eyes of Beatrice Soria 
 which made him writhe; not quite derision, not quite 
 contempt, but cruelly hinting both. 
 
 "Is it for this you have left me?" said the lustrous 
 and languid glance of those eyes in which he had once 
 seen all his heaven, and was so tempted to see it still. 
 
 "What inferior creatures we are to women!" thought 
 Guilderoy. "We are fools enough to be troubled by 
 what seems to us an equivocal situation, a want of 
 decency or dignity, but a woman carries off any false 
 position with the most consummate ease; she is never 
 at a loss for brilliant conventionalities, she is never 
 shaken by a consciousness of inopportune memories; 
 you may have left her chamber half-an-hour before, but 
 she will present you with perfect self-possession to her 
 acquaintances in her drawing-rooms!" 
 
 If she had refused to receive his wife, he would 
 have accused her of jealousy, and of the desire to 
 create a painful scene; he would have said that women 
 carried so far too much earnestness into passing pas- 
 sions, and desired to give permanence to intimacies 
 which should be evanescent. 
 
 But he, who thought that he knew the whole 
 gamut of female emotions, was perplexed to explain to 
 himself, now, the motive and the character of her feelings. 
 
 There was an unaffected kindliness and sweetness 
 in her manner to Gladys which was the perfection of 
 acting, if acting it were. The young girl was bewitched 
 and fascinated by it; and, when they had left the
 
 GUILDF.ROV. 157 
 
 Palazzo Contarini, was full of the expressions of her 
 admiration, to which he found it somewhat difficult to 
 reply. 
 
 For one moment, as they glided over the water 
 homeward, he felt an impulse to tell her the story of 
 his relations to the Duchess Soria. He felt that it 
 would create a certain confidence and clearness between 
 them; that it would enable her to guide her own con- 
 duct and understand his own in the future; but the 
 words were difficult to utter. He had the intimate 
 sense which every man who is a gentleman feels so 
 strongly, that to speak of a woman's passion for him- 
 self is a cowardice and a vulgarity. He felt that he 
 should repent it for ever after if he were to be guilty 
 of such an offence against the unwritten laws of honour. 
 Moreover, he was conscious that he could not speak of 
 her with total indifference, because he was not indif- 
 ferent. And then, again, what would Gladys com- 
 prehend? She was such a child: she would probably 
 be disgusted, alarmed, and wholly unable to under- 
 stand either the confession or his motives for making 
 it. So he kept silence, and merely responded with ac- 
 quiescence to her repeated interrogations and affirma- 
 tions of enthusiastic admiration of the grace, the beauty, 
 and the charm of her great rival. 
 
 "You will be as charming yourself when you know 
 a little more of the world," he replied, with a touch of 
 impatience at the last. 
 
 "I shall never be like that," said the girl de- 
 spondently. 
 
 "You do not want to be; you are young; youth has 
 its own charm."
 
 158 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "But you told me I wanted to improve so much?" 
 
 "If I did I was a fool. You need not always take 
 seriously what I say, my dear. Men often have bo 11 lades; 
 they are only spoilt children. Women are very unwise, 
 and are always very unhappy, who attach too much 
 importance to our idle words." 
 
 Gladys was silent. She was wondering how she 
 was to know when he wished to have his words taken 
 seriously and when he did not. Her father's clear, 
 limpid, straightforward speech had always been so in- 
 telligible to her. She had had no experience of the 
 caprices and involutions of speech used only to conceal 
 the speaker's thoughts, or aimlessly to discharge the 
 doubts and the desires at war in the speaker's mind. 
 But her intelligence and the delicacy of her apprehen- 
 sions told her that in some way her praise of the 
 Duchess Soria was distasteful to him. She talked of 
 her no more. 
 
 After leaving the Palace they had gone down the 
 Grand Canal and out towards the Lido. Venice was at 
 her most beautiful moment (unless, indeed, daybreak 
 be not still more beautiful), the sun was setting behind 
 the city, and the golden glow suffused the water, the 
 sky, the earth, and made the ships and the isles, and 
 the buildings of the Schiavone look like the translucent 
 images seen in a mirage. 
 
 Venice is the heaven of lovers; yet Guilderoy al- 
 ready felt that he had ceased to be a lover as he 
 drifted through the sparkling sunshine or the starry 
 nights by the side of his young companion. When 
 there is absolutely no response, passion soon grows 
 tired alike of its demands and of its persuasions. He
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 59 
 
 had been used to women who studied, stimulated, 
 caressed, and tempted him. She was too young to do 
 the first of these, and too ignorant of her own charms 
 and powers to do the others. He remained wholly 
 unaware of the mingled and contradictory emotions 
 with Avhich this mute soul regarded him. The eloquent 
 expression of passion is more than half its attraction, 
 and the devotion of the heart is useless unless the in- 
 telligence is sufficiently awake to unite it to influence. 
 
 "I shall not see Madame Soria again?" she said, as 
 the gondola drifted up the canal an hour later, and 
 passed the Contarini Palace, in which the windows 
 were all lighted a giorno. 
 
 "Why should you want to see her?" he replied 
 with petulance. "I thought you were shy of strangers. 
 Be quite sure, however, that you will see her, over and 
 over again, in the world." 
 
 He turned his head away as they neared the lighted 
 palace; he hated to think that others were there beside 
 Beatrice Sorla, others perchance who had succeeded to 
 the same privileges and the same intimacy which had 
 once been his. 
 
 He had voluntarily abandoned them, but he re- 
 regretted them bitterly now; even as a man might in a 
 fit of passion fling a collar of pearls into the green 
 water of the canal, and regret his act when it had sunk 
 for ever out of sight under the seaweed and the sand. 
 
 "Do you intend to be mute for ever, as you were 
 before her, before all my friends?" he said irritably, as 
 they passed under San Giorgio Maggiore, feeling forced 
 to vent his irritation in some way. "I really cannot 
 understand you, my dear; you have spirit enough when
 
 100 GUlLDEROV. 
 
 you choose. Do you mean lo sit like a country mouse 
 in all London and Paris drawing-rooms? Do you mean 
 lo make no effort to attain the tone and the air of the 
 world you have to live in? You will make me supremely 
 absurd if you remain a mere country girl. In your 
 present position " 
 
 He checked himself, for his good breeding made 
 him conscious that he could not reproach or remind 
 her of social advantages which she had received from 
 himself. 
 
 Gladys' eyes filled with tears. Whenever her father 
 had reproved her it had been with gentle gravity 
 and reasonableness, not with petulant irritation like 
 this. 
 
 "For Heaven's sake do not do that!" cried Guilde- 
 roy, angry with himself, and so still more angered 
 against her. '"■ Les femmes pleureuses are my abhorrence. 
 If there be anything on earth I have avoided all my 
 life it is tears!" 
 
 "I beg your pardon," said the girl coldly. There 
 was a menace he did not like in the tone, and he said 
 nothing. 
 
 "Will she not be facile a vivre?" he thought un- 
 easily; it was the quality he most prized: he had never 
 met with it. His sister did not possess it; Beatrice 
 Soria had not possessed it, nor had any one of the many 
 women he had loved; it seemed to him the one good 
 thing upon earth, chiefly because he had always sought 
 and never found it. And, indeed, in a sense he was 
 right in his estimate, if his estimate sprang from his 
 own selfishness. Of what use is it for those who love 
 us lo say that they do so if they cannot bear with our
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 6 1 
 
 infirmities, pardon our weaknesses, and make the at- 
 mosphere of our lives sweet and clear? 
 
 "If you would like to go to England," he said ab- 
 ruptly, "I have no objection. You can go to the first 
 Drawing-room instead of the second, and we can go to 
 Ladysrood for Whitsuntide. Your father would be 
 pleased, no doubt." 
 
 The warmth with which she thanked him made him 
 feel very insincere towards her. If she could have 
 known his motives for being desirous to leave Venice, 
 she would have seen that consideration of her wishes or 
 of John Vernon's pleasure had very little to do with it. 
 
 But ignorance, that kindest friend of trustful natures, 
 kept her from such knowledge, and she was grateful 
 and happy. 
 
 On the morrow he sent a letter to the Palazzo Con- 
 tarini, in which he expressed his regret that he was 
 recalled suddenly to England, and must thus lose the 
 honour of seeing the Duchess Soria again in Venice. 
 It flattered Beatrice Soria to learn that he should have 
 left Venice with so much precipitation. 
 
 Men only flee from what they fear, not from what 
 is indifferent. 
 
 "What is the use of his flying from me?" she 
 thought. "The world — our world — is so narrow; we 
 must meet again and again in it." 
 
 He had killed what was best and warmest and 
 sweetest in her, as men do without thinking how they 
 destroy the better qualities of women. They think that 
 they have full title to a woman's fealty and forbearance, 
 though they may have shown neither forbearance nor 
 fealty themselves, and they demand from her super- 
 
 Guilderoy. /. II
 
 1 62 GUILDEROY. 
 
 human virtues at the very hour that they do things to 
 her which would make an angel a fiend. There arose 
 in her now, in the place of her warm impetuous pas- 
 sions, a colder and unkinder passion, which had the 
 patience to wait and the wisdom to affect tranquillity. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 "And Lady Guilderoy, what is she like?" asked an 
 old friend of Lady Sunbury, in a crowded London 
 ball-room. 
 
 "She is a charming child, but such a child!" she 
 replied with a sigh, 
 
 "You have forgiven her, then?" asked Lord Aubrey, 
 who was standing near. 
 
 "There is nothing to forgive. Your advice was 
 sound. It would have been very stupid to quarrel. But 
 if you ask me whether I believe the marriage is for 
 Guilderoy's ultimate peace, I do not." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "For a thousand reasons. You always repent at 
 leisure when you marry in haste. Then she is too 
 young. A great charm you say? Yes, but sometimes 
 a very costly one. She will only be happy in the country, 
 and he is only happy in the world. Is he in love, do 
 you say? My impression is that he is not. She is!" 
 
 "That is ominous, and early. If he is not, why on 
 earth did he marry?" 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 Lady Sunbury moved her fan in a gesture suggestive
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 63 
 
 of her impotence to account for the extravagancies of 
 any man. "Evelyn is very capricious and has coups de 
 tete which are often wholly unaccountable. This was a 
 roup de tete. Now that he has outgrown its momentary 
 excitement I think he looks at his wife and wonders 
 what he was about." 
 
 "A happy prospect for her." 
 
 " On s'habitue a tout," said Lady Sunbury with 
 little sympathy in troubles of the soul. "He will always 
 be very kind to her — Evelyn can be unkind to nothing 
 — and he will be very courteous and generous: if she 
 be reasonable she will not want more; she can enjoy 
 herself in any way she likes. I hope she will be 
 reasonable." 
 
 "How old did you say she was?" 
 
 "Seventeen, I think." 
 
 "It is not the age of reason," said Lord Aubrey, 
 and as he wandered away through the rooms he felt a 
 vague pity for this young girl whom he had never seen, 
 who was to be content with the courtesy of her hus- 
 band, and with the power of spending money. Most 
 women wanted no more, it was true, but here and there 
 was a woman who did want more, and who having no 
 more was wretched. 
 
 Aubrey attended the Drawing-room a few days 
 later with some feeling of curiosity. Presentations 
 seldom interested him. He did not care much for 
 women. But this time he looked on with interest, as 
 Lady Sunbury presented her young sister-in-law. 
 
 "She may be a child, but she has the sang-froid of 
 race in her," he thought, as he saw Gladys come before 
 the throne with the same calmness with which she had
 
 164 GUILDEROY. 
 
 fronted the Cherriton lads on the Ladysrood moors. 
 She scarcely looked her best, because the Court dress 
 was too stately for her extreme youth, and the Guilderoy 
 jewels seemed too many and too heavy for her small 
 head and her childlike shoulders to sustain; but she 
 carried lierself with perfect grace and repose. She was 
 undisturbed by the novelty of the scene and the magni- 
 ficence of the crowd; and her cheeks were as cool, and 
 her pulse as even, as though she had been in the porch 
 under the apple boughs and the ivy of Christslea. 
 
 "There is the Princess royal in your lovely Perdita," 
 said Aubrey to Guilderoy. 
 
 Guilderoy assented with a smile: he was proud of 
 her and, for the moment, content. Occasionally, as his 
 sister had guessed, he surveyed what he had done with 
 a sense of wonder and vague uneasiness, half troubled 
 even whilst half pleased to find her always before him. 
 But he was well satisfied that she should be his as he 
 heard the murmurs of admiration around him. 
 
 "I do not wonder any longer that you married her," 
 said Aubrey. 
 
 "I wonder myself still sometimes," said Guilderoy. 
 "But I am disposed to hope that it was the one wise 
 act of a not wise life." 
 
 Aubrey was silent. The wisdom of it did not seem 
 to him so apparent as the temptation to it. He admired 
 his cousin in many things, but in others he blamed, and 
 in others he doubted him. "He has been a spoiled 
 child of pleasure and of women so long," he thought, 
 "will he understand the fragility of this new plaything, 
 or care for it if he do understand it?" 
 
 "You are thinking that I shall ill-treat her," said
 
 GUILDER OY. 1 65 
 
 Guilderoy, annoyed by what he fancied the other's 
 silence meant. "I assure you every one has prophesied 
 the same, even her father and my sister. I do not 
 know why; I have not been in the habit of ill-treating 
 women." 
 
 "You have been in the habit of leaving them," said 
 Aubrey. "Sometimes that comes to the same thing." 
 
 They were at that moment separated by the crush, 
 and Guilderoy was spared the trouble of denial or 
 reply. 
 
 Aubrey had at no time very much patience with his 
 cousin. Laborious and self-denying, strongly patriotic 
 and accepting a vast amount of responsibilities which 
 he hated because he believed them not to be con- 
 scientiously avoided, he viewed with impatience the 
 useless brilliancy of Guilderoy's intelligence, its scholarly 
 indolence and its ingenious sophisms. The very inward 
 sense which he sometimes could not help feeling that 
 Guilderoy was right enough in his easy-going pessimism 
 and his epicurean choice of the paths of life, only served 
 to make him the more impatient of a man who was 
 theoretically so selfish and yet practically so wise. 
 
 "Evelyn has been so spoilt by fortune," Lady Sun- 
 bury said to him once. 
 
 "No doubt," replied Aubrey, but in himself he felt 
 that circumstances had conspired to spoil himself quite 
 as much, but had not similarly succeeded, because his 
 natural indolence had been striven against by a strong 
 sense of the responsibilities of position. 
 
 "I do not know that I have done any good," he 
 thought honestly enough, "but at least I have not been 
 idle."
 
 1 66 GUILDEROY. 
 
 He went home from the Drawing-room that day 
 with a vague sense of pity for the girl he had called 
 Perdita. His pity was no doubt absurd enough; the 
 world would have told him so certainly, and yet he 
 could not avoid the sense of it. 
 
 "Evelyn will not make her happy, because he will 
 not be happy with her," he thought. "We cannot give 
 what we do not possess." 
 
 "I regret to disagree with you," he said an hour 
 later to his cousin Hilda in her own house. "I am 
 charmed with his wife, but the marriage will not be 
 happy; she will not be contented with dressing exqui- 
 sitely and spending money." 
 
 "Then she will be very ungrateful," said Lady Sun- 
 bury, whose pride was pinched day and night by want 
 of adequate means to meet the demands of her posi- 
 tion. "I seriously believe that the only one grave and 
 hopeless ill in life is want of money; it brings about 
 all others, it poisons every hour, and it makes good 
 temper absolutely unattainable. This girl is a baby, 
 and sentimental. She will possibly cry her eyes out 
 because he looks five minutes too long at another 
 woman. But when that stage has passed, as it always 
 passes, she will grow sensible of the advantages of 
 always having her bills paid uathout question." 
 
 "That will depend on whether her temperament is 
 susceptible of delight in running up bills." 
 
 "Every woman has that temperament. Pray do not 
 irritate me any further. I opposed the marriage ab- 
 solutely so long as it was of any use to do so; it was 
 an absurd one, a caprice, a folly. I have only ac- 
 cepted it to prevent the world talking, and because I
 
 GUILDEROY. 167 
 
 cannot quarrel for life with the head of my family; but 
 I do not profess to approve of it, and if she is to be 
 made into a sentimental heroine as a femme inconiprise 
 I shall detest her. She has had an immense, a most 
 amazing, piece of good fortune, I beseech you do not 
 irritate me by pitying her for it!" 
 
 "I certainly will not irritate you," said Aubrey, who 
 knew that she could irritate herself unaided. 
 
 Lady Sunbury, though she had become reconciled, 
 believed no more in the wisdom of this marriage than 
 she had done when she had been its most dogged 
 opponent. 
 
 "I know him," she continued to her cousin, "and I 
 know that he is one of those men who, without in the 
 least intending it, make women as wretched ultimately 
 as they make them radiantly happy at the onset. My 
 brother has not a harsh fibre in his whole nature (he 
 says that I absorbed them all), but whether I did or not 
 he has none; yet I am quite sure that he renders every 
 woman he loves much more unhappy than many colder 
 and worse men do." 
 
 "Because he ceases to care so soon?" 
 
 "Partly that, and partly because there is that about 
 Evelyn which women cannot forget. He will not under- 
 stand why they do not forget as completely and as 
 easily as he does, and so there is wretchedness." 
 
 "That was with his amours, but surely here " 
 
 "His marriage is in feeling only an amour too; only 
 an amourette. When he has come to the end of it he 
 will be supremely astonished to find that it leaves 
 restraints and obligations upon him which amourettes 
 have not."
 
 1 68 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "Perhaps he will get rid of them also." 
 
 "You cannot get rid of marriage. Unless your wife 
 disgraces herself you can never get rid of it." 
 
 "In our day it is at least worn lightly if not got rid 
 of, yet it is always there," said Aubrey. "You are like 
 a prisoner who has given his parole and goes wherever 
 he pleases; he walks and wanders where he will, and 
 he can saunter, or sit, or sleep, or swim; and the sun 
 and the rain fall on him, and he sees all the living 
 world and the wide horizon, but he has given his parole 
 to go back, and it is all poisoned for him." 
 
 "In marriage at least the parole is not often kept," 
 said Lady Sunbury. 
 
 At six o'clock Aubrey went and called on his cou- 
 sin's wife in the great Palladian mansion which had 
 ever since it was built been the town house of the 
 Guilderoy family. It was a noble house in its way, 
 with a staircase of black and white marble, and ceilings 
 by Italian artists of the period, and stately reception- 
 rooms which had seen many generations of fine gentle- 
 men and fine ladies pass through them like painted 
 shadows on a wall. He found the girl alone in a little 
 cabinet hung with French paintings of the Watteau and 
 Lancret time, and in which every chair, table, and con- 
 sole and gueridon were now heaped with roses. She 
 looked pale amidst the brilliant flowers and the sparkling 
 pictures; her eyes had still the dreamy, half-awake look 
 which had fascinated Guilderoy, but they had a look 
 of fatigue as well. 
 
 "I hope you will let me greet you as a relative as 
 I could not do at the palace just now," said Lord 
 Aubrey; and he bent his head and lightly touched her
 
 GUILDEROY. 169 
 
 cheek with his Hps. He pitied her intensely; it was 
 wholly absurd that he should do so, and he knew it, 
 and yet he could not resist the impulse of compassion. 
 He could understand all that she felt of bewilderment, 
 of fatigue, of shyness, and of apprehension before this 
 new life which had descended on her with such startling 
 suddenness and splendour. 
 
 "You must have thought us all boors not to come 
 to your marriage," he continued, "but it was your 
 father's and Evelyn's desire to have none present. We 
 did not even know on what day it was. I am so glad, 
 my dear, that I am the first to see you. We must be 
 great friends, as well as cousins. Will you allow me 
 that honour?" 
 
 She smiled. Her smile was still the spontaneous, 
 unstudied, glad smile of a child. She felt grateful to 
 Aubrey, and the sound of his voice and the pressure 
 of his hand seemed to her full of kindness and pro- 
 tection. 
 
 "Did I do right to-day, do you know, at the Court?" 
 she asked him. "I think he was satisfied, was he 
 not?" 
 
 "If he were not," began Aubrey, — then checked 
 himself, and answered quietly, "You did perfectly, and 
 it was a great ordeal; it was so crowded. You have 
 never seen anything of this London world of ours, I 
 think?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "I want to go to Ladysrood. They brought me all 
 these roses to make it feel like the country. He told 
 them to do it, but it is not the least like the country. 
 I should die if I stayed here."
 
 170 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Aubrey smiled. 
 
 "This time next year you will tell me there is no 
 place like London. All women say so." 
 
 "I shall not. It is noisy, dark, and ugly." 
 
 "It is not beautiful, certainly; but there are many 
 beautiful things to be found in it, and this house is 
 one of them. You will get fond of it in time. At 
 present I daresay you feel like a caged bird. Your jewels 
 tired you, did they not, to-day?" 
 
 "Yes, they were very heavy." 
 
 Aubrey sighed a little as she spoke. 
 
 "So is rank." 
 
 She looked at him with curiosity. 
 
 "You are the Lord Aubrey, are you not?" she asked. 
 
 "What do you mean, my dear? No one else has 
 that title, if you mean that?" 
 
 "No; I mean that I have heard my father praise 
 you. I have heard him say that if llie English nobles 
 were all like you they would have no reason to fear 
 the Deluge." 
 
 "That was very good of your fiither," replied Aubrey, 
 pleased and touched. "I suspect the Deluge would 
 come all the same if all the saints and heroes of Christen- 
 dom filled our order." 
 
 "He does not think that it would." 
 
 "He is happy enough to live out of the sphere of 
 practical politics," said Aubrey, witli a smile. 
 
 "For heaven's sake do not speak to her of poli- 
 tics," said Guilderoy, entering the room. "She has a 
 terrible bias towards them already, and I insist that 
 lovely women should have nothing to do with social 
 questions."
 
 GUILDEROY. I 7 I 
 
 "Her roses suit her better, certainly," replied 
 Aubrey, as his eyes rested on her with a wistful con- 
 templation. 
 
 "That child will be very unhappy if she loves him, 
 and probably equally unhappy if she does not," he 
 thought, as he took his leave, and went on his way to 
 the House of Commons. 
 
 She interested him. He saw much farther into her 
 nature after half-an-hour's conversation with her than 
 Guilderoy had seen of it after three months of the most 
 intimate association with her. 
 
 "He has certainly given her everything that a man 
 can give," thought Aubrey, "and yet I suspect he will 
 never give her the one thing which such a woman as 
 she will become will chiefly want." 
 
 Aubrey had little time or inclination in his career 
 to study the intricacies and fragilities of women's tem- 
 peraments, but he was a man of quick sensibilities and 
 of swift penetration. 
 
 He believed in feeling, though the world thought 
 him a cynic. Politics had absorbed most of his own 
 life, and the emotions had not enjoyed much play in it. 
 But perhaps for that reason his sympathies, when they 
 were aroused, had a great freshness in them. People 
 in general were afraid of him, for his wit could be 
 bitter and unsparing; but children or dogs were never 
 afraid.
 
 172 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 "Well, my dear, what do you think of Ufe?" said 
 John Vernon to his daughter, when they went to Ladys- 
 rood for Whitsuntide. 
 
 GUidys was standing in his httle study. She wore 
 a grey dress with a broad hat, with long ostrich feathers 
 drooping over it; she had a silver belt round her waist, 
 long gloves, and one very large pearl at her throat, 
 with a few pale tea roses. It was only two months 
 since she had left Christslea, and yet she looked to 
 him utterly changed; as changed as though she had 
 been absent for years. She hesitated a little and 
 coloured. It would have been wholly impossible to her 
 to find words for the curious mingling of great joy and 
 of apprehensive disappointment which her marriage had 
 brought to her: the vague sense which she was pos- 
 sessed with that love was at once bitter and sweet. 
 
 John Vernon saw the embarrassment she felt, and 
 regretted it. He would have been better satisfied by 
 some youthful outburst of undoubting enthusiasm and 
 ecstasy. 
 
 "You have quite a look of the world already," he 
 continued, with a smile. "What a toilette of Paris will 
 do for a child! If it were not too rude to a peeress, I 
 would tell you, my dear, that you are actually grown! 
 And so you wished for our rough seas and leaden skies,
 
 GUILDEROY. I "] 3 
 
 even in Venice? That was very sweet and faithful of 
 you. And yet I think I would sooner hear that you 
 had never thought of us there." 
 
 "I should have been very thankless not to think," 
 she said, still with a heightened colour on her cheeks. 
 "Things seemed so much simpler, too, when I was here," 
 she added, after a little pause. 
 
 "No doubt they did, since you saw nothing but the 
 poultry and the pigeons," said her father with a smile: 
 whilst he thought, "It is very early for your difficulties 
 to have begun, my poor little princess!" 
 
 "In what way does your life seem to have any per- 
 plexity?" he asked aloud; "and when you feel any do 
 you not take your puzzles to Guilderoy?" 
 
 "I think it would tease him if I did." 
 
