University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

In a small room, second floor, front, No. —
South Audley street, Grosvenor square, on one of
the latter days of May, five or six years ago, there
stood an inkstand, of which you may buy the like for
three halfpence in most small shops in Soho. It was
stuck in the centre of the table, like the largest of
the Azores, on a schoolboy's amateur map—a large
blot surrounded by innumerable smaller blotlings.
On the top of a small leather portmanteau near by,
stood two pair of varnished-leather boots of a sumptuous
expensiveness, slender, elegant, and without
spot, except the leaf of a crushed orange blossom
clinging to one of the heels. Between the inkstand
and the boots sat the young and then fashionable author
of ——, and the boots and the inkstand
were tolerable exponents of his two opposite
but closely woven existences.

It was two o'clock, P. M., and the author was stirring
his tea. He had been stirring it with the same
velocity three quarters of an hour—for when that cup
should be drank, inevitably the next thing was to
write the first sentence of an article for the New
Month. Mag., and he was prolonging his breakfast,
as a criminal his last prayer.

The “fatigued” sugar and milk were still flying
round the edge of the cup in a whity blue concave,
when the “maid of all work” of his landlord the
baker, knocked at the door with a note.

The tea, which, for some minutes, had turned off a
decreasing ripple from the edge of the arrested spoon,
came to a standstill at the same moment, with the
author's wits. He had seized his pen and commenced:—

“Dear Sir:

“The tale of this month will be called—”

As it was not yet conceived, he found a difficulty
in baptizing it. His eyebrows descended like the
bars of a knight's visor; his mouth, which had expressed
only lassitude and melancholy, shut close,
and curved downward, and he sat for some minutes
dipping his pen in the ink, and, at each dip, adding a
new shoal to the banks of the inky Azores.

A long sigh of relief, and an expansion of every
line of his face into a look of