 "Ah! Then don't do it, dear. Never worry any 
 man. We are fretful creatures, with more nerves than 
 women, though we pretend to have none. My dear 
 Gladys, I was so much opposed to your marriage while 
 you were so young, because I knew that it would not 
 be only a garden of roses for you. There are the roses 
 no doubt, but there are the briars too. You have the 
 pleasures of life, my love, and you must pay for them 
 with the pains. What is it pains you most?" 
 
 "I am not sure" — and he saw that she was speak- 
 ing the truth — "I am not sure that anything pains me. 
 Only I fancy that I am not quite what he wants, what 
 he wishes." 
 
 "So soon!" murmured Vernon with a sigh. "I 
 daresay that is imagination, my dear," he said, repressing 
 what he felt. 
 
 "When the first ardours of love subside they always
 
 174 GUILDEROV. 
 
 leave a vague disappointment because the fever heat 
 of them cannot be sustained. You are now feeling the 
 reaction which follows them as invariably as evening 
 follows day. If you wish to be really happy, my child, 
 do not doubt and do not analyse. Self-examination is 
 very apt to grow morbid. It has its uses, but it may 
 very easily have its abuses too. You have the faults 
 of youth and inexperience, no doubt, but I do not 
 think they are very grave ones, and they will mend 
 with time." 
 
 She was silent some moments. Then she took off 
 her hat and pushed back the hair which hung over her 
 forehead. 
 
 "Father, do tell me," she said in a very low voice, 
 "how shall I ever know if he really loves me?" 
 
 "My dear child!" 
 
 John Vernon was startled and dismayed; he had 
 had his own doubts as to the ultimate happiness of the 
 union, or rather he had had no doubt of it, but a pro- 
 found conviction that it would bring little happiness to 
 either of them in the end. But he had not expected 
 any shadow to fall quite so soon across the garden of 
 roses, across the brightness of the morning light. He 
 scarcely knew what to say to her. 
 
 "Can you doubt it, dear?" he replied evasively. 
 "Surely you cannot. No man can have given greater 
 proof of it than he. If he had not loved you greatly, 
 why should a man of his high position and powers to 
 charm have taken the trouble to woo a little country 
 girl without a penny to her fortune? I think you 
 do Lord Ciuilderoy injustice and dishonour by your 
 doubt."
 
 GUILDEROY. 175 
 
 She gave a little sign of dissent, faint and sad and 
 incredulous. 
 
 "He might think he loved me," she said in a very 
 low voice. "He might think so and then find it was 
 not true — how shall I know? How do women know?" 
 
 "Good God! What can he have let her see or 
 feel to put such a cruel fancy in her mind already?" 
 thought Vernon as he looked at her in trouble and 
 anxiety of spirit. 
 
 He did not know what to say to her, and he was 
 afraid even to show the anxiety he felt lest it should 
 increase a feeling already morbid and possibly base- 
 less. 
 
 "Do yoH care for him?" he said abruptly, looking 
 her full in the face. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 A blush rose over her face, and her eyes fell under 
 his gaze. For the first time he failed to see entirely 
 into her thoughts, but he saw that she was very much 
 changed. Possession, which often weakens and chills 
 the heart of the man, usually awakens and enchains 
 the heart of the woman. She had been a child without 
 any knowledge of love on the day when John Vernon 
 had given her hand to Guilderoy in the little church 
 of Christslea; but now, however young she was in years, 
 she was a woman in feeling. 
 
 He laid his hands on her shoulders and kissed her 
 forehead. 
 
 "Then, my dear," he said, gravely, "do not ask 
 yourself what is, or what is not, the measure of his 
 love. Make yours so great, and keep it so patient, that 
 it shall be a treasure he can never get elsewhere; so
 
 176 GUILDEROY. 
 
 only will you ever attain or bestow real happiness. Do 
 not analyse either love or happiness too much. They 
 are like flowers, like butterflies — they die beneath the 
 lens of the microscope." 
 
 Gladys looked up at him in silence; her face was 
 grave and pale. 
 
 He could not tell whether she were satisfied, or dis- 
 satisfied, whether she believed in happiness or had al- 
 ready ceased to expect much of it. They said no more, 
 and spoke of other things. Much as he longed to know 
 all the innocent secrecies of her mind, John Vernon 
 would not aid her to continue a self-examination which 
 might so easily become self-torture. He knew that wo- 
 men are at all times over-fond of self-contemplation, 
 and analysis of themselves and of the affections they 
 receive and return. 
 
 Men are not so fond of it; their greater activity 
 and more frequent pleasures make them usually im- 
 patient when they are forced to much self-examination, 
 and their moral record is rarely clear enough for them 
 to care long to look at it. But women have a passion 
 for moral vivisection, and spend many an hour of tor- 
 ment, turning in and out, and stripping bare the deli- 
 cate nerves of their own organisations. He wished to 
 check his daughter on the threshold of this laboratory 
 of the imaginations and affections. 
 
 The great advantage of a great position is that it 
 leaves little time for such dangerous meditations. Society 
 may not be very elevating or very ennobling, but its 
 demands and its diversions, even when they become 
 tedious, fill the mind and leave small space for self- 
 contemplation. In many ways it is an evil, and it is
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 77 
 
 unfavourable to the growth of great thoughts; but it is 
 also an aid to happiness, or to such near likeness to 
 happiness as most human lives attain, and John Vernon 
 was unselfishly glad that the world would, if perforce, 
 surround his child so completely. Love can make its 
 own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot. 
 He knew that. 
 
 Why must the two be divorced? Gladys would 
 have asked him wistfully. 
 
 He would have answered her, or probably he would 
 have been too merciful to answer her, that love and 
 certainty can never dwell long together; and the foe 
 that every woman has to dread most utterly is habit — 
 habit which makes the nostrils insensible to the per- 
 fume of the rose, and the ears unconscious of the 
 melody of the fountain. 
 
 Guilder oy. I. 12
 
 178 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 "You are twenty-one years of age to-morrow, are 
 you not?" said Aubrey to his cousin's wife one autumn 
 day on the terrace of Ladysrood. 
 
 "Yes; it seems very old." 
 
 She sighed as she spoke. Aubrey laughed, then 
 he sighed too. 
 
 "It is very sad if you can feel it to be so," he said 
 seriously. 
 
 "I do. I feel quite old. I suppose a woman who 
 is not" — she was about to say "not happy," but checked 
 herself and said instead, "who has lost her children 
 can never feel young." 
 
 "Not young at twenty! My dear Gladys, you must 
 be jesting, though it is a very sad jest." 
 
 "Oh no. I am not jesting indeed," she replied. 
 
 Aubrey looked at her with curiosity and tender- 
 ness. "Happiness is a matter of temperament," he 
 said vaguely. 
 
 "I suppose so." 
 
 "Who should feel young if you do not? So young 
 in years as you are, with perfect bodily health, and all 
 wishes of your heart satisfied except one, which no 
 doubt will be satisfied ere long?" 
 
 She did not answer. 
 
 She was thinking how surely on the morrow she
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 79 
 
 would find some superb jewel which she did not want 
 lying on her table as a birthday gift from her lord; 
 and how equally surely when she should meet him later 
 in the morning there would be the indifference in his 
 caress and the conventionality in his congratulation, 
 which may be concealed as completely and as perfectly 
 as kindliness and courtesy can conceal them, but which 
 yet show through these as plainly as the gilded copper 
 shows in a little while through the thin gold. How 
 much more feeling would there be in Aubrey's brief 
 warm greeting, or the little Latin poem which her 
 father would be sure to send up to her at morning, 
 penned on parchment in the style of the Latin booklets, 
 rolled on the umhilicus with carved ivory ends, and 
 made as completely like such a little messenger of the 
 Caesars' times as scholarship and love could make it! 
 
 What a difference! Oh, what a difference! though 
 the little booklet would only have cost a few hours' 
 labour, and the great jewel two or three thousand 
 guineas ! 
 
 "Do you think anybody's wishes are ever granted?" 
 she said now. 
 
 Aubrey hesitated to reply. 
 
 "Yes; I think they are. Very often we do not like 
 them when we get them, but that is not the fault of 
 fate who has humoured us with our selected toys." 
 
 "Have you had your wishes?" 
 
 "No; for I always wished before everything for a 
 strictly private life, wholly beyond all possibility of 
 comment or interference from the world. As it is I 
 have the felicity of being one of those people who can- 
 not move a step without reporters being after them,
 
 lOO GUILDEROY. 
 
 which to me so absohitely poisons all existence that I 
 could willingly change places with any one of my hinds 
 at Balfrons." 
 
 "Publicity is the twin of Demos," said Guilderoy, 
 hearing the last words as he approached them. "Be- 
 tween them they will make life altogether insupportable 
 to the man of talent of the future. No one will do 
 anything even in the very least excellent or original, 
 because of the penalty of the public pillory which will 
 await it." 
 
 "That I believe," said Aubrey. "But it is, I sup- 
 pose, only the market-place of Athens or Syracuse over 
 again, with ostracism or petalism." 
 
 "There were at least unknown worlds to which to 
 migrate to then," said Guilderoy. "You were, I believe, 
 trying to teach Gladys more enjoyment of such a world 
 as we have. I wish you could succeed. Who is it has 
 said that beauty smileless is as a fair landscape with- 
 out light?" 
 
 She had walked a little way from them in the 
 autumn sunshine. 
 
 "She has had a great sorrow," said Aubrey. "The 
 sort of sorrow a woman feels acutely though we do 
 not." 
 
 "That I quite understand," said his cousin with 
 some ennui. "But all that kind of feeling passes with 
 time; she is very young; she might be gayer and hap- 
 pier if she chose, very naturally I think and with great 
 advantage. The world would like her better. It does 
 not like serious women." 
 
 "Is she so very serious?" 
 
 "Can you doubt it? She takes everything seriously:
 
 GUILDEROY. l8l 
 
 society, duty, pleasure, fortune, even myself, whom no 
 woman ever took seriously without regretting it!" 
 
 He laughed as he spoke, but Aubrey smiled more 
 sadly. 
 
 "She stands in a serious relation to you." 
 
 "Unfortunately." 
 
 The word escaped him without thought. She re- 
 turned nearer to them at that moment, the pale autumn 
 sunshine shining on her uncovered head, and her slender 
 white throat disclosed by a high lace collar, like those 
 in Marie Antoinette's portraits, opening in front with a 
 knot of gardenias closing it on her breast. 
 
 She looked older than her years. It seemed to her 
 as if she had lived half a century since she had left 
 Christslea on the day of her marriage, now nearly four 
 years before, when her father had walked through the 
 golden gorse, wishing that it might be a symbol of her 
 future life. 
 
 She was famous as one of the patrician beauties of 
 England. 
 
 For the world she had just that mixture of success 
 and of failure which made Guilderoy at once gratified 
 and irritated. 
 
 Her great beauty could not be contested; the 
 "grand manner" which had come to her instinctively 
 was perfect in its high breeding and comeliness. 
 Society followed, imitated, and crowned her. But she 
 was not liked; men thought her cold, women considered 
 her rude; every one who knew her was jealous of her 
 or offended by her in some way or another. The 
 world, like her husband, did not find her "facile," and 
 in the frivolities and crazy caprices of the society of
 
 1 82 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the dose of this century she was alienated and stood 
 aloof. She had been made a leader of fashion without 
 being even aware that she was so. A colour or a flower, 
 a mode or a place, which she selected became at once 
 celebrated by her choice of it. There is great caprice 
 in all forms of fame, and in none more so than in the 
 fame which society awards to one of its members. 
 
 Society had never found any one so profoundly 
 ignorant of fashion as she was when she first appeared 
 in it; and it had seen no one so little penetrated by its 
 temper and its homage as she still was; out of the very 
 spirit of contradiction it made her one of its sovereigns, 
 though the sceptre it offered seemed to her not of as 
 much worth as any stalk of a bulrush growing by the 
 mere of Ladysrood. 
 
 When a woman is happy she can be elastic and 
 sympathetic even to what she dislikes; happiness gives 
 suppleness, softness, and indeed force to the character 
 as sunshine ripens and mellows fruit. 
 
 But she was not happy; she loved her husband pas- 
 sionately, and she had from the earliest days of their 
 union been conscious that he was impatient and weary 
 of her. She could not console herself with small things 
 as women usually can do. She cared scarcely at all 
 for her position, her influence, the pleasures of the 
 world, or the extravagance of her toilettes; and the 
 flatteries she received produced no more impression on 
 her than the beating of the rain against her carriage 
 panels as she went to Court. 
 
 She had given birth to two male children, but one 
 had died before birth and the other a few months 
 afterwards. It was supposed by those who knew her
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 83 
 
 that her want of interest in all which went on around 
 her was due to this disappointment; but it was not that 
 only which made life void of satisfaction to her. The 
 greatest suffering of her life arose from the fact that 
 her fine and penetrating intelligence could not let her 
 be blind to the discovery that whatever sensual or 
 sentimental desire had hurried Guilderoy into his mar- 
 riage, she was now absolutely nothing in his existence; 
 nay, was even perhaps something which perpetually an- 
 noyed and irritated him by the mere sense that she 
 was there, for ever, in his existence. 
 
 Outwardly, however, all was still well. 
 
 "Your melancholy predictions are happily falsified, 
 you see," he said to John Vernon one day, who 
 hesitated a moment before he replied. 
 
 "I am sincerely glad to hear it." 
 
 "Your tone is sombre and incredulous, and I fear 
 you doubt it still?" 
 
 "I am afraid that of marriage, as of men, one is 
 forced to say, * Call it not happy till its end is seen.' " 
 
 "What, after all, is happiness? George Sand has 
 best defined it, ' C'est un eclair qui traverse les brumes 
 monotones de la vie.' " 
 
 "That is surely rather descriptive of ecstasy? The 
 ecstasy which, in the nature of things, must have the 
 lightning's brief duration as it has its brilliancy. Hap- 
 piness, I have always held, is rather a matter of our 
 own individual temperament than of circumstances or 
 of the passions." 
 
 "A philosopher's view; true, no doubt, of philo- 
 sophers, hardly of mankind in general, of womankind 
 certainly not true."
 
 184 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "No, women are the creatures of the emotions; a 
 cold word, a letter a day late, a sigh which they over- 
 hear and think is not for them, suffices to make them 
 wretched. I hope you do not find Gladys over-sensi- 
 tive? I could hardly myself tell whether she were or 
 not. She was a child, and there was nothing to rouse 
 her feelings unless it were a stray dog or a fisherman's 
 boat that foundered." 
 
 '•No, I do not think she is impressionable," replied 
 Guilderoy. "She is certainly not impassioned." 
 
 "Ah!" Vernon looked at him with a little sigh. 
 "What did I tell you? She was years too young." 
 
 "One is glad of a certain coldness in one's wife. 
 Coldness is not the word I ought to use, however; 
 there is an absence of passion in her; I do not regret 
 it; it is a great shield in the world." 
 
 "You would regret it if you loved her," thought 
 Vernon. "Or rather if you had really loved her you 
 would have taken pains to conjure it away. I daresay 
 you alarmed her at first with the violence of your 
 ardours, and then you chilled her with the carelessness 
 of your tepid affections, and between the two the soul 
 in her is scared and shuts itself up like an oyster, clos- 
 ing its shell on its pearl." 
 
 He was not more satisfied than he had been before 
 their marriage. 
 
 It seemed to him that the acquiescent contentment 
 of Guilderoy might very easily drift on into mere in- 
 difference, and if the heart of Gladys were now still 
 asleep it would assuredly awake some day. 
 
 "How fatal is marriage!" he thought. "A man 
 sees a woman, a woman a man, with no knowledge, no
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 85 
 
 experience of each other; very often without even any 
 affinity, they enter into the closest of all human rela- 
 tions, and undertake to pass their lives together. It is 
 the habit of its apologists to say that it works well, 
 idiotic though it looks. It does not work well. It 
 hurries men and women blindly into unions which often 
 become absolutely hateful to them, stifling to their de- 
 velopment and intolerably irritating to their inclinations. 
 It flies in the face of all the laws of sex. It is a fig- 
 ment of the social code, irrational, unreal, and setting 
 up a gigantic lie as the scaffolding which supports 
 society. Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is 
 polygamous; sometimes even polyandrous. Why is the 
 fact not recognised and frankly admitted? Why do we 
 adhere to the fiction of a fidelity which is neither in 
 nature nor in feeling possible to man? Because pro- 
 perty lays its foundations most easily by means of mar- 
 riage, therefore the individual is sacrificed to property. 
 I confess that it makes one almost side with the 
 Socialists." 
 
 "It is not very long since you came here on the 
 wings of a headlong and unconsidered desire," he said 
 aloud. "You have had your desire; can you honestly 
 declare that you are any the happier for it?" 
 
 Guilderoy was embarrassed. He was naturally 
 sincere. 
 
 "If I be not," he said with effort, "the fault is cer- 
 tainly my own, and no one else's." 
 
 He knew that he infinitely regretted his marriage, 
 but he could not say so to John Vernon. 
 
 He regretted it for five hundred reasons which were 
 for ever rising up in his memory. He regretted it be-
 
 1 86 GUILDEROY. 
 
 cause he was impatient of its obligations, and he re- 
 ceived none of the compensation which he had antici- 
 pated. His wife was lovely, admired, and perfect in 
 her manner in the world; but he did not believe that 
 she had any single opinion or feeling in common with 
 him. She gave him the constant impression that she 
 disapproved of all he said and all he did; she was 
 neither pliant nor facile; she obeyed all his wishes in- 
 variably, but there was something about her passive 
 obedience which irritated him more than any refusal 
 could have done. Physically, he had tired of her as 
 absolutely as though she had had neither youth nor 
 loveliness, and, mentally, he had early concluded that 
 her nature and character were wholly unsuited to his 
 own. 
 
 After all, it was the common doom he thought; no 
 marriages were happy, the utmost that the best of them 
 became was a mutual agreement to make the best of a 
 mistake. And little by little, every day and every hour, 
 she became less and less in his thoughts, of less import- 
 ance in his projects and wishes, of less influence on his 
 temper and temperament, of less prominence in his life 
 and his feelings. On the whole it had been a failure, 
 and he knew it, but he was always desirous that his 
 society and his friends should be as much blinded to 
 the fact as was possible. He was careful of every 
 observance and consideration for her before the world; 
 for to think that the world ever talked of their union 
 as infelicitous would have been still more intolerable to 
 him than the infelicity itself. 
 
 And yet he was aware that he had a great deal to 
 be proud of in the woman who bore his name, and a
 
 GUILDEROY, 1 87 
 
 great deal to be grateful for in that pride and delicacy 
 in her character which would, he was sure, prevent her 
 from ever jeopardizing his honour or her own. 
 
 "On a les de'faiits de scs qualitc's," he thought often. 
 "If she had been more impressionable and more facile 
 to me, she would have been so to others as well as to 
 myself." 
 
 A man's error. One of the many errors which are 
 very common to men, and stand for ever between them 
 and their true comprehension of women. 
 
 Sometimes, when he was in a contented mood, he 
 told himself that it was as well as he could have hoped ; 
 she was much handsomer than most; high-bred in 
 manner and feeling; and, if too silent, her silence at 
 least preserved her from the caquetages and imprudences 
 which compromise socially so many women. If she 
 spoke little, she at least spoke well when she did speak. 
 She looked admirably effective in any one of his houses; 
 whether at Ladysrood, or in London, Paris, or Venice. 
 She had that look as of an old portrait, a Reynolds, a 
 Gainsborough, a Mignard, or a Giorgione, which makes 
 a woman accord with old and picturesque and stately 
 residences. 
 
 On the whole it might have been worse, he often 
 told himself; but then this resignation is not the 
 language of happiness. 
 
 "You always saw the Princess in Perdita," said Hilda 
 Sunbury once to her cousin Aubrey; and he answered, 
 "Yes; it was very easy to see that. I think the heart 
 is always Perdita's, always sighing a little for the
 
 1 88 GUILDEROY. 
 
 shepherd's hut, and the pressed curds, and the oaten 
 cake." 
 
 "What a simpleton if she is!" remarked Lady 
 Sunbury, who had no patience with shepherds or for 
 those who sighed for them. "Because she has not even 
 the very smallest of stones in her shoe, she jgoes miles 
 out of her way to pick up one to put in it!" 
 
 "What pebble does she pick up?" asked Aubrey. 
 
 "How should I know?" said Lady Sunbury. "She 
 picks up ever so many, I believe. . The most impossible 
 thing of all is that she is sentimentally in love with 
 Evelyn. As if there could be ever anything surer to 
 drive him headlong away from her! He has been a 
 man of many, many caprices, but nothing would ever 
 be so appalling to him as to be loved with anything 
 approaching a grande passion. He cannot endure 
 worry; he abhors the expression of anything like strong 
 emotion. He is amiability itself as long as you do not 
 fatigue him, or bore him; but the moment you do either 
 he puts a cross against your name and avoids you. If 
 she does not understand that, he will avoid her. Avoid 
 her permanently! He was never in love with her. His 
 fancy was captivated and his obstinacy was charmed by 
 the idea of marrying what he admired and I disliked. 
 That was all. He thought her lovely and he wished 
 for her; her loveliness has lasted, but his wishes have 
 not lasted with it." 
 
 "Who was it said that in a year it is just the same 
 to you whether your wife is Venus or a Hottentot?" 
 said Aubrey. "I do not go quite so far as that, but I 
 am certain that Venus, when she can always be had,
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 89 
 
 does cease to seem beautiful to her possessor. I once 
 asked an Austrian abbot if he could ever weary of the 
 view before his windows over the Danube; it was so 
 beautiful; and the abbot said to me, 'Dear Sir, I have 
 looked at that view so long that it seems marvellous to 
 me you can find any beauty in it at all!' That is 
 human nature, in a monastery and out of it." 
 
 Lady Sunbury was a woman who had no illusions, 
 and she was extremely angry with people who were 
 silly enough to nourish them. They seemed to her the 
 most useless things in the world; exorbitant in their 
 demands, baseless in their formation, and foredoomed 
 before their birth to disappointment. Material ad- 
 vantages were, after all, what really mattered, she 
 thought; ease, affluence, and influence the only real 
 enjoyment of existence; and she— whose whole life for 
 twenty years had been made painful and irritating to 
 her by financial difficulties, by conjugal quarrels, by 
 standing the helpless witness of extravagance and folly, 
 repeated from father to son, and all the incessant morti- 
 fications which await the contrast of a great position 
 with a narrow fortune — felt no patience with what ap- 
 peared to her the mere sentimental childish imaginary 
 sorrows of her young sister-in-law: they seemed to her 
 like weeping for the moon. 
 
 "I believe your encourage her in her delusions," she 
 added. 
 
 "I do not s-ee her enough to encourage anything, 
 good or bad," said Aubrey. 
 
 It was not strictly true. Whenever his cousin was 
 in England he saw his cousin's wife, and found time to 
 do so even when his crowded and harassed life could
 
 I go GUILDEROY. 
 
 ill afford the few spare hours in it to any mere personal 
 interest. She had interested him on the first day that 
 he had called on her in the Watteau cabinet amongst 
 the roses, and had found her tired of the weight of 
 her jewels and of the darkness and noise of -the great 
 capital. 
 
 Many times during the London season he put aside 
 weighty labours to find moments for her boudoir, and 
 when he had no day for anyone else he would always 
 take one, amidst the stress of political excitement, to 
 pass a few hours at Ladysrood whenever his cousin was 
 there. He was a man of strong feeling which slum- 
 bered underneath the prosaic cares of a political career. 
 His imagination was still alive; and he had a vague 
 consciousness that he was watching the opening scenes 
 of a story which might possibly turn some day to 
 tragedy, whenever he found himself associated at any 
 of the great gatherings of Ladysrood, or listened to any 
 expression of divergent opinion between Guilderoy and 
 his wife. 
 
 "She might be perfectly happy from one year to 
 another," continued Lady Sunbury irritably. "Has she 
 no idea of all that she owes to Providence for having 
 given her a companion who is good-tempered and a 
 purse which is full? Does she expect a Prince Charming 
 like my brother to sit always at her feet? Does she 
 think that because she has married him all other women 
 cease to exist for him? Does she expect to make a 
 homing pigeon of a migratory nightingale? She must 
 be a fool, absolutely a fool!" 
 
 "No, she is not that; not that by any means," said 
 Aubrey. "She is only a woman — very much in love,
 
 GUILDEROY. I 9 I 
 
 very ignorant of life, and totally unable to understand 
 the caprices and vagaries of the male temperament." 
 
 "Well, if that goes on she will be a fool," said 
 Hilda Sunbury. "You will admit so much? How can 
 she live in the world day and night as she does and 
 not learn something?" 
 
 "Perhaps she will learn more than he will like, 
 some day." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "What I say. I do not mean anything especial; 
 but I think as a general rule women who have two 
 grains of sense do not continue jealous of a man who 
 is indifferent to them, but rather turn the tables and 
 give him cause for jealousy." 
 
 "Is that the advice you will give her?" 
 
 "I shall not give it her certainly, but you may be 
 sure a great many men will." 
 
 "And do you think she will take it?" 
 
 "I should say that Avould entirely depend on her 
 mood of the moment." 
 
 "On her mood: not on her principles?" 
 
 "My dear Hilda — point de phrases! — that sense of 
 principle resists in a woman all temptation from without 
 only just as long as it is not tempted from within. So 
 long as she is still in love with Evelyn he will be safe, 
 unless in a moment of pique she revenges herself in 
 the endeavour to make him feel; but the instant she 
 
 ceases to care Well, I do not suppose that the 
 
 Guilderoy scutcheon will then be the religiously sacred 
 thing to her which it appears to you. I have great 
 belief in the affections of women, but I have no be- 
 lief in what is termed their virtue. I mean that they
 
 192 GUILDEROY. 
 
 are to be controlled through the one, not through the 
 other. Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. 
 They might as well say that a house should resist an 
 earthquake." 
 
 "What a doctrine!" exclaimed Lady Sunbury, 
 shocked. 
 
 Aubrey looked at her with a smile. "Oh, there are 
 souls which are passionless, no doubt, as there are 
 houses which are not built over a volcanic current," he 
 said, and thought to himself: 
 
 "What should you know — you thoroughly excellent 
 and most irritating of Englishwomen? What should 
 you know? Your whole soul has been centered in ex- 
 ternals, in ceremonials, in social dignities, in social 
 duties, bound in the buckram of routine, and stiff with 
 the starch of position? What should you know of all 
 the great passions which make life bloom like a Sicilian 
 pasture in flower in May, only often to lay it waste 
 under lava, as Etna pours fire and stones over the 
 asphodels and the irises?" 
 
 But he did not say so; she would have thought 
 him mad; and she, like the world, knew nothing of 
 the tragedy in his own life which made him so in- 
 finitely pitiful to all woes of the passion and emotions; 
 she, like the world, thought him a man without a grain 
 of romance in his nature. 
 
 Aubrey perceived, what his cousin did not take the 
 trouble to see, that Gladys was not happy: was depressed 
 by an affection — very strong on her part once, very 
 slight on her husband's — and was restrained at once by 
 pride or by shyness from ever expressing anything 
 which she felt.
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 93 
 
 She was not demonstrative by nature, and if she 
 had been so she would have hesitated to risk wearying 
 Guilderoy by the expression of what she feh was in- 
 different to him. The demonstrations of his passion 
 had not Lasted long; they had left her with remembrance 
 of a fervour and a phrenzy which she could never 
 forget, and which made the mere mechanical caresses 
 of habit wholly intolerable to her. If she had 
 never been loved in this way she might have lived 
 contentedly without it; but the intoxication of those 
 first weeks in Venice had taught her all that love could 
 be. To become after then merely the mistress of his 
 house, merely the rarely remembered object of con- 
 ventional embraces, was to her an unendurable torture. 
 She appeared to him cold when her whole senses and 
 emotions were writhing under the carelessness and in- 
 difference of his. 
 
 "He only recollects my existence now and then 
 because he wishes for children," she felt bitterly. He 
 was always courteous, kind, and gentle; but as every 
 month passed away she felt more and more that he 
 had never really cared for her. He had married her 
 out of caprice, passing admiration, fancy for what was 
 new and strange to him, and the sense that he must 
 some day marry or see his title and estates pass to 
 persons whom he detested. Her clear and quick com- 
 prehension taught her this very soon, and occasional 
 phrases which she overheard from the women most 
 intimate with him confirmed her knowledge. She felt 
 that those who liked her pitied her, whilst those who 
 liked him, the far larger number, regarded her with 
 
 Guilderoy. I. 1 3
 
 194 GUILD EROY. 
 
 something more disdainful than pity. The sense of 
 that gave her a cahnness quite foreign to her nature, 
 and a strength of self-repression injurious at her years. 
 
 She had had everything to learn of the world into 
 which she was launched; but she soon became ac- 
 quainted with its intricacies, its meanings a demi-mot, 
 its profound heartlessness and unscrupulousness veiled 
 by such polished externals. She had at first failed to 
 comprehend many things which passed around her, but 
 little by little she had learned to attach their full 
 meaning to them, and thus she arrived in the third 
 year of her married life to a perception that the affec- 
 tions which Guilderoy did not give to her he took else- 
 where. He did not, indeed, ever offend her by no- 
 torious or openly-displayed attachments; but she knew 
 that the society of almost any other woman was more 
 agreeable to him than her own. She saw that he was 
 sought, flattered, admired, tempted, on all sides; and 
 she saw that he did not resist, or try to resist, the 
 temptation. Whether they were in London or Paris, in 
 Italian cities or German watering places, or at their 
 own country place, or the country places of their 
 friends, she saw that any woman, seen for the first time 
 and possessing beauty or charm enough to attract him, 
 became for the time being infinitely more the mistress 
 of his thoughts and feelings than she had ever had 
 power to be. 
 
 "I wish you would endeavour to be amusing," he 
 said, more than once to her. "I assure you in these 
 days Helen or Briseis herself would have no chance in 
 the world if she were not amusinc:."
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 95 
 
 "And were I amusing, I should have no power to 
 amuse you," she thought, though she did not say it. 
 She was not amusing, because she Avas not amused. 
 She was not amused because she was not happy. In 
 happiness one enjoys trifles like a child, and the great 
 world only seems to us a brilliant decor de scene set 
 out on purpose to illustrate and illuminate our own 
 romance, which is being played on its stage. But in 
 the depression of repressed affections or disappointed 
 illusions, the best of its pageantry leaves us depressed 
 and displeased. The world thought Lady Guilderoy 
 stupid, and when it was disturbed in this opinion by 
 some unexpected allusion or some curt incisive phrase 
 which showed in her both the habits of study and the 
 powers of sarcasm, it disliked her still more than when 
 it had believed that her lovely mouth could only drop 
 monosyllables. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 The only person, besides her father, who saw her 
 wholly at her best, and quite as she was, was Aubrey. 
 In great receptions, in large house parties, in all the 
 crowd and movement of fashionable life, she was 
 always glad to see Aubrey come to her side, and to 
 feel the shield of his kindly friendship between her 
 and the impertinences of fine ladies and the embarass- 
 ing homage of men, who, seeing that she was neglected, 
 
 13*
 
 196 GUILDEROY. 
 
 made sure that she could be consoled. He did much 
 for her that Guilderoy had never dreamed of doing, 
 and would not have had patience to do if he had. He 
 gave her many indications of all that she needed to 
 know in the bewildering mazes of fashion and pre- 
 cedence. He got for her the good will of many persons 
 of power and influence. He explained to her many 
 things which astonished and troubled her, and he made 
 her London receptions successful and distinguished. 
 The world obeyed any hint from him eagerly, and all 
 his social power, which was vast, he put out on behalf 
 of his cousin's wife. 
 
 "Nothing would enrage and estrange Evelyn so 
 greatly as to find her a social failure," he thought very 
 often, "and yet he will not take the trouble to stretch 
 out his little finger to prevent her being one." 
 
 And what his cousin failed to do, Aubrey did. 
 
 "It is a little like Achilles spinning for me to 
 interfere in these things," he said with a smile, as he 
 corrected her invitation list, explained to her questions 
 of precedence, and told her why one duchess was a 
 great sovereign revered by all society, and another 
 duchess was a mere dowdy whose word nobody attended 
 to or asked. All these things were trifles which were 
 wholly insignificant in his sight, occupied as he was 
 with the great cares of public life; but from his birth 
 and position he was familiar with them; he knew their 
 power to make or mar a woman's entry into the great 
 world, and he had power to control all their mysterious 
 influences; and all that it was necessary for her to know 
 and avoid, she learned from him.
 
 GUILDEROY. 1 97 
 
 "Evelyn should do all this for you," he said to her 
 once. But his cousin did not, and never would have 
 done, so Aubrey did it for him. 
 
 He knew that Guilderoy would never pardon a 
 woman who bore his name if she did not attain emi- 
 nence in society. Guilderoy imagined that he attached 
 no value to social opinion, and weighed nothing in its 
 scales. But he deceived himself in that as in many 
 another estimate of his feelings, and unless the purest 
 silver had possessed the hall mark he would never have 
 rated it as silver. 
 
 "You are very kind to Gladys," he said to his 
 cousin once or twice, but he was never aware of all that 
 he owed to Aubrey; and that if his wife received princes 
 and princesses with a perfect manner, if she filled her 
 houses with the best and only the best people, if she 
 never made an error in the date of a title, or a mis- 
 take in the smaller intricacies of etiquette and prece- 
 dence, it was due entirely to the man who sometimes, 
 for the first time in his life, was late at a Cabinet 
 Council, or tardy in speaking before a division, because 
 he had been giving lessons in social policy to John 
 Vernon's daughter. 
 
 "These are all very little things, both you and I 
 consider," said Aubrey to her. "Yes, they are indeed 
 the absurdest of trifles, and it is perhaps wonderful 
 that a society on the brink of disintegration, as English 
 society is, should still make so much of them. But it 
 is just the knowledge of them, or the ignorance of 
 them, which marks a woman of the world from a 
 parvenue. Guilderoy wishes you to be a woman of the
 
 ig8 GUILDEROY, 
 
 world, so omit nothing which is necessary to the educa- 
 tion of the world. Besides, I confess that social etiquette 
 has a certain value, if only in the maintenance of some 
 standard for manners; I wish in some things that we 
 had more of it; I wish it were not possible for an 
 American adventuress to entertain the Prince of Wales, 
 or for an English brewer to be hoisted into the House 
 of Lords because he has made money by brewing, and 
 been useful in elections. I know this latter possibility 
 has been called the strength of England; but it has, on 
 the contrary, been and is her very greatest weakness. 
 For it has made social life a hotbed for aspiring 
 toadyism, has made political life a manure heap for 
 the propagation of mushroom nobility, and has enabled 
 a minister to force measures on the country which the 
 country disapproves, because he can bribe his supporters 
 by the whispered promise of peerages. If new peers 
 must be made, it would be better to call up all the 
 Victoria Cross men to the Upper House than to make 
 nobility ridiculous by conferring it on tradesmen. The 
 Victoria Cross men would at least allow of some sort 
 of analogy to the old reasons for knighthood." 
 
 Gladys always listened and followed him with 
 sincere interest when he spoke of these things. Her 
 father had been used to converse with her at times on 
 serious and public matters, and all the problems of 
 government and history possessed much more interest 
 for her than the fashionable frivolities of the hour. 
 
 "It will be time to think of politics twenty years 
 hence," said Guilderoy to her, but she thought of them
 
 GUILDEROY. IQQ 
 
 already, and often went to the Speaker's gallery to hear 
 Aubrey. 
 
 He spoke well; not with any great brilliancy of 
 rhetoric, but with admirable lucidity and logic, great 
 force of persuasion, great power of invective held in 
 calm reserve, and that tone of perfect courtesy and 
 scholarship which have been, until the last dozen years, 
 the distinguishing glory of the House of Commons. 
 
 "Why do yon never speak?" she asked once of 
 Guilderoy, who answered impatiently: 
 
 "It is of no use to speak in the Lords. Besides, I 
 have never spoken. If I were to rise now they would 
 think I had gone mad. It is of no kind of use to enter 
 political life unless one has been trained by having 
 ])assed one's early years in the Commons. I could 
 never have had that parliamentary education. I suc- 
 ceeded my father when I was a child of five years 
 old." 
 
 "But you have great talents, they all say? My 
 father says so, too!" 
 
 "I am not sure that I have any. The world and 
 your father are too complimentary to me. But I have 
 at all events the common sense not to spoil my whole 
 life by efforts for which I am wholly unfitted, and which 
 would be assuredly wholly unprofitable." 
 
 "Aubrey's are not unprofitable?" 
 
 "I should not venture to say they were, but I am 
 quite sure he is not such a blind optimist as to be 
 satisfied with their results. Parliamentary government 
 is the best machine that was ever constructed for grind- 
 ing down superiority into mediocrity; that is why it is 
 so immensely popular with the middle classes."
 
 200 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "But if you believe in an oligarchy, you might at 
 least support that if you were conspicuous in public 
 life?" 
 
 "I never said I believed in it, my dear. All I am 
 entirely convinced of is that the poAver of no man, 
 whether Aubrey or another, will check permanently the 
 gradual breaking up of England, which is being brought 
 about by the inevitable decadence into which all na- 
 tions fall." 
 
 "I do not like to think it." 
 
 "No one likes it; but our liking or our disliking 
 will not alter the philosophy of history." 
 
 "But do you not feel that our own lives lead to it? 
 Do you not see that society is so foolish, so extravagant, 
 so selfish, so crowded, that it must make those outside 
 of it despise it even while they envy it? You have 
 said yourself that there is neither elegance nor dignity 
 in it, only an immense expenditure, and a feverish 
 hurry. You have said yourself that instead of Maecenas 
 we have a nobility which sends its libraries and its 
 picture galleries to the auction-room; which, rather 
 than give up its racing and betting, its foreign baths 
 and its London excesses, will see its old houses stripped, 
 or its woods felled, or its collections bought by the 
 Jews. I have heard you say that, or similar things, a 
 thousand times." 
 
 " Certainly, my dear; and does any Cuyp out of Ladys- 
 rood, any Gainsborough out of this house, go to Christie's 
 through me? I have never cut a stick of timber which 
 it was not absolutely needful to cut for the health and 
 the growth of the woods themselves. When I have 
 been pressed for money, which has happened, though
 
 GUILDEROY. 20I 
 
 my income is large, I have never sold my family 
 Holbeins nor my ancestral oaks. I have a very strong 
 sense that noblesse oblige, though I have not, I admit, 
 the virtues of ray cousin Aubrey." 
 
 He spoke with some irritation, and for the first time 
 a vague sense of annoyance, at the opinion she had of 
 Aubrey, stirred in him. 
 
 "He and I," he continued, "have always been the 
 industrious and the idle apprentices in the eyes of our 
 families. He early chose Athene and I Venus. But 
 though I grant he has the monopoly of the virtues, yet 
 I have an ounce of conscience left I assure you, and 
 all that I have inherited will pass out of my hands as 
 it came into them, intact to your children." 
 
 She resigned the argument; she could not press on 
 him the fact that his life was utterly self-indulgent, 
 however free it might be from the avarice or the in- 
 dignity which allowed others to send their household 
 goods to the market. 
 
 "Who has filled your head with these fancies of 
 utility?" he said, irritably. "Your father or my cousin? 
 What a singular thing it is that when nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine women out of a thousand only ask to enjoy 
 themselves, I should have married the one in a thousand 
 who knows nothing of enjoyment!" 
 
 And he left her with some impatience. She could 
 neither persuade nor allure him, because she possessed 
 no influence upon him. 
 
 "She will be all her life that most depressing thing, 
 a conscientious woman!" he thought with a smile and 
 a sigh as he drove to his favourite club. "If she had
 
 202 GUILDEROY. 
 
 married Aubrey she would have been a million times 
 happier, and I " 
 
 What would he have done ? Would he have remained 
 at the feet of the only woman whom he had ever loved 
 with any love approaching a strong passion? He was 
 not sure; but what we might have done almost always 
 looks to us so much fairer than what we have done. 
 
 He did full justice to his wife's mind and character; 
 he even in theory admired them, but in actual fact he 
 was only bored by them. She had not known how to 
 interest and divert him; she was transparently truthful, 
 full of high ideals and high thoughts, and possessed 
 with the terrible earnestness of youth; but she only 
 wearied him, and a woman far her inferior, morally and 
 mentally, would have had far more power to move him 
 when she wished if she had only had more pliability and 
 more gaiety of temperament. He required to be amused 
 as a petulant and spoilt child requires it. There were 
 always countless women ready to do it; he went to them 
 and left Aubrey to bring blue books and explain inter- 
 national law to his wife. 
 
 "It is his metier!" he said with some contempt. 
 He did not perceive, because he did not study her 
 enough to see it, that what prevented her from having 
 such enjoyment of life as would have been in accordance 
 with her nature and her age was the sense, perpetually 
 weighing on her, that he regretted his hasty marriage. 
 
 She felt that she Avas a burden on him; and though 
 she never said it, its consciousness was ever present with 
 her. 
 
 The existence of incessant change which she per- 
 petually led gave her rather sadness and bewilderment
 
 GUILDEROY. 203 
 
 than pleasure. The few months they remained in the 
 London house, the few weeks spent at Ladysrood, the 
 changes from Paris to Venice, to Cannes, to Aix, to 
 Baden, according to the season of the year and the 
 moods of fashion, gave her a sense of homelessness and 
 restlessness which were not suited to her temperament. 
 Life did not seem to her spent aright in this mere 
 succession of display and distraction, this indolent and 
 self-indulgent pursuit of the appetites and senses. She 
 was afraid of seeming "odd" in her world; for he told 
 her that people were so soon considered so, and always 
 detested as a consequence. She did her best to en- 
 deavour to seem amused at this perpetual carnival; but 
 she could not bring herself to feel so. Her early education 
 had left too indelible a stamp of simplicity and gravity 
 upon her for her to easily adopt the tone of those around 
 her. Sometimes Guilderoy saw, or thought he saw, a 
 look of disdain for his pursuits and pastimes come upon 
 her features, and it angered him extremely. He thought 
 it a censure of himself. 
 
 "My sister's frown was quite enough in the family," 
 he said once petulantly. 
 
 "Did I frown?" said Gladys, very sorrowfully. "I 
 did not know it. Indeed I am very sorry." 
 
 "You frown very often," he said angrily. "Perhaps 
 you do not know it. It is an ugly habit, and makes 
 people think you a prude." 
 
 "I see a great deal in society that I do not like," 
 she said, a little coldly. 
 
 "And pray, my dear, did it never occur to you that 
 neither age nor experience have as yet qualified you to 
 act as duenna to a naughty world?"
 
 204 GUILD EROY. 
 
 She coloured at the ridicule in his accent. 
 
 "About some things I am sure I am right," she said 
 in a low tone, which sounded to him like obstinacy. 
 "One wants no duenna to know that there are some 
 things which are — which offend one — one feels them." 
 
 " Von feel them because your heart is always behind 
 your beehives and sweetbriar at Christslea, and you 
 think every one should talk like your father, with equal 
 parts of St. Augustine and Horace. You are a country 
 mouse at heart, and are always sighing for the hayricks. 
 How I do wish you were not! It makes the women 
 detest you and laugh at you; and it does not suit your 
 style at all. You look a great lady, not a Phyllis or 
 Amaryllis." 
 
 "They may laugh if they please," she said, with the 
 look on her face with which she had once said that the 
 Cherriton lads might burn the hut down if they pleased. 
 
 "But that is just what they must not do," said 
 Guilderoy, considerably irritated. "Nothing offends or 
 annoys me more; nothing is so odious as the ridicule 
 by women of a woman. She never recovers it. It is 
 much less injurious to her to be calumniated than to 
 be laughed at. The greatest beauty cannot stand it." 
 
 "It is wholly indifferent to me!" 
 
 "But it is not to me," said Guilderoy. " Le ridicule 
 tue. It kills grace, it kills charm, it kills popularity. 
 It would afflict me immeasurably if for want of a little 
 flexibility you were considered a precisian in the world. 
 It is Hilda's style, I am aware, but it is a most uncom- 
 fortable style, most depressing in its effect upon others, 
 and not at all the style of our day." 
 
 " Ujie societe gangrene'c ! Oh, we know all that; it
 
 GUILDEROY. 20$ 
 
 has been said admirably by Balzac, and more or less 
 since by all his imitators," continued Guilderoy, im- 
 patiently. "It is really not necessary, my love, that you 
 should either preach or philosophise about it. There 
 are always numbers of writers and wits who make their 
 livelihood by repeating all that kind of thing as well as 
 it can be said; and I am myself convinced that no 
 amount of condemnation will ever alter matters by a 
 hand's breadth — not even condemnation so weighty and 
 so terrible as yours!" 
 
 She coloured, mortified by the words and by their 
 tone. She felt that in his eyes she was always the same 
 country child who had first opened the little wicket for 
 him under the boughs at Christslea. She had grown a 
 century older in her own feelings; she was greatly 
 changed in the eyes of all others; but in his sight she 
 was always the same young and unworldly rustic, who 
 had known no society beyond that of the fisherfolk on 
 the shore and the wild creatures of the moorlands and 
 orchards. 
 
 He had no patience to discuss her opinions; he 
 could not see why she should have any. This disdainful 
 relegation of her to an utterly inferior place in in- 
 telligence, in its strong contrast with the reverential 
 sympathy of Aubrey, gave her a passionate sense of 
 offence, which was too deep to be easily expressed. 
 
 "He thinks me a fool," she felt bitterly; and she 
 knew that she was not one, that she could have met him 
 on equal ground if he had deigned to so encounter 
 her. 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 "English society," he continued, "has undergone
 
 2o6 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the most radical revolution in its tone and temper as 
 well as in its politics; it has put seven-leagued boots 
 on in the ways of demoralisation as well as democracy. 
 It is much more than fast, it is constantly outrageous. 
 We have always been a very profligate nation, though 
 we have professed great chastity; and in this generation 
 the impudent people are uppermost, and they have 
 moulded a society to their liking, and every one who 
 is not of it is nowhere." 
 
 "Do you desire that I should be of it?" 
 "Of course not, my dear child. Why will you 
 suggest absurdities? You do not wait to hear my con- 
 clusion. I was about to say that modern society, being 
 no longer high-bred, but only 'smart,' no longer distin- 
 guished, but only rich, as immoral as it can possibly 
 be, and having even ceased to be able to tell a gentle- 
 woman from a cabotine when it sees one, good manners 
 are altogether thrown away upon it, and it only laughs 
 at them." 
 
 "Its laughter must be less degrading than its 
 praise ! " 
 
 "That is the sort of thing which you are always 
 saying and for which they detest you. I am not estimat- 
 ing its praise. I am wholly indifferent to it. But I 
 assure you that your scornful dignity and your delicate 
 susceptibilities are as out of place in it as the silver 
 ewer that the royal fugitives carried with them on the 
 road to Varennes." 
 
 "Silver vessels seemed natural to them, I suppose." 
 "Yes; and so the silver of seriousness and high- 
 breeding are natural to you. But it is the people with 
 the pitchforks and the false assignats that are now block-
 
 GUILDEROY. 20'] 
 
 ing the roads of society everywhere, and though you 
 cannot help being royal, you may as well smile when 
 you can." 
 
 He could not say to her what he really wished to 
 convey, that her lack of animation and interest made 
 women laugh at her, and laugh at him because they 
 believed her jealous of his attentions to them; and the 
 unconscious disapprobation often spoken in her eyes of 
 the society which most amused him was a constant 
 theme of raillery against him with his female friends. 
 
 Material sorrows every one can understand, though 
 even these every one does not stay to pity; but the 
 sorrows of the spirit, when combined with material 
 prosperity, hardly any one has patience to contemplate. 
 Cold, hunger, and ill-health, all these wants and pains 
 physical, are easily comprehended even by the un- 
 sympathetic; but the cold of the soul which is solitary, 
 the hunger of the heart which vaguely misses and 
 vaguely desires what it has never yet found, the ill- 
 health of the spirit which is weary and yet restless, 
 which sits at the banquets of the world without appetite, 
 and turns away from all which delights others, cloyed 
 and yet empty, this no one will ever pity; the multitude 
 only calls it in a man cynicism, and in a woman ennui. 
 And yet how far it is from being either one or the 
 other! 
 
 She was too young to know the charm of toleration, 
 the wisdom of indifference, the force of an influence 
 which is never urged but merely suggested. Her cha- 
 racter had been constructed by her father's teachings 
 on a few broad lines; the lines on which were built the 
 characters of a simpler, graver, calmer day than ours,
 
 2o8 GUILDEROY. 
 
 when women stayed at home whether in palace or 
 in cabin. It had strength, truth, candour, honour, 
 purity; but, hke many such characters, it lacked pliancy, 
 sympathy, and comprehensiveness. It adhered to its 
 own few firm rules, and did not allow for, because it 
 did not in any measure perceive, the caprices, the ne- 
 cessities, and the weaknesses of others. 
 
 There is a fatal law which philosophers might pos- 
 sibly trace out to some law of compensation, which 
 usually makes the woman of perfect purity and candour 
 incapable of that charm of quickly comprehending and 
 infinitely pardoning which makes a woman most sweet 
 and most beloved. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 Aubrey's sister, the Duchess of Longleat, was one 
 of those who make la pluie et le beau temps in the great 
 world for those she disapproved or favoured. She had 
 conceived at first a violent dislike to Gladys because 
 "no one knew her"— darkest of all social crimes! But 
 Aubrey took infinite pains to reconcile her, and to 
 secure her kindness and support to Guilderoy's wife. 
 
 "Why should you care whether she is admired or 
 detested?" his sister asked him once; and he replied: 
 
 "I care because I pity her infinitely; she is married 
 to a man who will never pardon her if she fails to 
 succeed in his world, and who yet will never take the 
 trouble to point out to her the way to succeed."
 
 GUILDEROY. 20g 
 
 "It is a dangerous occupation to do it for him," 
 said his sister, "She is extremely handsome." 
 
 "Not dangerous to me," said Aubrey with a rather 
 sad smile. "You know I am bicn irempe." 
 
 "To Evelyn to have his wife a mere country 
 nonentity," he continued, "a woman who makes 
 blunders and is quoted in ridicule because she sends 
 in the wrong people together, would be infinitely more 
 intolerable than to have her a Medea or Lady Macbeth. 
 She knows nothing of social matters. How should she? 
 She is a child, and she has always lived in a cottage with 
 a recluse. But some one must teach them to her. 
 Hilda Sunbury ought, but she will not; virtuous woman 
 though she is, she would be delighted at everything 
 which would separate her brother from his wife. Evelyn 
 will not because he is too indolent, and he has more- 
 over no patience with people to whom these things are 
 not a second nature. There only remain yourself or my- 
 self. AVe must undertake her training in these things." 
 
 "I really do not see why," said the Duchess. 
 "Evelyn is an unconscionable egotist. He has always 
 been so; he always will be. We are not bound to 
 remedy the omissions of his selfishness." 
 
 But she adored her brother, and to please him 
 threw over the new-comer the mighty tegis of her ap- 
 probation and protection. The world always followed 
 her Grace of Longleat like sheep. 
 
 "The Duchess of Longleat thinks her perfect," was 
 a phrase with which those who wished ill to Gladys 
 were easily silenced. Against the opinion of that 
 greatest of great ladies there was no appeal. 
 
 Guilderoy meanwhile went on his own way, not 
 
 Cuilderoy. /, 1 4
 
 2IO GUILDEROY. 
 
 taking any notice of the means by which his wife's 
 social success was secured. He was often absent in 
 Paris, in Italy, at German baths, or in Austrian country 
 houses, and his wife was quickly becoming not of much 
 more serious import to him than the chests of old 
 Stuart and Tudor plate locked up at Ladysrood. He 
 prized the plate certainly, and would have been in- 
 dignant and humiliated if thieves had broken in and 
 stolen it. But it was scarcely ever in his thoughts. He 
 trusted its safe keeping to that good fortune which had 
 attended him from his birth. 
 
 He had, by degrees, glided back into his old habits, 
 his old amusements, his old attentions to wonjen; and 
 he never looked intently or fondly enough at her to 
 become aware of a certain look which was in her eyes 
 when they followed him which might have told him 
 that she was neither a child nor a saint, neither im- 
 passive nor forgiving. He only thought her of a cold 
 temperament, and was glad. 
 
 She vaguely yet painfully felt that she had been 
 deceived by the grave and tender sentiments which he 
 had expressed so constantly before marriage with her, 
 and which were now never heard of from him. He 
 seemed utterly to have forgotten all the poetic and 
 romantic views with which he had captivated her 
 childish imagination; and she thought that they had 
 been entirely assumed to attract her. She did him 
 wrong. He had been quite sincere in his moods of 
 serious and ardent fancy when he had been first under 
 the charm of Christslea. He had affected nothing; he 
 had been actually, for the time being, the imaginative 
 and serious lover which he had seemed to be. He was
 
 OUILDEROY. 211 
 
 a man wholly surrendered to the influence of the mo- 
 ment, and taking all his colour from it. 
 
 Very soon after his union with her, the habitual in- 
 fluences of his life had begun to reassume their force 
 over him; the poetry and earnestness which had never 
 been more than momentary with him had ceded place 
 in turn to the instincts and modes of thought more 
 common to him. He had never been insincere, al- 
 though he appeared so to her. He had been merely 
 following the whims and emotions of a season; and 
 when she ceased to have any power over him, the kind 
 of feelings which she had temporarily aroused faded 
 with the fading of her charm. His sister had been 
 wholly correct in saying that his fancy for his wife had 
 only been in feeling an amourette like many another, 
 and it had no more enduring weight with him. But 
 in all this he was not false, although he seemed to her 
 to be so. He followed his own vaiying moods, and if 
 she became of but slight account in his existence, it 
 was because he honestly forgot that she ought to be 
 of any. 
 
 But all these complications and vacillations of cha- 
 racter were too intricate for her to follow; and she 
 only felt a continually growing sense that she had been 
 intentionally deceived by him when he had wooed her 
 with the graceful and chivalrous kind of homage which 
 had won her young heart under the red autumn leaves 
 of the Christslea orchards. The world forever claimed 
 him; and he went to its claims willingly. 
 
 He could not live without stimulant, distraction, 
 movement, excitement; they were all drugs indispen- 
 sable to his existence, and in the fumes of them such 
 
 14*
 
 212 GUILDEROV. 
 
 an idyl as had smiled at him for a moment amongst 
 the autumn flowers of Christslea had no chance to re- 
 tain its spell. He had been quite sincere in it; as 
 sincere as when he had assured her father that he 
 sighed for the nude and childlike soul of a virgin love. 
 He had not conscientiously played a part; because he 
 had believed that the part was his own whilst he had 
 played it. But this was too subtle for her comprehen- 
 sion; she only saw that the man who had wooed her 
 did not exist in the man who had wedded her. 
 
 In him as in many another man of intelligence and 
 imagination, the mingled fever and conventionality of 
 modern life had made both imagination and intelligence 
 mere occasional factors in his thoughts and character; 
 frittered away and hurried away by the ever-pressing 
 crowd of baser instincts and more material interests 
 and pleasures. 
 
 In all the wishes and fancies for a more poetic 
 existence, and for more innocent affections, which he 
 had expressed to her, and to her father, in the weeks 
 preceding his marriage, he had been his own dupe; 
 and had deluded himself with a mirage of his own 
 creating. The mirage had faded; but the obligations 
 he had taken on himself when under the charm of it, 
 remained behind it. 
 
 Now and then, indeed, he felt with a pang that he 
 did not keep his promise to John Vernon in either the 
 spirit or the letter. "Et puer est, et nudus Amor," he 
 had said when sitting under the porch at Christslea; 
 but the divine nudity of the innocent soul had soon 
 seemed to him of little charm, and he had wished it 
 draped and veiled with those arts which heighten what
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 I 3 
 
 they hide. He knew, in his own consciousness, that 
 every word which Vernon had predicted had been 
 verified. He had sought those who threw the sulphur 
 on the fading or on the rising flame. Often he sought 
 them in spheres far removed from the knowledge or 
 observation of his wife. But at times the women who 
 beguiled him were amidst those of her own world. 
 
 There was a new star risen over London society in the 
 third year of his marriage. It was a lady familiarly 
 called by all her male friends Olive Shiffton: a very 
 pretty woman, with the undulating form and the volup- 
 tuous grace of an odalisque, combined with an impu- 
 dence which was almost heroic, and a success only 
 possible in the senility and sensuality of society at the 
 close of this century. Mrs. Shiffton had come no one 
 very well knew whence. Her husband had a large 
 Australian fortune, and she herself was vaguely said to 
 be "a lawyer's daughter," which, as Lady Sunbury ob- 
 served, was satisfactory, no doubt, but vague, com- 
 prising as it did everything whatever from the Lord 
 Chancellor down to the lowest attorney of Smoke Street. 
 Be she what she would, she was lovely to look at, had 
 caught the eye and amused the ennui of an exalted 
 personage, and had, by audacity, cringing, and clever- 
 ness, placed herself in the highest rank of society. 
 Some great ladies still did not know her, indeed, but 
 they were the exception. Mrs. Percy Shiffton was 
 really seen "everywhere." 
 
 She laid siege to Guilderoy, and succeeded in be- 
 guiling him. She amused him infinitely, quite as much 
 by what she was not as by what she was. Her constant 
 endeavour to persuade herself and everybody that she
 
 214 GUILDER OY. 
 
 had been born in the purples was a perpetual comedy 
 to him; whilst the great rarity of her peculiar loveli- 
 ness, which was that of a Creole rather than of an 
 Englishwoman, had a potent seduction for his senses. 
 
 "Do not even think of that odious woman; I do 
 not even know her," said the Duchess of Longleat to 
 Gladys; but Gladys could not but see the power 
 possessed and exercised by this person Avhom she met 
 at every turn and in every house except at that of 
 Her Grace of Longleat, at Balfrons, and at lUington. 
 The very exclusion of the lady from the houses of his 
 relatives served to suggest to her the terms of intimacy 
 existing between Guilderoy and Olive Shiffton, 
 
 "It is only his way; he is always flirting like that; 
 it means nothing," whispered the Duchess to her once 
 at a great ball at Grosvenor House, where Guilderoy, 
 half amused, half bored, was sitting out four dances 
 under the shadow of tropical plants by the side of 
 Olive Shiffton. 
 
 "Why do you not flirt too, you goose? That would 
 bring him to his senses," thought the Duchess. But she 
 had too much of the good nature of the Balfrons blood 
 to make the suggestion, and she had great respect for 
 the self-control with which a woman so young as Gladys 
 succeeded in restraining all evidence of suspicion or 
 indignation. 
 
 "It is not Olive Shiffton that she need care about," 
 said Lady Sunbury to her. "He will play with her a 
 season — half a season — nothing more. There are greater 
 dangers than that, if she only could understand them." 
 
 "What do you mean?" asked the Duchess. 
 
 "I mean that all these caprices do not really matter.
 
 C.UII,1>ER0Y. 2 I 5 
 
 What docs matter is the only woman he has ever really 
 loved, or, to my belief, will ever really love," 
 
 "Beatrice Soria?" asked the Duchess. "But I thought 
 that was all broken off long ago?" 
 
 "My dear Ermyntrude," replied Lady Sunbury, 
 "there are plants which only grow the stronger for being 
 broken off; any gardener will tell you that. He was in 
 Italy this spring, and you know Soria is dead." 
 
 "Certainly he was in Italy, and certainly Soria is 
 dead; but it does not follow " 
 
 "How can you say so? Oh! if there were nothing 
 more truly dangerous than the Olive Shifftons of society 
 we should not all suffer as we do." 
 
 "Well, do not suggest it to Gladys. Here, if any- 
 where, ignorance is bliss." 
 
 "I am not a mischief-maker," replied Lady Sunbury 
 with hauteur and dignity. 
 
 "I am afraid you are, sometimes," thought Ermyn- 
 trude Longleat; and she communicated her apprehen- 
 sions to her brother. 
 
 "I do not think there is any danger from the 
 Duchess Soria," he answered. "She is a very proud 
 woman. Proud women cannot be discarded one day and 
 freshly won the next." 
 
 "Oh, my dear, if she be still in love with him!" 
 said his sister, who did not see much security in this 
 barrier. 
 
 Meantime Gladys was only very dimly aware of the 
 causes for jealousy which were given her. She did not 
 understand enough of the world or of the persons in it 
 to be conscious of how much she might have to resent. 
 
 She felt that her husband cared but little about
 
 2 I 6 GUILDEROY. 
 
 her; she was sensible that his Hfe contained numerous 
 interests, friendships, and amusements in which she had 
 no part, and of which she had scarcely any knowledge; 
 but the complete innocence of her childhood hung too 
 long about her like a golden mist not to be as yet a 
 veil which blinded her to much. She had no compre- 
 hension of men's natures. Her father had tried to 
 suggest their faults and follies to her, but her mind had 
 not embraced the extent of his meaning. Only very 
 slowly, little by little, as months succeeded months, did 
 she begin to comprehend the vast difference between 
 what was, and what seemed to be, in the world in 
 which she found herself, and realised the vast extent 
 to which unacknowledged affections and influences have 
 in it a greater potency than those which are visible and 
 avowed. 
 
 In her ignorance she had fancied that, because she 
 was his wife, Guilderoy would for ever prefer her to all 
 others; she learned that it was rather almost all others 
 whom he preferred to herself. He was, indeed, never 
 unkind to her, or otherwise than courteous. The greatest 
 want of kindness which he ever showed was in a lack 
 of attention to what she said, a restrained but yet per- 
 ceptible weariness whenever she was alone with him. 
 He was liberal even to extravagance in all he gave her; 
 he was scrupulously punctilious in politeness to her be- 
 fore his household or his friends, and he was seldom 
 ruffled to the utterance even of an impatient sentence 
 to her ear. But, all the same, she felt that she was 
 very little, perhaps nothing, to him; and when she re- 
 called the adoration of the first few weeks of their 
 union she felt a cold like ice close in about her
 
 GUir.DEROY. 217 
 
 heart; for she knew all that she missed, all that she 
 had lost. 
 
 No doubt there were many women of her age who 
 would have been made quite sufficiently happy by the 
 material powers and pleasures which he had given her. 
 But she was not. Her pride was incessantly wounded 
 and her affections were incessantly starved; and she was 
 sore of heart amidst the profusion, the dazzling changes, 
 the movement and the constant crowds, of her new 
 existence. 
 
 She had not very much time left to her to think; 
 but her thoughts were often bitter and troubled when 
 her lips were speaking those conventional phrases in 
 which she had learned to take refuge. The preoccupa- 
 tion and depression which were so often on her took 
 from the charm of her personal loveliness, because they 
 robbed it of light and animation. The glad spontaneous 
 smile with which she had welcomed the name of Sir 
 Roger de Coverley, or recognised the bay of Christslea 
 in David Cox's drawing, was never seen upon her 
 features now. 
 
 "You have really marvellously acquired all the 
 morgue of an English great lady," he said to her once. 
 "I never imagined you would be able to assume so 
 easily the impassiveness and unpleasantness which my 
 sister and many like her of the old school think so ne- 
 cessary to the high breeding of a woman of fashion!" 
 
 He did not perceive that what were dead in her 
 were the vivacity, the insouciance, and the abandonment 
 of youth. 
 
 "That is cruelly unkind; I do all that I can to be
 
 2 I 8 GUILDEROY. 
 
 whatever you wish," she answered him with tears 
 brimming in her eyes. 
 
 He rose; restless and angry, and unreasonable. 
 
 "For Heaven's sake, my dear, do not give way to 
 hysteria like that," he said with much unconscious ex- 
 aggeration. "I thought you too proud and high-spirited 
 to burst out crying at every word which does not 
 flatter you." 
 
 "I do not want flattery," she said indignantly. "I 
 want only justice." 
 
 "Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a 
 woman," he said irritably. "One can never hint a fault 
 to them but what they think we are brutal and un- 
 generous. All that I ask of you is to enjoy your life — 
 at least, to look as if you did. It is no immense de- 
 mand, assuredly. You have everything which attracts 
 and pleases other women, and yet nothing whatever 
 seems to attract or please you. I did not make the 
 world, and I cannot alter it. You must learn to take 
 it as it is. We all have to do so, or become intolerable 
 to ourselves and others." 
 
 "There is only one thing I want," she said in a 
 voice so low that he scarcely heard it. 
 
 "What is that?" he said with some impatience. She 
 looked at him, and could not bring herself to answer. 
 
 "Nothing you can give me," she said with a return 
 of that coldness which he at once admired and detested 
 in her. 
 
 "What some one else can give then?" he asked 
 with a sudden surprise and displeasure. 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Cannot you speak, my dear, without enigmas or
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 I Q 
 
 monosylables? If it be anything in reason you shall 
 have it." 
 
 She looked at him wistfully. She longed to say to 
 him all that she felt, to open her heart to him in all 
 its longing and pain, but the sensitiveness and pride of 
 her temper kept the words of confession and entreaty 
 from her lips. She was afraid of his contemptuous 
 and slighting reception of her expressions of affection, 
 and she had the overwhelming consciousness that she 
 was too indifferent to him for him ever to take the 
 trouble to penetrate or analyse her feelings for him. 
 
 "I wish I could please you," she said, instead of 
 the words which had been on her lips; and these seemed 
 to him stiff and commonplace, and left him cold. 
 
 "You please me in much," he said. "I am very 
 proud of you in much. But I would willingly see you 
 gayer of temper and more easily interested. It is so 
 much, my dear, for a woman to be amiable! And no- 
 thing is so unamiable as the tendency you display to 
 brood over your own wrongs and poser to yourself as 
 superior to the rest of the world. Pray do not let this 
 inclination to tearful scenes grow upon you. Nothing 
 is so distressing to any man; and I more, even than 
 most men, abhor everything approaching to a scene. 
 Remember that, dear, and try to be happy. If I have 
 not made you so it is my misfortune, not my fault." 
 
 He believed w^hat he said. 
 
 "It will be terrible," he thought when he was 
 alone, "if she become la feinme incomprise. There is 
 nothing on earth so distressing, so unconsolable, so 
 absolutely unreasonable upon earth. At present she is 
 young, and really lovely, and it does not matter much;
 
 2 20 GUILDEROY. 
 
 but, years hence, it will be unbearable, and how is one 
 to check it? It is always a malady which grows. Good 
 heavens! why were women made like that — always 
 analysing your feelings and their own, always teasing 
 you to tell them that what is dying is not dead; always 
 pulling up love by its roots if they think its blossom 
 looks sickly, always killing by over-culture the very 
 thing they most wish should live eternally? I know she 
 is good. I think her lovely. I was very fond of her 
 for a while; I am not now; I cannot help that. But it 
 is possible that I might be so again if she did not 
 weary me. Cannot she understand that? No; they 
 never understand it. They can never comprehend that 
 one's soul revolves like the earth, and has its summer 
 and winter solstice. With them it must be all summer 
 at canicular heat, and if they cannot have the sunshine 
 of summer, they will at least have its storms." 
 
 And he went out of his house with a sense of ex- 
 treme irritation. 
 
 "I have always been kind to her," he would have 
 said, if any one had reproached him; and he was indeed 
 wholly unaware that anything of kindness was lacking 
 in him. He had had a nervous dread of her display- 
 ing any attachment to him in the world, and he was 
 relieved to find that she was so undemonstrative and 
 so reasonable. She suffered with all the terrible anxiety 
 of instinctive jealousy whenever she saw his attentions 
 to other women, and when she realised how easy it was 
 for them to enchain and charm him, and how impos- 
 sible for her. But her fears took no definite shape; even 
 her sense of pain came rather from the idea of her own 
 insufficiency to him than of his inconstancy to her.
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 21 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 One day, Gladys returning unexpectedly from a 
 drive, and going upstairs to her own rooms without 
 summoning any servant, came suddenly on her head 
 waiting woman, who was standing before her opened 
 jewel-safe. It was an iron safe enclosed in an inlaid 
 lac box of great beauty, and standing on a metal tripod, 
 of which the feet were fastened to the floor by screws. 
 The key was kept by herself on her watch-chain. 
 
 The woman did not hear her approach, and was 
 standing in hesitation before the first jewel-tray; her 
 hesitation ended in selecting rapidly two or three rings, 
 which she slipped into the bosom of her dress. She 
 was tempted, but afraid, to take the larger objects. 
 She was a Scotchwoman, a widow, and very religious, 
 high in esteem with, and long trusted by, great families; 
 she had been in the service of Gladys since her mar- 
 riage, when she had been hired for her by Lady Sun- 
 bury. 
 
 Her mistress now went up to her without a sound 
 and took the key out of her hand. 
 
 "Put back those rings you have stolen," she said 
 in a calm voice. The woman turned red and white, 
 trembled, stammered, and protested. 
 
 "Denial is of no use," said Gladys. "You have 
 opened the safe with a false key, for I have its own
 
 222 OUn.DEROY. 
 
 key on my chain, as you know. Put back the rings. 
 You took three." 
 
 The maid, trembhng in every hmb, brought them 
 from their hiding-place and restored them to their 
 cases. 
 
 "You will not ruin me, my lady?" she said piteously. 
 "My character is all that I have in the world to 
 live by!" 
 
 "Have you taken anything before?" 
 
 "Not much," she muttered. "I never touched the 
 safe before, so help me God! But you are very care- 
 less with your money, my lady, and it is a cruel tempta- 
 tion to put in the sight of poor folks." 
 
 Gladys looked at her in disgust. 
 
 "And I gave you fifty pounds last month to send 
 your children to the sea!" she said slowly. "And I 
 have trusted you, I have trusted you entirely ever 
 since I took you into my service. Are you not ashamed 
 to have repaid me thus?" 
 
 "You trust everybody, my lady," said the woman 
 with ill-concealed scorn. "And there are those higher 
 than I, and nearer to you than I, as repays you worse." 
 
 The face of Gladys flushed hotly. 
 
 "Leave me this moment," she said; "I will not ar- 
 rest you for the sake of your children. Perhaps I do 
 wrong to let a thief go unmarked into the world. But 
 I hope that you will remember the danger you have 
 escaped, and be honest to your employers in the 
 future," 
 
 The woman made her a low curtesey, murmured a 
 hypocritical blessing on her, and tried to kiss her hand. 
 But Gladys nwlioned her away.
 
 GUILDF.ROY. 2 23 
 
 "Leave the house in ten minutes, or I will not an- 
 swer for my longer clemency." 
 
 The maid curtseyed a second time, and withdrew 
 in silence. 
 
 "You young fool!" she thought, "you have never 
 looked if your other jewels are safe, and you little 
 guess the nest-egg I have laid up from your careless- 
 ness every month since I have been in your service. 
 Trusted me! Aye, you trust everybody, you born 
 simpleton, and you go through the muck of the world 
 as if it were a meadow of daisies!" 
 
 AVhen she told Guilderoy of the incident he was 
 amused. 
 
 "I am glad it is that sanctimonious Presbyterian, 
 whom Hilda thought such a pearl," he answered. "My 
 dear child, you may be quite sure that you are robbed 
 right and left by all your people. We always are. The 
 woes of employers should be sung by another Tom 
 Hood. The whole world is just now on its knees in 
 adoration before the poorer classes; all the cardinal 
 \'irtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only 
 property of any kind which is the sinner. But I fancy, 
 if the truth were known, the scales are more evenly 
 weighted than that, and that the continuous robbery to 
 which property is subjected by those possessors of all 
 the virtues who yawn in our halls, and gorge themselves 
 on our food, would pretty well make the balance even 
 between us. Do not think more about it. Take a 
 Frenchwoman; you will not find her reading the Bible 
 when you come home from a ball, but she will be much 
 more agreeable to you, and infinitely more honest," 
 
 But to Gladys the matter was not so light.
 
 2 24 GUILD EROY, 
 
 To a nature which is very faithful, honest, and 
 trustful, any deception seems the most appalling of 
 crimes; and all ingratitude seems to enter the very flesh 
 like a thorn. 
 
 Soon after the discovery of the theft a newspaper 
 was sent to her with a broad mark placed against one 
 of its paragraphs. She supposed it referred to some 
 critique or essay of her father's; his scholarly work for 
 the great reviews was always full of interest to her even 
 when she did not understand the subject of it. But at 
 the first line she now read a burning colour mounted over 
 her face and throat; she saw that the paragraph was 
 far from the harmless thing she thought, and that the 
 news-sheet was one of those curses of modern society 
 which live on supplying it with anonymous calumnies. 
 
 The marked lines, carefully worded to escape the 
 laws of libel, but plain as the alphabet to the initiated, 
 spoke jestingly of the tender relations existing between 
 one of the largest landowners and most influential 
 peers of the south-western counties and an olive branch 
 brought from the antipodes; suggested with a sneer that 
 the olive in this case would not mean peace, and re- 
 commended the noble Lothario to read the marriage 
 service over once a week. In its studied innuendo and 
 its cowardly malignity the insinuated charge was a 
 masterpiece of its own venomous and iniquitous order. 
 More subtle than lago, more treacherous than Iscariot, 
 more devilish than Satan's self, these privileged and 
 unpunished carrion-eaters of the press bear ruin and 
 shame and indignity into innocent hearts and happy 
 homes, themselves safe and secure in their masked 
 crime because the very loftiness of the place of those
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 2 5 
 
 whom they attack forbid them to descend into the mud 
 of pubUc tribunals. 
 
 She read it with horror, and flung it from her as 
 she would have cast off a viper. 
 
 She had been too much surrounded by the hints 
 and jests and smiles of the world not to comprehend 
 to what and to whom the slander pointed. But it was 
 the first time that the full meaning of her husband's 
 attentions to women grew plain to her. 
 
 She paced to and fro her room in a paroxysm of 
 disgust and horror. She had the sensation of falling 
 headlong down from some giddy height. All the force, 
 the passion, and the scorn which slept under her out- 
 ward seriousness and serenity leaped up in her. She 
 seized the paper from the corner whither she had flung 
 it, and tore it with quivering hands into a thousand 
 pieces. 
 
 At that moment Aubrey entered. One glance at 
 her face told him that she was suffering from some 
 great shock. 
 
 "My dear child, what can possibly have happened?" 
 he asked her in great concern. 
 
 It was four o'clock; he was going down to the 
 House, and had come in for a moment on his way to 
 bring her some political news. 
 
 She told him in a few broken and ashamed words 
 what she had read. 
 
 "It is not true? It cannot be true?" she asked 
 him, gazing with heart-breaking entreaty into his face. 
 
 "Of course it is not true, my dear," he answered, 
 avoiding her gaze; and he said in his soul, "God for- 
 
 Guilderoy. I, 1$
 
 2 26 GUILDEROY. 
 
 give me if I tell her what is a falsehood! — after all it 
 may not be true." 
 
 "You should not read those papers," he added. 
 "The men who fatten and grow rich on them should 
 be flogged at the cart's tail from Kensington to Shore- 
 ditch. When I think that they drink burgundy, and 
 drive in broughams, while we send other men who 
 snatch a watch or a purse to the treadmill, I feel that 
 our whole hollow system of society and civilisation is 
 so accursed that it will be all too good a fate for us if 
 our whole city perishes by the Clan-na-gael." 
 
 "But is it true?" she repeated, in all a woman's 
 seclusive narrowing of thought of her own sufferings and 
 passions. "You know — you know — he does admire her." 
 
 "I do not believe he admires her. He plays with 
 her. She amuses idle moments for him in society, 
 that is all," replied Aubrey with some embarrassment. 
 "My dearest child, do not distress yourself. An Olive 
 Shiffton is not worth one tear of yours." 
 
 "But I have seen " The words were broken 
 
 in their utterance by a sob in her throat. 
 
 Aubrey sighed heavily; he felt all the restless pain 
 of a man before the sorrow of a woman to whom he is 
 sincerely attached, and whom it is utterly out of his 
 power to console. 
 
 "You have seen him flirting with her. All that 
 means nothing. You must not put any false construc- 
 tion on it. She is a pretty woman and an audacious; 
 but she has neither the good breeding nor the good 
 taste which could ever make her really charming to a 
 man who has both. How can you read these foolish 
 and villainous news-sheets?"
 
 GUILDEROY. 227 
 
 "This one was sent to me marked. I thought it 
 was something about some essay of my father's." 
 
 "Very likely she sent it herself," said Aubrey. But 
 there he wronged her; it was the discharged maid who 
 had sent it. "She is an adventuress, nothing better, 
 though London society has taken her to its bosom. My 
 dear Gladys, do not descend to any thought of her. It 
 is beneath you." 
 
 "That is easily said!" she murmured, with a faint 
 smile. 
 
 "And difficult to feel. That I quite understand. 
 But not impossible, I think, is it? Not to a proud and 
 loyal nature? Not to your father's daughter?" 
 
 She was silent. He was infinitely grieved for her. 
 He felt an intensity of indignation on her behalf which 
 he could not express lest he should lend weight to her 
 suspicions and strength to her anger. His affection for 
 her was full of compassion, and he felt much what he 
 would have felt if he had seen a child that he was fond 
 of struck a blow on its tender flesh. 
 
 He endeavoured to make her apprehensions and her 
 wrongs seem lighter than he knew that they had every 
 right to be, because he was convinced that any evi- 
 dence of her indignation given to his cousin would only 
 cause dissension and disunion, and lead to a scene 
 which would very likely end in final rupture. 
 
 "You have never been intimate with this person?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "Never. I bow to her; and he told me to send her 
 a card for our great ball; that was all." 
 
 "Then you will have no trial of intercourse with 
 her. I am sure that he will not ask you to invite her 
 
 15*
 
 228 GUILDEROY. 
 
 to Ladysrood. He knows what my sister's and his 
 sister's opinions of her are. Next season you may be 
 sure he will have forgotten she exists. You will say 
 nothing of this to him?" 
 
 "No?" 
 
 Her accent was interrogative, doubtful, reproachful. 
 
 "No," said Aubrey. "No; certainly not if you are 
 wise, my dear. He is not a man to be patient under 
 interrogation or reproach. If you appeared to believe 
 such a story you would possibly excite, you would in- 
 evitably irritate him. He will see and know nothing 
 of it. He never reads newspapers by any hazard, and 
 you may be sure that no one will venture to speak of 
 this to him." 
 
 "But something should be done? Is such an offence 
 as that to pass? Am I to be humiliated in such a 
 way, and no one of all my friends revenge it?" 
 
 "Leave the matter to me," said Aubrey. "You are 
 a part of my family. All that ought to be done shall 
 be done. But for your own sake, my dear, do not open 
 this subject with Guilderoy," 
 
 She was silent still. 
 
 All the burning pain of the first deadly know- 
 ledge of her life was like fire in her veins. To her, 
 as to every woman who loves and is wronged, the 
 hardest task of all was to be meek and to endure with 
 patience. 
 
 "You believe that I am your friend?" said Aubrey, 
 gravely, as he took her hands in his own. She raised 
 her eyes to his heavy with tears. 
 
 "Oh, yes," she said, with deep emotion. "You are 
 the only friend I have, except my father."
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 2g 
 
 Aubrey was deeply touched, but he restrained all 
 that he felt. 
 
 "Do not say that, dear; you have many who care 
 for you. My sister cares very warmly; and were she 
 here she would say the same to you as I. Do not be 
 the first to break your peace with Evelyn; if you were 
 to speak of this bitterly — and you could not speak of 
 it calmly — it would be a firebrand which would set in 
 a blaze the whole of your relations with him, present 
 and future." 
 
 She did not answer. She could not say even to 
 Aubrey what she felt in her heart, that she was ab- 
 solutely nothing to her husband, and that the violence 
 of anger from him would have seemed almost more 
 easily endurable than the sense that he only gave her 
 outward courtesies and that sort of indifferent regard 
 which he felt for her because she was physically beauti- 
 ful, and so did him honour in the world. 
 
 "You will promise me?" said Aubrey. "I have 
 not a moment to lose. I must be at the House in ten 
 minutes' time; tell me before I go that you will follow 
 my counsels. Believe me they are such as Vernon him- 
 self would give you were he here," 
 
 "I will try," she answered. 
 
 "That is not enough. You must say, 'I will.' You 
 will keep your promise once given, I know." 
 
 She hesitated a moment; then she said in a low 
 voice : 
 
 "You can judge best, I daresay. I will not speak 
 of it." 
 
 "That is right, and brave, and wise. One day you
 
 230 GUILDEROY. 
 
 will thank me," said Aubrey; he kissed her forehead 
 gravely with his accustomed salute and left her. 
 
 It had cost him much to keep to her a tone so calm 
 and in semblance almost unsympathetic. He felt that 
 if he had met Guilderoy upon the staircase of the 
 house it would have been a hard struggle not to have 
 insulted him in her behalf. But he knew that the ad- 
 vice which he had given her was sound. She would 
 have to learn to bear such trials as these in silence. 
 Probably much heavier ones would await her in the 
 future. 
 
 "Poor child!" he thought sadly. His heart was 
 heavy as he walked towards Westminster. His thoughts 
 went back to the days of his early and secret marriage; 
 the fatal mistake of his boyhood, which had been con- 
 fessed to his father but to no other creature in the 
 world. He recalled the immense devotion, the ex- 
 aggerated constancy, which he had given in the ardour 
 and loyalty of youth to one whose worthlessness he had 
 learned too late. How strange, how contradictory, how 
 cruel, he thought, the caprices and the awards of fate! 
 He who in the loneliness of rank and power would have 
 deemed a great, a disinterested, and a faithful love the 
 dearest of earth's treasures, had been betrayed where 
 he had given heart and soul and honour; and his 
 cousin, to whom to give constancy was impossible and 
 to receive it was wearisome, had the whole life of this 
 beautiful child centered in him, and was moved by it 
 rather to impatience and annoyance than to any other 
 emotion ! 
 
 "He will want some day what he throws away
 
 GUILDEROY. 23 1 
 
 now," thought Aubrey as he walked to his place in the 
 Chamber. 
 
 And the next moment he knew that this reflection 
 was romantically false; that it was beyond all other 
 things unlikely that Guilderoy would ever be met by 
 any such chastisement in kind; and that in the treasure- 
 house of love it is frequently those who give the least 
 who most receive. . 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 "I HAVE not a doubt the Shiffton woman had it put 
 in herself to compromise him. It is just the sort of 
 thing she would do," said the Duchess of Longleat, 
 when he spoke of the matter to her. 
 
 "He has no right to place himself in a position to 
 be compromised," said Aubrey. 
 
 "The best advice to her," said the Duchess, "would 
 be to flirt outrageously; to compromise herself, to 
 awaken him and affright him. But one hesitates to tell 
 her that, it is always playing with edged tools." 
 
 "And I do not think she would do it if you did 
 tell her. The swan cannot affect the parade of the 
 peacock. She is not of that type." 
 
 "No, she will not flirt," said the Duchess. "But she 
 may do worse. If she be thus chilled and offended, she 
 may throw herself into some flood of real passion, half 
 out of vengeance, and half out of the need of love. 
 That is usually the way with women who are reserved 
 in manner but have warm hearts."
 
 232 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "There is no such passion in our day." 
 
 "Oh, my dear, that is a mere phrase. There is as 
 much, or as little, as there ever was probably. Your 
 favourite Greeks and Latins were as fond of butterfly 
 loves as our society is, if I remember aright the verses 
 that you used to translate to me at Balfrons when we 
 were children." 
 
 "Yes, but theirs 7vcre loves, Avhilst they lasted; in 
 most of the 'affairs' of our days what is there except 
 vanity, advertisement, often avarice, sometimes jealousy, 
 at best, sensual impulses? Of passion nothing, or almost 
 nothing." 
 
 "I think she would be capable of more." 
 
 "I think so too; she is capable of more; but it is 
 thrown away on a man who does not even perceive it." 
 
 "She will not always give everything for nothing." 
 
 "Probably; and that makes her danger. If she ever 
 love anyone else, she will not be content with one of 
 the passing liaisons of which we see so much; she will 
 believe herself lost, as women believed in old days, and 
 will end her life wretchedly in ceaseless remorse." 
 
 "It is Guilderoy who should have the remorse." 
 
 Aubrey smiled bitterly. 
 
 "My dear! Do you think he could ever be stirred 
 to such an emotion, even if he stood by her dead body? 
 He would say that she had always been unreasonable, 
 and unsympathetic. Every woman seems to him un- 
 sympathetic, and unreasonable, who does not at once 
 understand his desertion of her." 
 
 He felt the greatest anger against his cousin; he 
 had always been impatient of his many changes and his 
 countless passions, and he had blamed him for wasting
 
 GUILDEROY, 2^;^ 
 
 all his years and his intelligence in the mere pursuit of 
 women who only wearied him as soon as they were won. 
 But now his anger against him took a more personal 
 shape. He felt intolerant of his neglect of his duties 
 and his indifference to all that was noblest and worthiest 
 of culture in the nature of Gladys. 
 
 He preserved silence towards him, because his 
 intimate experience of the world told him that inter- 
 ference has almost always unhappy issues, and he saw 
 no way in which it would be possible for him to convey 
 to Guilderoy his own opinions without producing such 
 a quarrel as must inevitably put an end to all intimacy 
 between them. Besides, what effect could remonstrance 
 of any kind have upon a temperament like his cousin's? 
 
 If he did not care for his wife, what condemnation 
 or persuasion could ever induce him to do so? Feelings 
 are not to be called into existence by censure or argu- 
 ment. They are wind-sown flowers, and must spring 
 how and where they will, 
 
 Gladys kept her word. 
 
 She never mentioned the matter to Guilderoy, and 
 she never flinched or even betrayed anger when she 
 met Olive Shiffton in society, as she constantly did. 
 Her manner grew a little colder, a little graver, to all 
 the world than it had been before; and all the women, 
 and many a man said what a pity it was that she was 
 so silent, and looked so uninterested, that none could, 
 in common parlance "get on" with her; but that was 
 all. She went out into the world with her pain hidden 
 under conventional courtesies, with quite as much 
 courage as the Spartan boy who hid the growling cub 
 beneath his cloak.
 
 234 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Was it true? That wonder, that doubt, haunted her 
 every hour. It occupied her every thought. It ahnost 
 made her forget her httle dead boys lying in their tiny 
 coffins on beds of dead white roses in the churchyard 
 of Ladysrood. Was it true? Was it? 
 
 At times, horrible coarse temptations assailed her, 
 things that she had read of or heard of, means by 
 which women in jealous pain learned the truth through 
 interrogated servants or bribed messengers. But such 
 temptations only passed through her mind for moments, 
 as hot winds sweep over fair fields. Her loyalty and 
 her pride alike rejected their tempting. Yet the im- 
 pression grew more strongly upon her that it was true. 
 There was, or she fancied there was, an insolence of 
 triumph in the black languid eyes of Olive Shiffton 
 whenever they met hers across a crowded room, which 
 to her tortured fancy was confirmation strong as proof of 
 holy writ. And she had not even the solace of Aubrey's 
 presence, for ten days after the day on which she had 
 received the journal he had been compelled to go to 
 Balmoral as the minister in attendance on the Queen. 
 
 What was the use of a great love, she thought 
 wearily, if he to whom it was given, neither heeded nor 
 wanted it? 
 
 It was certainly beautiful in theory for her father 
 to bid her make hers so great, that her husband could 
 find no other equal to it; but if its force, its sincerity, 
 its magnitude, only formed a total which was wearisome 
 to the object of it, what then? What good could it 
 effect? To what purpose did it exist? She could com- 
 prehend that women might pardon inconstancy, where 
 it was loyally confessed and generously atoned for; she
 
 GUILD EROY. 235 
 
 could imagine that there might be relations which only 
 became closer, sweeter, and dearer for temporary separa- 
 tion and offences of the passions; but neither of these 
 was her case. Guilderoy neither confessed nor atoned, 
 neither quarrelled with, nor admitted that he offended 
 her. He simply went his own way as though he had 
 never married her, and was at once so calm, so courteous, 
 and so careless that such serenity hurt and insulted her 
 more in her own sight than any quarrel with her would 
 have done. Aubrey and her father both spoke of her 
 duties as making patience, silence, and endurance her 
 obligation; but she was too young and too much in love 
 with her husband to resign herself to that mute course 
 without the most painful effort. No doubt they were 
 right, no doubt they were wise, she thought bitterly, 
 but they were not women with aching hearts that they 
 could understand. Did anyone understand? No one in 
 the world, she thought. Every one seemed to consider 
 that such trials as hers were inevitable and mattered 
 little. Every one seemed to hold that the material ad- 
 vantages of position and fortune were compensation 
 enough for all pain. 
 
 She loved him with all the tender and fanciful 
 poetry of youth and womanhood; but any expression of 
 it had been crushed into silence in her, by the conscious- 
 ness which came to her very early that it would seem 
 to him inopportune and wearisome. He was not a man 
 to prolong passion after possession, and any evidence 
 of his wife's for him would have been sure to find him 
 cold and critical. He had hinted as much to her once, 
 and her mind, sensitive and receptive to a fault, never 
 forgot the impression given to her by it. He had with-
 
 236 GUILDEROY. 
 
 out intending it conveyed to her the sense that she was 
 his, much as were the other decorations of his state and 
 his position; the companion of his days of ceremony, 
 not of his hours of pleasure, the associate of his rank, 
 but not of his affections. 
 
 He had not intended to give her this impression in 
 any measure so strongly as she had received it; but it 
 had been given even in the early Venetian days, and 
 could not be effaced. When the speaker is careless of 
 what he says, and the hearer listens with apprehension 
 and self- torment, the latter constantly is wounded when 
 the former had no intent whatever to wound. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 vSoME weeks later in the season she chanced to 
 stop her carriage one afternoon at a fashionable club; 
 old Lord Balfrons, who scarcely ever stirred out ot his 
 own houses, had been in person to her desiring to see 
 Guilderoy at once. She did not know at all where he 
 was, and said so, but his uncle was sure that he was at 
 one of his clubs at that hour, and bade her go and in- 
 quire. The old marquis was angered and anxious; he 
 had set his fancy on securing a certain Vandyke which 
 had come into the market, and in his son's absence re- 
 quired the offices of his nephew. He was petulant, 
 eager, and unreasonable; as great age, like youth, is 
 apt to be when there is a chance that one of its whims 
 may be thwarted; and Gladys, afraid to vex him, did
 
 GUILDEROY. 237 
 
 what she had never done before, and drove to various 
 houses in Pall Mall and St. James' Street. 
 
 At one of them the porter, new to his place and 
 ill-versed in the prudence which his situation required, 
 came to her carriage-door with a note in his hand. He 
 said that Guilderoy had not as yet been to the club 
 that day; but there was a letter which had come for 
 him; would her ladyship take it? Gladys took the 
 envelope in her hand, and she recognised the grey 
 olive leaf and the gold letter S. For an instant a hor- 
 rible temptation assailed her; she held the note one 
 brief instant in her hand while the colour changed in 
 her cheeks from pale to red, from red to pale, in rapid 
 alternation. In another instant she had conquered the 
 temptation; she remembered the scorn which her father 
 would have for her if she yielded to it. 
 
 She gave the letter back to the porter. "Lord 
 Guilderoy will take it when he comes," she said, in a 
 voice which trembled a little despite her efforts. "To 
 the park," she said to her servant; and the horses bore 
 her rapidly away. 
 
 The day chanced to be fine; the sunshine was gay. 
 Her friends and acquaintances saluted her by the score; 
 but though she mechanically returned their salutations 
 she was not sensible of what she did. The noise of 
 the streets was like the sound of a great sea in her 
 ears, and the yellow light, with the motes of the sun- 
 beams and the vapours of the smoke dancing in it, was 
 vague and confused before her eyes. 
 
 The sight of the letter had confirmed the suspicion 
 which had haunted her for some days. Jealousy seemed 
 to her a miserable and vulgar thing; a wretched
 
 238 GUILDEROY. 
 
 weakness which any woman of courage and pride 
 should scout as a degradation; and yet, being only 
 human, she was jealous, and she suffered intensely. 
 
 "Does pain always make vileness so easy?" she 
 thought bitterly. That she should have felt such a 
 temptation seemed for one moment to have sunken her 
 fathoms deep in indignity. John Vernon had taught 
 her the code of honour of a high-bred gentleman, the 
 kind of teaching which is unhappily omitted from the 
 education of most women, yet which is more necessary 
 for their own happiness, and that of those connected 
 with them, than all the learning or graces in the world. 
 Had he wholly ceased to care for her? Had he, indeed, 
 ever really cared at all? The doubt which had so 
 long festered and ached in her heart became a certainty. 
 She did not believe that he had ever loved her. In 
 truth he never had. 
 
 She did not see him that day or evening at all; 
 they had different engagements. The next day they 
 had a dinner party at home; she saw him for a moment 
 before it, and took the occasion to say to him; "Would 
 you mind my going to Ladysrood for a few days? I am 
 tired of the hurry of the season." 
 
 "My love, always do what you wish," answered 
 Guilderoy, with the careless amiability of indifference. 
 "I would not remain long were I you; it would look 
 odd at this moment." 
 
 "He does not even wish me away," she thought. 
 "So little does my presence affect him!" 
 
 Aloud she answered, "I Avill only stay three days; 
 only time enough to see my father." 
 
 "Your father should come into the world. It is a
 
 GUILDEROY. 239 
 
 pity he is so eccentric. He would be the most popular 
 man in London if he would only show himself." 
 
 "He would not care for popularity." 
 
 "I wish you did; at the least it is a very amiable 
 quality, and wins one innumerable friends." 
 
 "You are very popular." 
 
 There was an accent which sounded disagreeably in 
 the ear of Guilderoy in the few simple words. 
 
 "I do not think I am," he said with irritation. "I 
 care too little about other people. I am too great an 
 egotist, as you and your father are always telling me, 
 and I believe it is true." 
 
 "You are very popular," she repeated quietly. "At 
 least with women." 
 
 "You do me much honour," he replied with a little 
 laugh, not entirely free from embarrassment. At that 
 moment the first of their guests entered their drawing- 
 rooms. The next morning, very early, before Guilderoy 
 was awake, she left the house, and took the express 
 train of the forenoon to Ladysrood without announcing 
 her arrival there to any one. In the coolness of the late 
 summer afternoon she drove her ponies over the moor 
 to her father's cottage. The sandy road, running be- 
 tween high banks of marl and sandstone, crowned with 
 blossoming furze, with nodding foxgloves, and with 
 osmunda fern, was the same which John Vernon had 
 taken after the ceremony of her marriage, when he had 
 wished the golden flowers to be a symbol of her path 
 through life. 
 
 The evening was grey and still, and very peaceful; 
 there was a honey smell in the air rising from the short 
 wild thyme; it had rained the day before, and there
 
 240 GUILD EROY. 
 
 was a delicious moisture in the air; the moors were 
 lonely, here and there girls drove a flock of geese across 
 them, or a herd of red and dappled cattle was seen 
 browsing quietly. The simple familiar scene touched 
 her painfully; it seemed centuries since she had been 
 a child there herself, as careless as the girl that drove 
 the geese, as the young heifers that cropped the thyme: 
 and yet not much more than three years had gone by 
 since she had been found in the hut with the fox cub, 
 and had left childhood behind forever, not knowing 
 her loss. 
 
 She found John Vernon reading a mighty folio of 
 ancient date under the apple trees of his pasture, and 
 for a moment she felt a child again, when she saw the 
 ivy-shrouded porch, the homely sweet-smelling garden, 
 the low thatched roof, and the lattice window of her 
 own chamber. She never came to Christslea without a 
 sense of peace returning to her for so long as she 
 stayed under its tangle of honeysuckle and of sweet- 
 briar. 
 
 "Why did you not tell me, my dear? I would 
 have awaited you at Ladysrood," said Vernon. "What 
 can possibly bring you down in the height of the season? 
 Are you not well? You look tired." 
 
 "The life is fatiguing, there is nothing real in it; it 
 is all haste and turmoil." 
 
 "Nevertheless you should enjoy even that at your 
 age. I think they call it being dajis le mouvement, do 
 they not? I suppose the mouvemejit is much wilder 
 and more breathless than it was in my day. However, 
 my dear child, whatever the sins of the world, I am
 
 GUILDEROY. 24 1 
 
 grateful to them since they have sent you to lighten my 
 loneliness." 
 
 "You will come back to Ladysrood with me, will 
 you not? I shall only be here one day, I must go 
 back on the third; there is a State ball; they Avould not 
 like me to be absent from it." 
 
 "I will come with you willingly," said John Vernon. 
 "You know without you at Christslea, the summer 
 brings no flowers for me." 
 
 "I love to be here!" said his daughter. "It makes 
 me feel young again." 
 
 When she had renewed her acquaintance with the 
 old man and woman who formed the household of 
 Christslea, with the cocks and the hens, with the birds 
 and the bees, with the red and white stocks and the 
 clumps of sweet-william, with the big old dog, and the 
 tame fox in the orchard, and to please the old servants 
 had drunk a little cyder and eaten a piece of honey- 
 comb, sitting in the porch, she drove her father home 
 with her in the now darkening night to Ladysrood. 
 
 "Really, my love, you should be a very happy 
 woman," said Vernon, as the ponies trotted through the 
 deep ferny brakes of the park over the smooth grass 
 drives, and going at a gallop up the lime avenue of 
 the western entrance, were pulled up before the great 
 house standing glorious and spiritualised in the white 
 moonlight, with all its towers and pinnacles and fantastic 
 corbels standing out against the starlit sky. 
 
 "Because the park is fine and the house is hand- 
 some?" said Gladys, in a tone which he had never 
 heard from her. "Surely these are very coarse and 
 
 Guildej-oy. I. 10
 
 242 GUILDEROY. 
 
 material reasons ior you to allege? I thought you never 
 weighed externals." 
 
 "I do not think they are coarse reasons," said 
 Vernon, a little coldly. "Beauty is a great element in 
 happiness. Not the only factor, certainly, but a very 
 important factor nevertheless, for those who have eyes 
 to see it. I think the possession of an ancient, historical, 
 and beautiful house is one of the most poetic pleasures 
 in life; and I think, too, that the indifference with 
 which many of the owners of such houses consider 
 them is one of the greatest signs of decay in any 
 nobility. Not long ago, too, my dear, you were in love 
 with Ladysrood. I hope you do not tire of it because 
 it is yours. That would be a sad lesson for London 
 life to have taught you." 
 
 "I like it very much," said Gladys; but the tone 
 had no warmth in it. "I daresay if my little boys had 
 lived I should have felt affection for it." 
 
 "You will have other children, no doubt," said 
 Vernon, "and I should have thought there were already 
 existing reasons for you to be attached to your home." 
 
 She did not reply. 
 
 "I confess I am very attached to it myself," he con- 
 tinued, not wishing to dwell too seriously on the sub- 
 ject. "It is a really noble place, and though it is very 
 eclectic in the many various tastes which have gone to 
 make it what it is, yet it is harmonious even in its con- 
 tradictions of styles and epochs. The only perfect house 
 is a house in which one reads as in a book the history 
 of a race."
 
 GUILDER OY. 243 
 
 It was nine o'clock. Dinner awaited them, served 
 in the small dining-room of the Queen Anne wing of 
 of the house. Vernon ate nothing, as was his custom 
 at that hour, and his daughter ate little; her favourite 
 dogs supplied willing appetites. The dinner over, she 
 and he strolled out on to the west terrace; the air was 
 very warm, the stars brilliant, the sound of the distant 
 sea came to their ears on the silence; behind them 
 were the lighted windows of the wings; before them 
 the quaint green garden, with its high clipped hedges, 
 its fishponds, its yew trees under which Charles Stuart 
 had played at bowls, and Elizabeth Tudor had sat to 
 watch a midsummer masque sparkling amongst the 
 roses. They stood awhile leaning against the balustrade 
 of the terrace, then Vernon sat down on one of the 
 stone chairs, and said quietly: 
 
 "Tell me, my love, why have you come to me?" 
 
 Gladys did not change her position. She still leaned 
 her arms on the balustrade, her chin rested on her 
 hands; her eyes looked into the dewy darkness of the 
 hushed night. 
 
 "I wanted to tell you what a vile and mean thing 
 I nearly did," she answered slowly; and she told him 
 of her temptation to open the letter. 
 
 Vernon sat mute, his face in shadow, and he spoke 
 no word till she had finished quite; even then he waited 
 some moments ere he answered. 
 
 "You could not help your longing," he said at 
 length. "It is just these inclinations towards base 
 actions which sometimes enter the highest souls which 
 
 16*
 
 244 GUILDEROY. 
 
 make us understand how the myth of the devil arose. 
 I am thankful, indeed, that my daughter did not stoop 
 to baseness." 
 
 She turned her face towards him, and her eyes 
 were full of tears, 
 
 "He does not love me, you know. I have known 
 it a long time. I do not think he ever did." 
 
 "My dear! You are dreimiing! Why else should 
 he have married you?" 
 
 "It was a caprice — he has so many caprices. Do 
 you remember that line in the Phredrus: 'What we 
 call winged Eros, the immortals call Pteros for his 
 flighty nature?' Pteros is his love. He knows no 
 other." 
 
 John Vernon listened with bitter regret. He had 
 known that it was so; he had always known it; but he 
 had hoped that she would be young enough and blind 
 enough not to find it out herself — at all events, not to 
 find it out until time should have rendered it a matter 
 of little moment to her. All his heart yearned towards 
 her in this her first great sorrow, but he believed that 
 sympathy would be the unkindest kindness which he 
 could give her. What was the use of feeding morbid 
 regrets and sense of wrong which could never avail in 
 any way to get her back what she believed that she 
 had lost? 
 
 "I think you speak very bitterly and hastily on 
 small grounds," he said, resisting his desire to sym- 
 pathise with her, and curse the man who had made her 
 unhappy. "It does not in the least follow that because 
 a woman writes to him secretly that he invites, or
 
 GUILDEROY. 245 
 
 even cares for her, to do so. It may be even an 
 annoyance to him that he cannot prevent. You cannot 
 tell." 
 
 "I can tell. I have seen them together a hundred 
 times. I believe the whole world knows it — -except 
 myself." 
 
 "Well, let us admit that it is so. I do not defend 
 him. But I do say, my dear, that jealousy in a man's 
 wife makes her odious to him and ridiculous to the 
 world at large. In a woman who is not his wife jealousy 
 may be permissible, because her tenure is so insecure 
 that she may naturally tremble for its duration. But 
 in his wife it is to others absurd and to him intolerable. 
 JJyie femme qui se respecte n' est jamais jaloiise. My dear 
 child, you are still very young; you still know no more 
 than very young women do of the characters and 
 passions of men. My dear, I can assure you of one 
 thing — no man is constant to one woman. Male con- 
 stancy is not in nature, and therefore it is not demanded 
 in law. I understand that you are in love with your 
 husband, and therefore it is impossible for you to un- 
 derstand why he is no longer in love with you. I can 
 only tell you, my child, that nature has made man in- 
 constant; utterly inconstant through his senses, even 
 when he remains constant in his heart. It is terrible 
 to you; it is terrible to every woman when she learns 
 it for the first time. But the only women who ever 
 arrive at retaining happiness are those who recognise 
 this as a fact, and allow for the man's infidelity as they 
 would pardon an infant's forwardness." 
 
 She was silent; her chin still rested on her hands,
 
 246 GUILDEROY. 
 
 her eyes still gazed into the shadowy woods which 
 surrrounded the gardens beneath her. Her whole soul 
 rebelled passionately at the suggestion that she should 
 accept inconstancy as inevitable and forgive it as im- 
 material; she had all the vehemence, the narrowness, 
 the exclusive passion of youth and of womanhood. 
 
 "Why did you not tell me all this — before you let 
 me marry?" she said at last, very bitterly. 
 
 Vernon had long known that some day or other that 
 reproach would be brought against him. 
 
 "It would have been no use, my love," he said 
 gently; "no use whatever if I had. Love had blinded 
 you. And I could not even speak of such things to a 
 child like you. What could you have understood? You 
 do not even understand much now." 
 
 "I understand, then, you think him right?" 
 
 "I have never said so. I do not necessarily approve 
 a thing because I admit its possibility. Abstractedly, 
 I agree with Plato that men should govern their passions, 
 but actually I know that they do not do so until they 
 are at least as old as I am, and not always then. And 
 what I most want you to see is, that even if your hus- 
 band be indeed unfaithful to you, which is a mere as- 
 sumption on your part, you will gain nothing by the 
 endeavour to resent what you cannot alter. After all, 
 my child, if a woman cannot keep the affections she 
 has once won, pride should keep her from lamenting 
 her own failure, and tenderness should make her silent 
 on it. You seem to me to be drifting into a state of 
 irritation and of aigreur , which can serve no purpose 
 except that of your enemies, if you have any, who
 
 GUILDEROY. 247 
 
 may wish to see the breach widened between you and 
 Guilderoy." 
 
 "The women who care for him wish it no doubt!" 
 "Well, it is into their hands that you play. You 
 have self-control and you have intelligence. I want you 
 to perceive that, whatever she may feel, only a weak 
 woman and a silly woman degrades herself by the ex- 
 hibition of conjugal jealousy." 
 
 She was again silent; she bit her lips to restrain 
 the emotion which well nigh mastered her. She knew 
 that her father was right, but the advice struck on the 
 aching warmth of her young heart like cold steel on 
 warm flesh. 
 
 John Vernon's own heart ached for her, and had 
 he followed his impulse he would have given her the 
 mere fond unreasoning consoling sympathy that another 
 woman would have given. But he knew that it would 
 be the most unwholesome thing that he could offer 
 her in such a moment. 
 
 "You have said nothing, I hope, to Guilderoy?" he 
 asked her. She shook her head. "Pray continue to 
 say nothing. If it be not as you suppose, a false ac- 
 cusation would incense him greatly; if it be as you 
 suppose, it could do no possible good. You would drive 
 him into either a subterfuge or a rage. Neither is a 
 desirable result. Believe me, dear, a wise woman 
 never asks questions. What is the use of asking them? 
 The person tormented takes refuge in prevarication or 
 in downright falsehood. His character is irritated and 
 injured, and the woman who has worried him sinks
 
 248 GUILDEROY. 
 
 farther and farther from any chance of ever obtaining 
 his true and vokintary confidence. Love may be won 
 and confidence may be won, but neither can be 
 bulHed." 
 
 "What am I to do then? To learn to care nothing? 
 Is that the best?" she asked in a cold voice. 
 
 "God forbid," said Vernon. "What did I tell you, 
 my child, the day you first came home after your mar- 
 riage? That you must care so much that you will give 
 him an affection he cannot get elsewhere. I admit that 
 this requires self-negation, self-control, self-effacement, 
 in a measure, which it is exceedingly hard to attain. 
 Most women are self-centred even when they are not 
 selfish. Their egotism is wholly unlike male egotism, 
 but it is apt to be very narrow and very exacting. A 
 man changes and forgets; the woman often does neither; 
 but it does not follow that for that reason she is un- 
 selfish, though no doubt she thinks she is, in her close 
 adherence to her memories. My dear child, life is not 
 all a poem nor all a playtime. It is often monoto- 
 nous, trying, and full of irritation. This period of 
 yours is especially so to you. But you will not make it 
 smoother or happier by thinking yourself wronged on 
 small proof." 
 
 "But if it be true that I am? Then " 
 
 Then — well, even then I would counsel you to bear 
 it with silence and with dignity. Expostulation and 
 upbraiding are bad weapons, and cut the hand which 
 uses them. I never thought that I^ord Guilderoy was 
 of a character which would give you happiness. I did
 
 GUILDEROY. 249 
 
 not tell you so, but I told him so constantly. He has 
 the natural faults of a man whom the whole world has 
 conspired to spoil. He is imaginative, impatient, 
 capricious, and inflammable; such men are always in- 
 constant; they cannot help being so any more than the 
 vane can help turning with the wind. But he has many 
 lovable and generous qualities; to you he has been ex- 
 ceptionally generous; think of his finer nature and 
 pardon him its weaker side. That is the only counsel 
 I dare give you, for your sake and for his. Alas! I 
 see you are unconvinced." 
 
 "I am unhappy!" she said in her heart, but she 
 did not say it aloud. She was angered against her 
 father; she had expected from him indignant denuncia- 
 tion and a sympathy which would not pause to weigh 
 or analyse. Her heart was aching bitterly with pas- 
 sionate pain which would have willingly found vent in 
 some rash action; the calm philosophy of John Vernon 
 seemed to her like so much ice given her when she 
 shivered in the cold and asked for a shelter by the 
 fire. 
 
 "It is no use speaking of it," she said, wearily; 
 after a while, "Let us go in; I think the turmoil of 
 London hurts me less than all this summer silence. 
 One wants to be so happy to bear to look at the 
 stars!" 
 
 Vernon rose and put his arm tenderly upon her 
 shoulder. 
 
 "My dear child! you will be happy again. You 
 have not bidden adieu to life at twenty years old! My
 
 250 GUILDEROY. 
 
 advice sounds very chill and unsympathetic to you no 
 doubt; but it is sound. It is of no use to rebel against 
 woes which spring from character. You are very young- 
 still; you are a beautiful woman; if you have tact and 
 patience and forbearance you will ultimately vanquish 
 your rivals, if rivals you truly have. But if you display 
 jealousy, if you descend to baseness, to espionage, to 
 recrimination, you will forfeit your own esteem and you 
 will lose all hold upon your husband. Men, my love, 
 are not merciful to women's tears as a rule; and when 
 it is a woman belonging to them who weeps, they only 
 go out and slam the door behind them!" 
 
 "I shall not weep, believe me," she said, bitterly; 
 and she drew herself away from his touch and went 
 across the pavement of the terrace into the drawing- 
 room which opened on to it; the wax lights were shin- 
 ing on the red satin wall-hangings, the rococo furniture, 
 the Chelsea and Woz-cester china, the old Delft and 
 Nankin vases; it was the room in which Guilderoy had 
 told his sister of his intention to marry John Vernon's 
 daughter. 
 
 Her father followed her, and looked at her in 
 silence, with infinite pity. 
 
 "It was not my fault," he thought. "I did what I 
 could. It was the old story, si jeunesse saimit ! Ah! 
 si jeunesse snvnit , what marriage would ever be made 
 at all?" 
 
 He took her hands in his. 
 
 "My dearest Gladys," he said, gravely, "I confess 
 that I do not think your life will be very happy. I 
 never thought that it would be. You have a great
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 5 I 
 
 position and great possessions, but you are not of a 
 nature to be satisfied with these. But it lies with you 
 to retain what one may say are the angels Avhich stand 
 about the throne of hfe — honour, unselfishness, and 
 sympathy; they are not the smiling angels which youth 
 loves best, but they have a comfort in them by a dying 
 bed. Try that they shall always be with you. The rest 
 of the heavenly troop will very likely come behind them 
 uncalled." 
 
 The tears, so long withheld, rushed into her eyes; 
 she kissed the hands which held hers, and left the 
 room. He let her go, and himself paced to and fro 
 the long red room with agitated steps; it had cost him 
 effort to keep so calm a tone, to give only so apparently 
 niggard a sympathy. 
 
 "While I am here I can save her perhaps," he 
 thought. "But when I am gone? " 
 
 And he knew that this might be soon, for what he 
 had never told her was the frail tenure on which his 
 own life hung, and the ever-near end of all things which 
 was only warded off by that perfectly passionless and 
 solitary life which he was supposed by her, and by all 
 who knew him, to have selected by free choice. 
 
 "When I am gone — " he thought, and the thought 
 was one of acute and intense pain to him. The idea 
 that he would tell her husband his own secret, and 
 beseech his better care of her, passed through his mind; 
 but what use, he reflected, would it be? Guilderoy was 
 gentle, courteous, and kind; easily moved, too, for 
 awhile, and ready to promise impossibilities; he would 
 be sorry, he would be touched, he would swear to be
 
 2 52 GUILDEROY. 
 
 governed by loyalty and constancy; and then, women 
 and the world would surround him, and he would 
 forget. It would be only waste of words. John Vernon 
 never wasted words, and for a score of years had never 
 asked for sympathy; and he had so long kept in his 
 own breast the knowledge of the mortal disease within 
 him that he could not have brought himself to speak 
 of it without painful effort.
 
 GUILDEROY. 253 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 "Did you ever hear of the story of Griseldis?" he 
 asked her the next day as they strolled through the 
 gardens. 
 
 "Yes; she was a very foolish woman." 
 
 "Certainly she looks somewhat of a fool to us. But 
 perhaps she was in truth very wise; she gained what 
 she wanted in the end." 
 
 "She had certainly a very pitiful spirit." 
 
 "Do you think so? Patience and silence are never 
 pitiful, surely. They are grand qualities." 
 
 Gladys smiled with some scorn. 
 
 "A donkey is patient, so is a cow. We do not rate 
 them very highly in the scale of creation." 
 
 "Do you often answer Evelyn in that tone?" 
 
 "I do not know. Yes, perhaps, I daresay I do. 
 Why?" 
 
 "Only that it would possibly tend to make him 
 seek the society of those who did not." 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 "We often complain," continued Vernon, with some 
 dreaminess in his tone, "that others do not care for 
 us, or cease to care for us; and we seldom ask our- 
 selves if the fault is not ours, if we are not often irritat- 
 ing and even intolerable to them; if we try to under- 
 stand them in what is opposed to us; if we endeavour
 
 2 54 GUILDEROY. 
 
 to give them what they wish, not what we wish. Love, 
 Avhich is made such a fuss about, is only an immense 
 selfishness unless it does do this. What do you think? 
 You despise Griseldis; what would you have had 
 her do?" 
 
 "Go away." 
 
 "Go away? And leave her children?" 
 
 "She could have taken them with her." 
 
 "A dangerous vengeance. And she would have 
 violated her marriage vows." 
 
 "Since he violated his, she would surely have been 
 justified." 
 
 "Ah, my dear! the cases are not parallel. Both 
 psychology and physiology will tell you so if you study 
 them. Griseldis no doubt never studied either, but 
 she was wise enough to act as if she had." 
 
 "When I was a child and read the story, I despised 
 her." 
 
 "Then there is something of true womanhood lack- 
 ing in you, my dear." 
 
 "Is true womanhood abject slavishness?" 
 
 "It is infinite abnegation of self." 
 
 Gladys laughed, and there was a sound of hard- 
 ness in the laugh. 
 
 "Then women of the world have very little of it 
 indeed. They dress, they flirt if they can, they spend 
 money when they have it, and run up bills when they have 
 not; they make a fuss over a quantity of useless under- 
 takings which they call charity, or politics, as their 
 taste is, but they never sacrifice themselves for one 
 second of their time; when they take their lovers it is 
 with a view of self-aggrandisement by some affair which
 
 GUILDEROY. 255 
 
 will make them more sought after by the world and by 
 other men. There is not an emotion, scarcely even a 
 sensual preference, in any one of their attachments. I 
 wish that you would come into the world. You would 
 see then there would be no place in it for Griseldis if 
 she were revived." 
 
 "Griseldis is a figure of speech." 
 
 "Yes. Nowadays she would have the income of 
 her settlements, the custody of her children, and the 
 consolation of the newspapers!" 
 
 "You are rather cynical, my dear. It is not becom- 
 ing to a young woman, and it is not lovable in an old 
 one." 
 
 "Ah, I wish I had never left you and Christslea." 
 
 "Do you think you would have been contented if 
 you had married a curate or a squire? I doubt it. 
 There is something naturally grande dame in you 
 which would have rebelled against small means and 
 narrow lives." 
 
 "I never rebelled when I was with you." 
 
 "No. You were a good child, but you were a 
 child. I did not welcome your marriage, but I doubt 
 if I should have been stoic enough to complacently 
 watch your roses fade, and your years slip away, in the 
 rustic loneliness and homeliness of my cottage. It was 
 lovely to see you in it at seventeen, but it would not 
 have been lovely to see you in it at seven-and-twenty. 
 What the French call un beau mariage is after all a 
 magic wand to a maiden." 
 
 She did not speak, but she gave an impatient 
 gesture. 
 
 Vernon looked at her earnestly. "Do you absolutely
 
 256 GUILDEROY. 
 
 regret yours?" he asked. "Would you undo it if you 
 could?" 
 
 "This moment!" 
 
 There was the vibration of intense meaning in the 
 words. 
 
 . Vernon sighed. 
 
 "That is terrible if it be true. I hope you speak 
 in haste and in offence. You are more unforgiving, 
 Gladys, and less generous than I thought you. I thought 
 that your feelings for Guilderoy were of a different kind." 
 
 "You have a curious tenderness for him!" she said, 
 bitterly. 
 
 "I do not think I have any," replied her father. 
 "But I confess that, as a man of honour, I feel that 
 both you and I are bound to give him some indulgence 
 in return for the confidence he placed in us, and for 
 the great gifts (though you think them mere vulgar 
 considerations) which he has lavished on you in an af- 
 fection which, if not eternal, must have been genuine. 
 I am the last person on earth to over-estimate such 
 gifts; but I am also, I confess, tlie last person on earth 
 who could tolerate the idea that my daughter, when a 
 man trusted her with his name, and his good name, 
 hated the one and imperilled the other. My dear, it 
 was said by a Greek called Socrates, long before it 
 was repeated by Christ, that it is not right to do evil, 
 and that to say it has been done to us is no excuse 
 or reason for us to return it. Nor can I easily con- 
 ceive that one could feel any temptation to return it if 
 it were done by a person we had ever once loved!" 
 
 He spoke very calmly, but there was an accent of 
 sternness in his voice which she had never heard from
 
 GUILDEROV. 257 
 
 hini. She felt for the first time in her life that she 
 had in all the world no judge so just but none so un- 
 relentingly severe as her father. 
 
 The question which sorely perplexed John Vernon 
 was not to change or control the caprices of Guilderoy, 
 for he considered that hopeless, but how to induce his 
 wife to comprehend them in a measure and to view 
 them, if not with pardon, at least with serenity and 
 silence. 
 
 ^Vhat else was there for her to do? 
 
 His natural affection for his child made him angered 
 against the man who caused her mortification and pain, 
 but the sense of justice which was equally strong in 
 him made him conscious that it was impossible for such 
 a man to confine his existence within the limits of 
 such emotions and such actions as would be likely to 
 please the ear and meet the approval of a woman as 
 young as Gladys. There is an instinctive movement 
 towards freedom, an instinctive aversion to self-con- 
 fession, in the breast of every man who has not outlived 
 his enjoyment of the warmth of passion and the plea- 
 sures of liberty. 
 
 "But alas! alas!" thought John Vernon, "so few 
 women are wise enough to know this, and still fewer 
 women are unselfish enough to act on it!" 
 
 Her dignity, her demands, her sentiments, her de- 
 sires, her injuries and her rights, loom so large usually 
 in a woman's sight that she never sees beyond them, 
 and thus for ever misses truth. 
 
 The exceeding justness of his nature made him 
 able to conceive the irritation that it would be to Guil- 
 deroy to account for all his hours to a woman as young, 
 
 Guilderoy, /, 17
 
 258 GUILDER OY. 
 
 and as incapable of comprehending his errors, as his 
 wife was; and he could admit the innumerable tempta- 
 tions to inconstancy which his fortune, his world, and 
 his disposition combined to make irresistible and con- 
 tinual to him. Now and then a man will conquer the 
 world in the heart of a woman, but never will a woman 
 conquer the world in the heart of a man. Whatever it 
 be — the world of pleasure, of ambition, or of speculation 
 — the passion of it having once entered his soul will 
 reign there for ever till his last hour. 
 
 "It can never be the same thing between a man 
 and a woman," thought Vernon. "She — if she be a 
 woman young and innocent — she has a clean bill of 
 moral health, has nothing to conceal, and nothing that 
 she would hesitate to confide. But he has and must 
 have fifty thousand things in his past and present that 
 are not subjects for confidence; his life cannot be nar- 
 rowed to what is to be told to his wife. Other women 
 have claims on his silence and honour: in a word he 
 is a man, and requires a man's large liberty of action. 
 When moralists pretend that it should be otherwise 
 they substitute a conventional fiction which has led to 
 hopeless pretensions and heartburnings amongst women. 
 Even a lover does not give for any length of time 
 the same kind of fidelity that the woman gives to 
 him, though a lover's fidelity is more stimulated than 
 that of a husband, more tempted to remain true be- 
 cause uncertain of its tenure. Dumas fils and many 
 others writers are fond of pretending that fidelity 
 should be equal in both sexes, but they only put for- 
 ward a wholly untrue and impossible thesis, and make 
 women wretched because they incite them to demand
 
 GUILDEROY. 259 
 
 what both nature and law will for ever unite to refuse 
 them!" 
 
 He was grieved tliat Gladys was no wiser, no more 
 magnanimous than the rest. Had the education he had 
 given her been in fault? Had sea and moor, and Latin 
 verse and Saxon Chronicle, not tended to make her 
 into stronger stuff than the irrational, egotistical, and 
 wholly unreasonable temper of the majority of her sex? 
 Why must she, like them, take jealousy for devotion, 
 irritation for passion, offence for dignity, mortification 
 for martyi'dom? 
 
 "You surely do not mean that Guilderoy would 
 leave you for another woman?" he asked abruptly. 
 
 "Oh, no," she answered bitterly. "He would neither 
 love nor hate me enough to do anything of the kind. 
 Why should he do it either? He does not think enough 
 about me for me to be the slightest embarrassment to 
 him." 
 
 Her father sighed as he heard. 
 
 Against indifference the gods themselves are power- 
 less. 
 
 Had Desdemona waked from her murdered sleep 
 she would have found the tenderest and most penitent 
 of lovers in her jealous lord; but the amiable apathy 
 of a careless and unobservant indifference has no quality 
 in it of that kind which can be roused and changed 
 into devotion or remorse. 
 
 "I think he even likes me!" she said with greater 
 bitterness still. "I annoy him sometimes because I am 
 ]iot pliable, or facile, or amusable enough; but on the 
 whole he likes me, and if receiving an innumerable 
 (juantity of presents were happiness I should be in 
 
 17*
 
 560 GUILDEROY. 
 
 heaven. What he does not give in feeling he atones 
 for in furs and jewels and bibelots!" 
 
 "I hope," said John Vernon gravely, "that yon do 
 not say this kind of thing to anyone save to me?" 
 
 "No." She coloured and hesitated: her nature was 
 full of scrupulous truth, and baseness distasteful to her. 
 She always told the truth both in letter and spirit. "I 
 have sometimes said something, once or twice, to his 
 cousin," she added. 
 
 Vernon was surprised. 
 
 "You mean Lord Aubrey?" 
 
 "Yes; he has seen it for himself. He is very kind 
 to me." 
 
 "I should have thought he had no time to spend 
 on a woman's imaginary sorrows." 
 
 "They are not imaginary, and he knows that they 
 are not." 
 
 She was for the first time strongly angered against 
 her father. He seemed to be unfeeling, cold, and unjust. 
 
 "The more real they are the less would I speak of 
 them — even to Aubrey — were I you." 
 
 "He is not a stranger. He is a near relative and 
 a dear friend of ours." 
 
 "A very good friend too. But I should have thought 
 he was sufficiently occupied with his friend Britannia, 
 who, from having been a very virtuous housewife in 
 bib and tucker, is now disposed to unloose her girdle 
 and turn into a revolutionary maenad, and is trouble- 
 some accordingly." 
 
 He spoke carelessly, for he did not wish to suggest 
 to her any possible danger in the intimacy of Aubrey, 
 whom he knew as a man of high honour and grave and
 
 GUILDEROY. 26 1 
 
 lofty character. Yet he said more seriously, after a 
 pause, in which they passed down the long white rose- 
 covered colonnade which was a favourite haunt of 
 Guilderoy's, and where his silken hammock hung at 
 one end ready for his use if he should come there: 
 
 "Still I think it would be well, my love, not to talk 
 of these things, whether they are magnified or not by 
 your fancy and feeling. // y (i nne pudeur de I'dme. 
 That sounds a sentimental saying, but there is a truth 
 in it. Whenever we begin to uncover our soul we are 
 apt to forget that. We are all apt to lose that modesty 
 which is after all the chief beauty of all its emotions. 
 I know quite well that women have a need to unbosom 
 their feelings which the rougher natures of men do not 
 experience. But it is after all a weakness, a tendency 
 which even they should contend against, for it is like 
 opium-eating, it increases with indulgence, and in time 
 saps and destroys the whole vitality." 
 
 "I think you mistake," said Gladys coldly. "It is 
 not I who confide in anyone. There are things which 
 speak for themselves, and signs which all who run may 
 read. The whole world will not be blind because a 
 man may wish that it should be so." 
 
 "That is true; but people will not offer us pity if 
 they think we should take it as an affront, any more 
 than they would offer money to a ruined gentleman if 
 he remained a gentleman still." 
 
 "No one offers me pity," she replied, haughtily. 
 "On the contrary, they, I believe, share your opinion 
 that because I have made a beau mariage I can want 
 nothing more from earth or heaven!"
 
 262 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "I have never said so, Gladys," replied her father 
 with some coldness. 
 
 She was silent; conscious that she had spoken 
 wrongly; conscious also that the companionship of 
 Aubrey was chiefly welcome to her because, though he 
 never put it into direct words, he had from the first 
 moment that he had addressed her given her the sense 
 that he did pity her, and understood why she had 
 reason to be pitied, amidst all which seemed to the 
 superficial observer the supreme felicities and success 
 of her lot. 
 
 She knew the fineness of her father's penetration 
 and intuition too well not to be sure that he must see 
 even as Aubrey saw; and she was angered against him 
 that he did not admit it himself with the indignation 
 which would in her mood of that moment have been 
 refreshing to her. 
 
 They had come to the end of the long avenue of 
 white roses; it was carpeted with the fallen rose-leaves, 
 and overhead the thick foliage, starred with the white 
 blossoms, made the light fall in a green faint twilight 
 about them. 
 
 "Let us talk of something else," said John Vernon. 
 " Self- analysis is seductive, and Goethe benefited the 
 world by his; but if we are not Goethes we are apt to 
 become Obermanns in the indugence of it; and even if 
 Goethe had less contemplated himself, I for one should 
 have loved him better. 'I have been listening to what 
 the vines told me,' he said when he was in Italy. I wish 
 he had listened oftener to the vines and less to 'the im- 
 mense Me.' What a charming morning, my dear! How 
 the birds sing, and the leaves glisten, and the roses
 
 GUILDEROY. 263 
 
 smile! There is so much in Hfe beside our own passions 
 and pains, if we could but think of it. 'Taut qu'nn 
 arhre poussera, ce sera bon de vivre!' Is there not a 
 certain truth in that?" 
 
 "To a gipsy, or to a poet," said his daughter, 
 bitterly. "When do we have time to see a leaf come 
 out? We are always surrounded by faces. Can one 
 see the sea amongst the crowds on the beach at Biarritz, 
 or the trees in the woods at Homburg, or the sunset as 
 we drive home from the Bois? Of course the sea is 
 there, and the trees and the sunset are there; but to 
 see them in the sense that you speak of is impossible. 
 One may have a day like this now and then, twice in 
 the year perhaps, and then one realises all that one 
 misses all the rest of the year; that is all. What do I 
 see of all this when we are here with a great party? 
 Of course it is all around us like a decor de scene. But 
 I have no time to feel it; there are quantities of things 
 to be done; questions of precedence, programmes of 
 amusement, conversation to make up, toilettes to be 
 changed incessantly, relays of guests to be assorted; of 
 course one feels that the woods are beautiful, that the 
 gardens are charming, but one has no leisure to look 
 at them, or to breathe them in, as it were, as I used 
 to lie under the orchard trees on a summer afternoon, 
 and look through their boughs at the moorland lying 
 high and purple in the heat; I used to notice every- 
 thing then, from the dragon-fly in the foxglove to the 
 cloud that meant rain for the morrow. But now I 
 notice nothing; I have no time." 
 
 She looked with a sigh through the arched aisle of 
 the rose-charmille.
 
 264 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Vernon echoed her sigh. 
 
 "And yet, my dear child," he said, "I fancy that if 
 you were still Gladys Vernon living in my cottage, and 
 there were any other Lady Guilderoy reigning here, you 
 would be very likely to think her lot much brighter and 
 more brilliant than your own. There is always that 
 unkind discontent in human life. The monarch envies 
 the sleep of the cabin-boy, and the cabin-boy thinks if 
 he were only a king with no sea-water soaking his shirt, 
 and no black billows between him and his home ! It is 
 always so; it is the rule of existence; and it suggests 
 that Plato may be right, and that we have come from 
 other worlds which are always haunting us and making 
 us uncomfortable in this one." 
 
 He spoke lightly, for he wished her to think her 
 sorrows rather general than individual; but his own 
 heart was heavy. It was indeed no more than he had 
 always predicted and foreseen, but the realisation of 
 his forebodings did not console him for them. 
 
 She went back to the London life with a sense of 
 added strength and of restored repose. The long, quiet 
 summer day, with its smell from heather-scented lands 
 blowing through green woodlands and over garden 
 flowers, seemed to go with her, and leave some of its 
 peace in her heart. 
 
 How safe and secure and easy life seemed to her, 
 spent by those grey solitary seas, in that little quiet 
 hollow, under the gorse-covered cliffs where her father's 
 hermitage was made. 
 
 Was he right? Would she have been discontented 
 there as years went on? She did not think so. At this 
 moment that simple homely day of country things and
 
 GUILDEROY. 265 
 
 country sights and sounds, seemed to her infinitely 
 charming in its peace. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 When she reached town after her visit to Ladysrood 
 this day in June, she entered with a sigh the beautiful 
 Palladian house, with its glories of art and architecture, 
 its domed and frescoed staircase, its pomp of powdered 
 servants, and its sweetness of hothouse flowers, dimmed 
 by the grey, sad atmosphere of a sunless London day. 
 The season was at its height; every one said that it was 
 brilliant and delightful; the park was full of equipages 
 and the streets full of well-dressed multitudes; but to 
 her it seemed dreary as any desert, cruel, pitiless, hate- 
 ful. Life in the country was so much easier, sweeter, 
 safer. All her weight of pain and jealousy seemed to 
 fall back on her like a slab of stone as she entered that 
 mansion which such countless women envied her. 
 
 She had only been away three days, but the ac- 
 cumulation of notes and cards and letters of all kinds 
 was large. She told them to bring her some tea to her 
 boudoir, and having slipped on a teagown made like a 
 sacque of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's from a picture 
 at Ladysrood, she sat there and glanced at her corre- 
 spondence. It was just six o'clock; there was a large 
 and important dinner for royalty on her list for that 
 evening, but there were yet two full hours before she 
 need dress for it. She drank her tea all alone, gazing 
 at the roses which she had brought up from Ladysrood 
 in their baskets of moss , and thinking with a pang of
 
 266 GUILD EROY. 
 
 how the sun was slanting westward over the moors and 
 the sands of Christslea, and the httle birds were flying 
 amongst the ripening apples, and the fisherboys were 
 rowing over the pleasant sea, and all the balmy air was 
 blowing mild and glad through the tossing lilacs and 
 the bushes of homely southern-wood. 
 
 If only she had never left these! How much hap- 
 pier she would have been, let her father say what he 
 might! 
 
 She sighed wearily as she breathed the heavy Lon- 
 don air; heavy even here, where all that artificial and 
 natural fragrance could do to sweeten and to lighten it 
 was done. This beautiful boudoir, with its walls com- 
 pletely lined by old Saxe china, its ceiling exquisitely 
 painted with flowers, its windows draped with lace and 
 cream-coloured satin, seemed to her like a prison after 
 the moorlands, the orchards, and the shore. The hearts 
 in which a deep love of country things is rooted beat 
 ill at ease in cities. 
 
 And yet in the country it had seemed to her that 
 its silence and its sweetness made pain harder to bear 
 than when thought was muffled and stifled under the 
 noise and the follies of crowds. 
 
 Poor human nature, in pain and anxiety, is like a 
 sick child tossing on his bed, who fancies now this side 
 and now that will give most rest, and finds rest on 
 neither side because there is no rest in himself. 
 
 She had not been alone ten minutes before the 
 servant announced Lord Aubrey. 
 
 "Well, dear, so you have been to the country?" he 
 said, taking her hands in his kindly clasp. "It is the 
 best medicine for sick souls, only, alas! we never have
 
 GUILDEROY. 267 
 
 time to take it, or we dilute it so with a mixture of 
 the world that all its virtue goes out of it? How is 
 your father?" 
 
 "He is as well as he ever is," said Gladys, and she 
 coloured, for she remembered what her father said of 
 Aubrey. "He said the same as you' did," she added, 
 after a moment. 
 
 "I was sure that he would," answered Aubrey. 
 "Think no more of it. Try and enjoy your youth while 
 you can. I have not been enjoying my sober manhood 
 at all at Balmoral. We had five feet of snow on mid- 
 summer day." 
 
 And he told her stories of his stay there, and 
 touched on matters of foreign policy in which she had 
 become interested in her attendance at debates. But 
 he found her pensive and preoccupied; she was troubled 
 between her natural instincts of confidence in him and 
 the remembrance of her father's warning to have no 
 friend amongst his sex. 
 
 "Has Mr. Vernon told you not to put your trust in 
 me?" asked Aubrey, sadly. "I thought he knew me 
 better than to do that." 
 
 "No, no; he did not tell me so, indeed! He knows 
 how noble and how good you are," she said with em- 
 barrassment. "But he said that a woman should not 
 have any friend except her husband — that was all, and 
 that it was I who had done wrong to complain to you." 
 
 "But when her husband does not care to be even 
 her friend?" thought Aubrey bitterly, as he said aloud: 
 "I think your father is quite right in theory, my dear; 
 quite right as a general rule. But, to begin with, I am 
 Evelyn's cousin-german, and am as much interested as
 
 268 GUILDEROY. 
 
 you are in his honour and happiness; and, in the 
 second, I am neither a young man nor a thoughtless 
 one. Your father is not, unhappily, enough mth you 
 to be your adviser in the world; and I think I may so 
 far try to supply his place without doing or sapng any- 
 thing for which EveljTi would not thank me." 
 
 "Oh, what should I do without you?" 
 
 She spoke with warmth and gratitude, and stretched 
 her hand out to him with a childlike gesture of con- 
 fidence. 
 
 "You would do ver\' well, I daresay. Do not make 
 me too vain," said Aubrey, with a kind smile, as he 
 took her hand, and held it for a moment only. 
 
 Her gesture had displaced some of the notes and 
 cards Ipng on a little table at her side; they fell in 
 her lap; as she took one of them up she gave a little 
 exclamation, and showed the card to Aubrey. On it 
 was the double crown of a duchess by marriage who 
 was a princess in her own right, and imder them was 
 printed "Duchesse Soria, ne'e Princesse Brancaleone." 
 
 "Ah I" ejaculated Aubrey, off his guard for a 
 moment. "How is that card here? Do you know 
 her?" 
 
 "I was once at her house in Venice. I suppose she 
 is in London, and called yesterday. I shall like to 
 meet her again. I think she is the most beautiful 
 woman I ever saw in all my life." 
 
 "She is certainly ver}- handsome." 
 
 "But we never saw her again, as we left Venice 
 the next day, and I fancied that EveljTi did not like 
 her." 
 
 "Did you? "WTiy?"
 
 GUILDEROY. 269 
 
 "He was constrained before her; and he seemed 
 angry that I admired her." 
 
 "Poor httle innocent!" thought Aubrey. "It will 
 be something more tr)'ing to you than Olive Shifflon 
 now." 
 
 "Do you not like her?" she asked, wondering at 
 his silence. 
 
 "Like her? Well, yes. She is very beautiful, as 
 you say, and, I believe, she is a woman of originally 
 noble character if she had been generously dealt with 
 by fate." 
 
 "Is she unhappy, too, then?" 
 
 "Her husband was not worthy of her, I believe; 
 and I know that she lost a child she was passionately 
 attached to a few years ago. But I have only seen her 
 in the world. I have no intimacy with her." 
 
 "It was verj- kind of her to think of me," said Gladys 
 gratefully. "1 did admire her so much; I was so 
 young and so shy; I felt so foolish before her." 
 
 " Well, the shjTiess is cured," said Aubrey, with his 
 indolent, indulgent smile. "But the youth is not quite 
 over as yet, is it?" 
 
 "I feel ver)' old," she said with a sigh. 
 
 He laughed; he did not wish to refer seriously to 
 his last inten'iew with her; and he foresaw for her trials 
 much graver than any which she had passed through 
 as yet 
 
 A few minutes later Guilderoy entered the little 
 room. He was looking animated and interested. He 
 greeted his wife with graceful courtesy, if witli Mttle 
 warmth, and asked, with much more genuine feeling, of 
 Vernon's health. Gladys was touched by his tone and
 
 270 GUILDEROY. 
 
 pleased by his entrance; it was so very rarely that ever 
 he came there. 
 
 "Perhaps it is as my father says, a great deal my 
 fancy and a great deal my fault," she thought. 
 
 Aubrey soon rose and left them together. He 
 felt an irritation which it was impossible for him to dis- 
 play. 
 
 "He is only so kind," he thought, "because he wants 
 her to receive Beatrice Soria." 
 
 In truth, scarcely had the door closed on him than 
 Guilderoy took up the card with the double crown. 
 
 "The lady you admired so much in Venice is 
 here," he said. "I asked her to leave this on you 
 yesterday. Return her call to-morrow. Show her every 
 deference." 
 
 There was a sound of embarrassment in his voice; 
 but she did not notice it. She promised willingly what 
 he wished. 
 
 "I thought in Venice that you did not like her," 
 she said to him, "and I admired her so greatly. You 
 have never seen her since then, of course?" 
 
 "Why, of course?" he replied, impatiently. 
 
 "Because you would have said so," she answered in 
 her simplicity. 
 
 "I have seen her once or twice in Paris," said Guil- 
 deroy, with some constraint. "You know she has been 
 in retirement. Soria was killed by another Neapolitan, 
 two years ago, in a duel." 
 
 "And how came you to see her yesterday?" 
 
 "I met her in the park." 
 
 This was all true to the letter, but not to the spirit. 
 But Gladys, however, was not at that moment critical.
 
 GUILDEROY. 2^1 
 
 She was endeavouring with all her strength to be agree- 
 able and pliant to him, as her father had counselled 
 her to be. 
 
 That night she saw the Duchess Soria at a ball at 
 Marlborough House. They renewed their acquaintance 
 with a pleasure quite genuine on the one side, if only 
 graciously simulated on the other. 
 
 "What did I tell you?" said Lady Sunbury to her 
 cousin Ermyntrude as Mme. Soria, in all the blaze of 
 her historic diamonds, passed them with her royal host. 
 
 That night Gladys was consoled to see that her 
 husband scarcely approached Olive Shiffton, who was 
 present, and who looked very pretty, and a little 
 angered: the small shooting-star disquieted by the rising 
 of this great planet from the south. 
 
 "Perhaps he is tired of her; or perhaps it was never 
 really anything," she thought, almost reassured; and she 
 went home at dawn and went to sleep almost happily, 
 dreaming of the quiet waters of the bay by Christslea 
 and the sound of the fishermen's voices as they pulled 
 up their cobbles on the beach. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 "It was not true certainly," she said to Aubrey, a 
 week later. "You see he never notices her now, and 
 she looks annoyed. You were right to make me pro- 
 mise to say nothing." 
 
 Aubrey looked at her with an infinite compassion 
 which he could not reveal.
 
 272 GUILDEROY. 
 
 "It is always best to say nothing, whatever be the 
 provocation," he answered. "These follies pass. They 
 are beneath notice while they last. They are butterflies; 
 you cannot break them seriously on the wheel of jealousy 
 and anger." 
 
 "They are poisonous butterflies," said Gladys, with 
 a sad smile. "And you know the butterfly in one stage 
 of its life devours roses and lays gardens waste." 
 
 "I know," said Aubrey. "But other roses come, 
 and the garden grows green again some time or another." 
 
 "Not always," she answered. 
 
 "No, not always, I admit." 
 
 He was a man who believed in great passions and 
 great sorrows. He knew that most passions and most 
 sorrows pass, because most characters are shallow; but 
 he knew that there were exceptional natures, and that 
 these could never easily find either consolation or ob- 
 livion. For these few in the garden of life, the roses 
 once dead, few flowers have fragrance. 
 
 Olive Shifiton had been a mere caprice, a mere 
 episode; but such caprices and such episodes would be 
 repeated ad infinitum in his cousin's existence. How 
 was it possible to reconcile Gladys to this, or even to 
 prepare her for it? How was it possible even to hint 
 to her that the cessation of this offence to her was due 
 to the presence of another woman whose influence was 
 higher, finer, nobler, but infinitely more to be dreaded? 
 Of Olive Shififton, and of all those whom she resembled 
 and represented, Guilderoy was certain to grow fatigued 
 and intolerant with time; but if Beatrice Soria obtained 
 her power over him again it would be for long, per- 
 chance for life.
 
 GUILDEROY. 273 
 
 But it would have been of no use to suggest any 
 danger of this sort, even if his dehcacy and honour had 
 permitted him to do so. Fate is cruel and contradic- 
 tory enough at all times, he knew; but it is often better 
 to let her alone to do her worst than it is to meddle 
 with what is vague to us and will surely escape us in 
 our ignorant handling of it. 
 
 With that peculiar self-deception which is so com- 
 mon even in persons of the quickest perceptions and 
 intentions, Guilderoy never supposed that his marriage 
 appeared otherwise than most harmonious to the world. 
 He indeed often went out of his way to do things which 
 should show that it was so. In his heart he repented 
 it every hour that he thought about it at all, but it 
 would have been intolerable to him to think that his 
 acquaintance ever suspected he did so. When Olive 
 Shiffton had once ventured a jest about it, relying on 
 her privilege of intimacy, he had silenced her in a tone 
 which it was impossible for her to mistake. If he had 
 adored his wife he could not have been more reveren- 
 tial to her name before others than he was. 
 
 "Sometimes I think he is fond of her after all," 
 said Ermyntrude Longleat to her brother, on hearing 
 the story of his rebuff to Mrs. Shiffton as it went the 
 round of society. 
 
 "No; he is not fond of her, not in the least," 
 replied Aubrey. "But he has that sentiment that his 
 wife is part of his own dignity, of his own honour, 
 which so long survives all attachment, and exists even 
 where no attachment ever was, because it is a form of 
 personal vanity. He may slight her himself, but he 
 will let no one else slight her; that is not a matter of 
 
 Guilderoy. I. 1 8
 
 2 74 GUILD EROY. 
 
 the affections, but of self-love and of family pride. 
 It is the same kind of sentiment which he has for 
 Ladysrood, though Ladysrood per se bores him to ex- 
 tinction." 
 
 "He deserves to lose both Ladysrood and his wife." 
 
 "Ah, my dear! if we all had only what we deserve 
 we should be most of us very ill off!" 
 
 The season went on its course and closed without 
 her being rudely awakened from this last illusion. Many 
 saw indeed what an utter illusion it was, but no one 
 had brutality enough to rouse her from it, and show 
 her how utterly she was self-deceived. 
 
 She only saw that Guilderoy had grown wholly in- 
 different to the seductions of Olive Shiffton, and was 
 now never seen beside her. It was not sufficient to 
 make her happy, but it relieved her from her keenest 
 and most harassing anxiety, and she never dreamed 
 that it was the presence of another woman, and not any 
 mercifulness to herself, which made Guilderoy almost 
 rudely neglect and ignore his late diversion. 
 
 One glance of inquiring scorn from the lustrous 
 eyes of Beatrice Soria, as they had passed slowly in 
 review the attractions and the pretensions of Olive 
 Shiffton, had been enough to make him feel ashamed of 
 ever having felt the sorcery of those inferior and venal 
 charms. He had no emotion so keen as his dread lest 
 any gossip of the town should reveal to the Duchess 
 Soria the frivolous story of his latest intrigue. His feel- 
 ing for the colonial adventuress had been so entirely 
 awakened by physical attractions, had been so abso- 
 lutely void of any kind of higher feeling, or any shadow 
 of esteem, that it became very rapidly distaste or dislike
 
 GUILDEROY. 275 
 
 the moment that he feU that it might imperil for him 
 the regard and the patience of the only woman he had 
 ever loved. 
 
 For he knew now that Beatrice Soria held a place 
 in his passions and emotions that no other woman had 
 ever reached. She was lost to him, or he believed her 
 lost to him, through his own fault, his own levity; but 
 for that very reason his whole soul turned to her as 
 the sunflower to the sun that sets. 
 
 He had met her often since the evening in Venice; 
 but, though he had been frankly admitted to her pre- 
 sence, and treated with friendship and kindness, he had 
 never as yet been able to pass those outer courts; he 
 had never been able to recover any one of the forfeited 
 privileges of the past; he had never been able to tell 
 whether she loved him, hated him, or was wholly in- 
 different to him. All that he could see was that, to all 
 appearance, no one had succeeded him in her affec- 
 tions. The world coupled no one's name with hers, 
 and there was no one of her large circle who could in 
 any way claim any distinction above the rest. That 
 was all which he had been able to ascertain or to 
 divine when he had been in her society in Paris or in 
 Italy; it was all he could tell now that she was in his 
 own English world of fashion, and renewed her ac- 
 quaintance with him and with his wife with all the 
 pleasant welcome due to bomies coiinaissances in society. 
 
 The mystery, and what was to him the mortification, 
 of his ignorance of the feelings of a woman who had 
 been once as wax to his hands and as flame to his 
 passions, occupied him and attracted him to the ex- 
 clusion of almost every other thought. 
 
 18*
 
 276 GUILDEROY. 
 
 He had not known what he had felt when he had 
 heard of the death of Hugo Soria, in a duel with an- 
 other Neapolitan. He could not still be sure whether 
 he felt regret at his powerlessness to replace him, or 
 relief that it had been made impossible that he should 
 do so. He was conscious that it must increase tenfold 
 his own offence against the survivor. Who could ever 
 have foreseen so premature a death, for a man young, 
 fortunate, and singularly skilled in all arts of attack 
 and defence? To him it had always seemed probable 
 that Soria would long outlive himself. 
 
 He had seen nothing of her since her husband's 
 tragic end; two years had gone by, and it was under- 
 stood that she was adhering to the strictest rules of 
 mourning and retreat. Rumour said also, that she had 
 received a severe shock, when in the gay, roseate sun- 
 shine of Naples, after a ball, the dead body of Soria, 
 with a blood-stained cloak thrown over his face had 
 been carried into her presence by the masked bearers 
 of a religious fraternity. She had known nothing of 
 the duel, and was crossing the vestibule to go to her 
 own apartments when the terrible procession came in 
 sight across the sunlight of the marble colonnade. 
 Guilderoy could see the scene as though he had been 
 present at it; the marble arches of the loggia, with the 
 blue sea and the blue sky shining beyond them, the 
 warm, rose-hued light of sunrise streaming in from the 
 gardens, and, glowing in the warmth, the figure of her 
 in her ball-dress and her jewels, pausing in the fascina- 
 tion of terror as the black-robed bearers approached 
 with their burden; he could see it all as though he 
 had been there; he never thought of it without a
 
 GUILDEROY. 277 
 
 shudder, and he strove to think of it as Httle as he 
 could. 
 
 Two years had gone by since that time, and she 
 had returned to the world. He had seen her twice or 
 thrice, and had found her more beautiful than she had 
 ever been. If her thoughts reproached him for his 
 marriage, her lips never did. 
 
 "We will not speak of Hugo," she had said to him 
 when he first met her, and strove to say something, he 
 knew not what, of conventional regret. But these were 
 the only words of the least familiarity which ever escaped 
 her towards him, and whether she forgave his own 
 faithlessness to her, or whether she resented it too 
 deeply for all words, he with all his penetration into 
 the souls of women, could not tell. Anyhow Soria was 
 dead, and she was once more free: with her immense 
 personal fortune, her marvellous charm, her great social 
 reputation, and her irresistible power over men, could 
 now be wooed, possibly won, by any living man except 
 himself. 
 
 When he recalled the words of his letter of fare- 
 well, his cheeks grew red with shame; what could such 
 a woman as she have thought of him when he had 
 abandoned her like any courtezan, hired and dismissed? 
 Perhaps she had despised him too absolutely even to 
 honour him by resentment? He could not tell. Her 
 manner to him remained wholly what it had been 
 in the Palazzo Contarini; within view of their past rela- 
 tions, such a manner could be but a cloak; but whether 
 what it covered were tenderness or hatred, reproach or 
 offence too indelible for reproach, he could not tell,
 
 278 GUILD EROY. 
 
 only he knew that with her it could not be indifference; 
 that was wholly impossible to her whole character. 
 
 What motive had brought her to England? True, 
 she was a great lady, allied by friendship and even by 
 blood with many English families, but he felt that she 
 did not come to his country without some intention 
 personally touching himself. 
 
 They were in the same world; they must meet again 
 and again even if neither sought to meet; he could not 
 credit that it was either mere caprice, or mere accident, 
 which had brought her to grace the last weeks of the 
 London season with her courted presence. 
 
 He had gone to pay her homage, he had been ad- 
 mitted with many others, he had had no word or glance 
 which distinguished him from her other acquaintance; 
 but he had felt the old thrill which her voice awakened 
 in him; he was conscious of the old delirious charm 
 with which she moved him, and life became for him 
 filled once more with romantic and agitated interest. 
 
 "She is the only woman whom I ever loved," he 
 had thought as he left her that day. 
 
 He wished his right hand had been cut off before 
 it could have ever written that brutal and ineffaceable 
 letter of adieu. And being a man of the world, he 
 had said to his wife on his return, " Call on the Duchess 
 Sorla: show her every deference." 
 
 That in wishing her to go there he was transgress- 
 ing against those unwritten rules of custom and social 
 habits by which men of the world ai'e more often 
 governed than by any laws, social or moral, he knew 
 well enough, but it did not affect him. His mind and 
 his feelings were so centred for the time on the woman
 
 GUILD EROY. 279 
 
 whom he had lost, that he was insensible to any other 
 sentiment. To have Beatrice Soria once more beside 
 him in the rose gardens of Ladysrood as in the years 
 gone by, he would have sacrificed much; at times he 
 thought that he would sacrifice anything. There at last 
 he could find some occasion to learn whether he were, 
 or not, wholly exiled from that soul in which he had 
 once reigned alone. To believe, as he was forced to 
 believe, that she had grown wholly indifferent to him 
 was the first humiliation in matters of the heart which 
 he had ever suffered. He knew that he had deserved 
 his fate, and had brought it on himself; but this know- 
 ledge only increased the bitterness of his mortification, 
 and the keenness of his anxiety to penetrate the mystery 
 of her feeling towards him. 
 
 "What does she think of me?" was the wonder in- 
 cessantly recurrent to his thoughts. She baffled all his 
 desires to learn, as effectually as she had done so in 
 Venice. Ever since he had ^vritten that fateful letter 
 in the library at Ladysrood he had never heard, or re- 
 ceived from her, one syllable beyond the serene and 
 colourless phrases of an ordinary social intimacy. 
 
 The memory of his whole relations with her might 
 have faded out into absolute oblivion for any trace that 
 she gave of seeing in him anything beyond any other 
 of the many acquaintances and admirers who flocked 
 to greet her on her arrival in London. 
 
 He seemed forgotten as utterly as no doubt Hugo 
 Soria was forgotten, lying in the mausoleum amongst 
 the roses and cypress at Sorrento. 
 
 Meanwhile to his wife he was kind. He was grate- 
 ful to her for her sincere and frankly expressed admira-
 
 2 So GUILDEROY. 
 
 tion of her great rival, and he was touched, even whilst 
 he betrayed them, by the unconsciousness and con- 
 fidence which she showed. After all, perhaps she was 
 becoming facile, he thought; after all she had certainly 
 many lovely qualities. 
 
 Curiously enough the influences which most drew 
 his feelings away from her yet made him so far sensible 
 of her merits that he saw more of her and spoke more 
 to her than he had done for months; and she, attribut- 
 ing the change in him to his rupture with Olive Shiff- 
 ton, was both unsuspicious and almost happy. Perhaps 
 after all, she thought, her father was right; and the 
 silent patience and constancy of absolute devotion 
 might have power over him at the last. 
 
 Aubrey, of course, saw her pathetic error; but 
 though his pity for it wrung his own heart, he was too 
 loyal to his cousin and too merciful to her to breathe 
 any hint which could suggest to her the truth. There 
 was nothing in the manner of Beatrice Soria to hint it 
 to her. She had been always too great a lady to 
 tolerate the coarseness of the exhibition of passion in 
 society, and even at the time when Guilderoy's power 
 over her had been strongest, she had never chosen 
 that the world should be able to read their secret in 
 their public attitude. She left such vulgarities to such 
 women as Olive Shiffton, less certain of their influence 
 and more eager to display their dominion than was she. 
 "When you are sure yourself, what matters who doubts?" 
 she thought now; she was herself wholly conscious that 
 Guilderoy would obey her slightest sign whenever she 
 chose to make one, as the hawk obeys the cry of the 
 falconer. She was in no haste to make it. She had
 
 GUILDEROY. 2 1 
 
 been deserted, humiliated, betrayed; she was not yet 
 certain whether she hated him or forgave him. 
 
 "Time will tell me," she thought, with that strange 
 coldness of patience which runs side by side with the 
 fervours and ardours of the passions in all blood of 
 southern races. 
 
 Meantime she called all her wit, intelligence, and 
 beauty to her aid, and obtained with them so great a 
 success in this English world of his that all which the 
 consciousness of other men's admiration of what he 
 had abandoned could add to his regrets was added to 
 stimulate revived desires. No hand could "throw the 
 sulphur" with more perfect skill and sorcery than hers. 
 For the most potent of all her charms was that, beneath 
 all the bland arts of seduction and all the polished 
 powers of a woman of the world, there were the rich- 
 ness and the warmth and the unwise impulses of the 
 heart still living and beating if anyone had power to 
 make them live and beat for him. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 One day Aubrey found himself alone beside Beatrice 
 Soria at a gar'den party at Sion House. They had 
 walked on together under the trees until no one was 
 close to them, and the river was before them. 
 
 "We see you so seldom in this idle world. Lord 
 Aubrey," she said in her beautiful and mellowed English. 
 
 "Public life is a hard mistress," replied Aubrey. 
 "She is always saying of one in her jealousy: —
 
 2ii2 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Quod si forte alios jam nunc suspirat amores, 
 Tunc, precor, inlidos, sancte, relinque focos." 
 
 "She is more unreasonable, then, than other women 
 are in our day, whatever they were in Tibulhis's," said 
 the Duchess Soria. She was herself fond of the classics, 
 and learned in them like Tullia Arragona, and Vittoria 
 Colonna. "You have no good metrical translation of 
 the Elegies, or the Songs, in English, have you?" 
 
 "Alas, no," said Aubrey. "I often wonder they 
 have tempted no poet. John Vernon, though no poet, 
 has made, I think, versions of a few." 
 
 "Who is John Vernon? Ah, to be sure, I remember. 
 He is a great scholar and very charming, is he not?" 
 
 "I think you will like him. He is not of our time. 
 He reminds one of those studious and lettered gentle- 
 men who lived in the quiet of the country in the days 
 of the Georges, and were content as none of us contrive 
 to be content. How do you like his daughter?" 
 
 "Lady Guilderoy?" 
 
 "Yes; Gladys, as we call her. What do you think 
 of her?" 
 
 The Duchess Soria answered with bland praise. 
 She was a mistress in that delicate art; she never said 
 too much, but the little she said was sweet as the south 
 wind, and never commonplace. In a few slight sentences 
 she showed Aubrey that she saw the character of Guilde- 
 roy's wife with perfect justice and accuracy. 
 
 "Perhaps she is a little too grave for her years. 
 Men are not fond of gravity, though it is a quality so 
 safe," she added with a smile. 
 
 "I do not think she is by nature grave," said 
 Aubrey. "The world oppresses her. There are natures
 
 GUILD EROY. 283 
 
 which suffer in it; suffer from its banalitc, its artifices, 
 its intrigue, its necessities for dissimulation." 
 
 "Perhaps," said his companion. "But when the 
 world is always with us it is better to be interested in 
 it. Like whist, it will amuse our old age when our 
 passions are mere pall-bearers of a corpse." 
 
 "But there are those who can never feel that 
 interest. She is one of them. What is she to do?" 
 
 "She is in love with her husband," said Beatrice 
 Soria, with a delicate intonation of scorn. "When that 
 passes " 
 
 "It will not pass." 
 
 "Oh, my dear lord!" 
 
 "I am convinced that it will not." 
 
 "You are very cruel to him. He will not be 
 grateful." 
 
 "No, he will not, unless" — Aubrey paused and 
 turned to her with a look which said more than his 
 words — "unless you, Duchess, who have more influence 
 over him than any one, would tell him that he should 
 be so." 
 
 "I!" — the word was a haughty refusal in itself. 
 
 "You disappoint me," murmured Aubrey. "You 
 have so much power, if you would only have as much 
 mercy." 
 
 "My dear lord, that is not my role. One cannot 
 preach what one has never practised; one cannot ad- 
 vocate what one does not believe in. I have no belief 
 in conjugal happiness. I believe in the joys of the 
 passions, I believe in the pleasures of vanity, I believe 
 in the consolation of children, and I believe — perhaps 
 — in the sweetness of vengeance. But in these alone.
 
 284 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Lady Giiilderoy will, no doubt, have all these consola- 
 tions and pleasures. If she require her husband's 
 fidelity also she will be disappointed. No doubt she 
 will be at first disappointed very much. But she will 
 also no doubt find out (juon pent s'en passer." 
 
 "You are cruel to her," said Aubrey, with a sigh. 
 
 "My dear lord," said Beatrice Soria, "men wish 
 women to behave to them with sultry heat of passion 
 when they want passion, and with perfect absence of 
 passion when they have ceased to want it. They re- 
 quire the tropics one hour, the poles the next. They 
 want fire out of ice; when they have effected the trans- 
 formation they wish the fire to become ice again. Now 
 men are not gods that by the mere exercise of their 
 caprice they can bring about these changes. On the 
 contrary, they ask for such impossibilities and contra- 
 dictions that they very often make of a woman who 
 was tender, and malleable, and generous before, a very 
 devil, because they have put the devil of pain and in- 
 justice into her. Then they are exceedingly surprised 
 at the issue of their work, and if the evil they have 
 created out of good hurts them themselves they are 
 angry, and cry out, for they are children, and bad 
 children: spoilt, selfish, and unkind, never to be trusted 
 out of sight, and always cruel wherever they are 
 loved." 
 
 She spoke with force and warmth and scorn. Her 
 voice was low, but in the mellow and thrilling tones of 
 it there was a concentration of all the indignity, the 
 suffering, the humiliation, disdain, and wrath which had 
 been held in silence in her soul ever since the day that 
 she had received Guilderoy.
 
 GUILDEROY. 285 
 
 She knew that Aubrey was aware of her past rela- 
 tions with his cousin. Circumstances had made him 
 their confidant in the early days of their intimacy; and 
 he had been always on such terms with her as had per- 
 mitted him some frank expressions of his thoughts. 
 But here he felt that his words had been wasted. She 
 was not a woman to be moved by entreaty or sugges- 
 tion from any desire or intention of her own. 
 
 Aubrey raised his hat and turned away as others 
 approached and occupied her attention. 
 
 "Certainly he behaved very ill to her," he thought; 
 and then the paucity and insufficiency of such poor, 
 trite, commonplace words to express the unutterable, in- 
 effaceable, affront which Guilderoy had passed upon 
 such a woman as she was, seemed to him like a 
 renewed insult to her. Why should she show any 
 clemency? None had been shown to her. 
 
 And yet he thought one might move her still by 
 her heart if one dared to appeal to it. But he felt 
 that he could not presume to seek to learn what she 
 felt, whether of hatred or of love, to the man by whom 
 she had been forsaken. 
 
 That the wound given her was still unhealed he 
 knew by the profound and mingled emotions with which 
 she had spoken. 
 
 Her lover had killed much in her which had been 
 generous, tender, and magnanimous. He had inflicted 
 on her a wound into which all her best feelings and in- 
 stincts had sunk, as treasure founders in a deep sea. 
 If he suffered in time for the injury he had done, 
 whose fault would it be? Not hers, surely.
 
 286 GUILDEROY. 
 
 Beatrice Soria glanced after him as she spoke with 
 her other acquaintances. 
 
 "A man and a gentleman," she thought, "and a 
 true friend. But how like an Englishman, to have no 
 better way of trying to gain a point than to ask 
 for it!" 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 "You have invited Mme. Soria?" asked Guilderoy, 
 looking over his wife's list for the house parties. 
 
 "I had not thought of it," said Gladys. "Will she 
 care to come?" 
 
 "I heard her express a wish to see the English vie 
 de chateau," replied Guilderoy. "Ask her, at any rate. 
 Ask her in person. I am sure she will not refuse 
 you." 
 
 "I will try," said Gladys. 
 
 And she took an early occasion to do so when they 
 met at the last Drawing-room of the season. Beatrice 
 Soria did not reply for a moment; a faint smile came 
 on her beautiful mouth. Gladys wondered of what she 
 was thinking. The next moment she accepted the in- 
 vitation conditionally; it was possible she would not be 
 in England; if she were she would be happy to come 
 to Ladysrood for a day or two. 
 
 "I am very glad," said Gladys in her unconscious- 
 ness. "Pray do not forsake England so soon. Lord 
 Guilderoy is so very anxious that you should honour us 
 in the country."
 
 GUILDEROV. 287 
 
 "Lord Guilderoy is always so amiable," replied the 
 Duchess Soria. "And when his ambassadress is one so 
 irresistible as his wife, his wishes are always certain to 
 be crowned with success." 
 
 "When she says those graceful things so beauti- 
 fully, does she mean them, do you think?" asked Gladys 
 when she recounted the result of her mission to Guilde- 
 roy on her return from Court that day. 
 
 "My dear child," said Guilderoy with impatience, 
 " what a very childlike question ! One would think you 
 were on the cliffs at Christslea still! Who ever does 
 mean anything that they say in this world? These 
 pretty things are the mother-of-pearl counters with which 
 one plays the game of society; who has the most of 
 them wins the game. Surely you know that by this 
 time." 
 
 "I should be sorry to think it was only that," she 
 said wistfully. "I should like her to like me." 
 
 "Of course, she does like you; she has told me so," 
 said Guilderoy with some irritation. "People would 
 always like you if you were more pliant, more amused, 
 more good-natured. Oh, I know you are goodness itself 
 to all your poor people, and that you are very often 
 doing very kind things even in society, for I hear of 
 them. But that is not the amiability I mean. When 
 we do a favour, nine times out of ten we make a foe 
 instead of a friend, for there are very few natures which 
 a sense of obligation does not sour. The amiability 
 which is successful is the knack of saying things grace- 
 fully, of seeming interested when we are bored, of 
 seeming to approve when we disapprove, to agree when 
 we disagree, to make the most uninteresting stranger
 
 288 GUILDEROY. 
 
 believe that he is the salt of the earth to us: that is 
 what social amiability means, and you never attempt to 
 acquire it." 
 
 "It is hypocrisy," said Gladys, with scorn in her 
 eyes. 
 
 "It is nothing of the kind. Hypocrisy intends to 
 deceive. Social amiability knows that it deceives no- 
 body — at least nobody who has any knowledge of the 
 world — but it avoids friction, it polishes, and softens, 
 and soothes; it gives every one a vague sense of bien- 
 etre, and diffuses an agreeable atmosphere. That is what 
 you have not, and I fear never will have. You are 
 tres-grande dame; that I quite grant; but you have 
 modelled yourself too much on my sister, and have im- 
 bibed her unfortunate ideas that to be virtuous and 
 truthful it is primarily necessary to be what Sunbury 
 calls 'infernally disagreeable.' It is not my language 
 — it is his, and I ought to apologise for quoting it — 
 but it is really so inimitably descriptive!" 
 
 Gladys coloured with indignation. She knew that 
 she was wholly and utterly unlike Hilda Sunbury in 
 every opinion and quality; she knew that in comparing 
 her to his sister he compared her to what he considered 
 the most unsympathetic and uncompanionable of her 
 sex; she knew that she had just been doing her utter- 
 most to please him and to succeed in her mission to 
 the Duchess Soria; and she felt unbearably and in- 
 tolerably wronged by the injustice of his censures and 
 the contemptuous impatience of his tone. 
 
 "I do not think that you have any right to speak 
 to me in such a manner as that," she said in a voice 
 which shook slightly, yet was very firm. "I know that
 
 GUILDEROY. 289 
 
 you prefer every other woman in society to me; but 
 your indifference should not warp you into injustice 
 and discourtesy. I knew nothing of the world when I 
 married you; I have tried to learn all that I could, and 
 the lesson is hard, or I am stupid. I have not the 
 pliancy and facility of the ladies who are your friends; 
 but I must ask you to remember one thing — it was not 
 I who ever sought you, and my father again and again 
 in vain endeavoured to dissuade you from your mar- 
 riage with me." 
 
 Before he had recovered from his astonishment suf- 
 ficiently to answer her she had gathered her train over 
 her arm, bowed to him, and left him. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 He had been silent from sheer astonishment at the 
 passionate outburst of one whom he had always con- 
 sidered physically cold and mentally unperceptive. 
 
 It was a scene : it was not the first which had taken 
 place between them, but it Avas the most embittered. 
 There were words in it which stung his conscience, 
 and there were other words which awakened his anger. 
 His very sense that there was a great deal of justice in 
 her reproaches made them the more unwelcome to him. 
 He had thought her unimpassioned, he had even lauded 
 her and been glad that she should be so; and he saw 
 for the first time that deep down in her soul, under the 
 silence of pride and the ignorance of habit, there were 
 strong and embittered feelings. 
 
 Guilderoy, (, 19
 
 290 GUILDEROY. 
 
 He knew women and the world too intimately not 
 to know all that the existence of this feeling might mean 
 in time for himself. He was a man too sensitive to 
 the world's comments and too intolerant of publicity 
 and interference not to see with the gravest apprehen- 
 sions the possible approach of his wife's entrance into 
 that stage of susi:)icion and of irritation which usually 
 precedes and produces an exposure to the world of 
 disunion. He knew that he had only himself to blame; 
 he knew that a little more consideration for her, a little 
 more demonstration of affection on his part, would have 
 sufficed to shut the eyes and lull the soul of so young 
 a woman. He had believed her cold; he had let her 
 drift away from him, content indeed that she should do 
 so; but he had never supposed either that she had felt 
 his neglect so strongly or would ever express her sense 
 of it so openly. The mere thought of a future in which 
 such scenes were possible alarmed him beyond words. 
 Of all things he prized peace, freedom, and apparent 
 harmony. 
 
 "When once they are jealous!" he thought with a 
 shudder — the shudder of a man who has passed through 
 a thousand scenes of invective and reproach in penalty 
 of his pleasures. 
 
 Was it possible, he wondered, that she was jealous 
 of Beatrice Soria? Had any one told her the story of 
 his past? 
 
 With the yearning remembrance of that one name 
 of magic, he left his house and went where he often 
 went at this hour. It was five o'clock. She was most 
 days to be found at home then, adhering to her in-
 
 GUILDEROY. 29 1 
 
 dolent Ilaliau habit of never leaving the house till 
 sunset. 
 
 The London world was at her feet, and delighted 
 to wait on her. All that was choicest in it had re- 
 ceived her gracious hospitality in her own residence at 
 Naples and at Paris, and had many charming memories 
 for which to be grateful of moonlit-garden fetes at the 
 beautiful Sorrento villa, and dinners of delightful gaiety 
 and wit in her house in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne. 
 All that London could offer to her — and it is very 
 much when it is in the mood — it offered in return. 
 The staircase of her hotel was as thronged as the stair- 
 case of Buckingham Palace on the evening of a State 
 ball. 
 
 She had one of the suite of rooms which are given 
 to royal persons; she had had them filled Avith hot- 
 house plants and flowers. The London mists and rain 
 were disgusting things to her; she strove to forget them 
 as well as she could in the green twilight of palm leaves 
 and the delicate glories of orchidae. 
 
 He found her apartments thronged; it was known 
 that she was often to be found at this hour. Princes 
 and ministers, ambassadors and ambassadresses, wits 
 and elegantes and dandies, all that was most agreeable, 
 exalted, and exclusive in English society were there to 
 do her homage. He was only one in a crowd of great 
 people, most of them greater than he. He remembered 
 with a bitter pang the time when, for his sake, her 
 doors had been closed to all comers. 
 
 "Voila Ic passe de la Duchesse ," he heard a 
 diplomatist smilingly say with a glance at him as he 
 passed. "Qui sera son avcnir?" 
 
 19*
 
 2g2 GUILDEROY. 
 
 The jest made him irritated and mortified. He had 
 been her past indeed! — her all in all, her one exclusiv^e 
 thought, her dream, her empire, her heaven. He had 
 been all that, and he had tired of being it, ingrate that 
 he was! Who would be as much to her future? Any 
 one? 
 
 All that baser quality of men's love which is 
 stimulated and strengthened by the spur of social 
 jealousies and the sight of social successes in the one 
 beloved, all that element which is compounded of 
 vanity, emulation, and admiration increased by the 
 world's admiration, all moved in him, intensified be- 
 sides by the state of anger and offence against his wife 
 in which he had come thither. Never, in the earliest 
 hours of his adoration for her, had he believed himself 
 so passionately the lover of Beatrice Soria as he felt 
 that he was now capable of becoming. And she had 
 nothing in return for him except the touch of a soft 
 cool hand, the welcome of a sweet bland smile, the wit 
 of brilliant and polished phrases, all which all others 
 there enjoyed; all, and no more than that. Never since 
 the evening when he had seen her in the Palazzo 
 Contarini had he before felt so passionately all that he 
 had thrown away in surrendering, of his own free will, 
 his right to the first place in her presence and in her 
 thoughts. 
 
 He had thought her chain too closely fastened on 
 him, and he had cast it off in a moment of impatience 
 and fatigue; but now he felt that there were no dust 
 and ashes of humiliation which he would not eat if he 
 could only by them once more gain the right to kneel 
 at her feet and to become hers once more. He arrived
 
 nUILDKROY, 2 93 
 
 with the crowd and he was dismissed with it. Never 
 once in all the times that they had met had she allowed 
 him any solitary moment with her. He had surrendered 
 his right to any; he had to learn that such rights could 
 not be resumed at will. 
 
 Meanwhile, no sooner had his Avife been left alone, 
 than she had grown conscious of how she had sinned 
 against all her promises to Aubrey and all the counsels 
 of her father. She knew that she had lost patience at 
 the very moment when patience would perhaps have 
 rewarded her, and forgotten both wisdom and prudence 
 in the more selfish pain of offended pride. 
 
 She had said nothing which was not true; but there 
 are truths which must never be uttered if union and 
 the peace of the future are desired. The very force 
 and indisputable justice of such truth must constitute, 
 she knew, the heaviest accusation and reproach against 
 him. She had set a guard over her lips through so 
 many trying moments only to fail at the first word 
 which had mortified her. 
 
 With the tears streaming down her cheeks she 
 wrote and confessed her fault to her father. 
 
 "I am nothing to him, I know," she wrote; "but 
 why must he so often tell me so? If he would let me 
 return and live with you I would do so, and would not 
 complain. But that he would not like, because it would 
 compromise him before the world." 
 
 And then she tore the letter up, and did not send 
 it, lest it should trouble the peace of the solitary of 
 Christslea. 
 
 A little later she had to repress, as best she could, 
 everything she felt, and go out to a great dinner. The
 
 2Z).\ GUILDEROY. 
 
 dinner was followed by two or three receptions, at 
 which she had to be seen. She did not look well; she 
 was very pale, and her eyelids were swollen. 
 
 "How heavy your eyes are," said Aubrey, meeting 
 her for a moment that evening in the crowd of a great 
 house. "Tell me the truth, dear. Has anything fresh 
 happened?" 
 
 "Nothing fresh," said Gladys bitterly, "only what 
 I ought to be well used to; what will never alter as 
 long as I live." 
 
 "No mortal can say that," answered Aubrey. "There 
 is nothing really hopeless except death. Whilst a per- 
 son we love lives we should always deem ourselves 
 happy." 
 
 "I love no one," she said, in a tone which was 
 almost sullen. 
 
 "It is worse than I thought if you have ceased to 
 do so," he said gravely. "But it is not so. You de- 
 ceive yourself" 
 
 They were no longer alone, and he had no answer, 
 nor could he tell from any change in her face whether 
 she had been moved by his words. His heart ached 
 to see that mask of almost sullen indifference and 
 apathy worn on her young features. To what extremity 
 might not love which was deserted, and youth which 
 was unhappy, be driven half in despair and half for 
 sake of vengeance? He would not point out the way to 
 vengeance, but other men would. Though her apparent 
 coldness and her contemptuous inattention to them 
 chilled and daunted many of her wooers, yet there were 
 others whom such repulse attracted. She lived in a 
 society and in an age where fidelity is ridiculed or
 
 GUILDEROV. 295 
 
 received with incredulity, and wherein compensations 
 and condonations go hand in hand, and are rarely re- 
 fused. How long would she be without learning the 
 lesson which everything conspired to teach her? She 
 might learn it soon, she might learn it late; but learn 
 it some time or other she would assuredly. Has not 
 Ovid said that Helen, being left alone, was innocent of 
 any fault? Heletien ego crimine solvo. 
 
 END OF VOL. I.
 
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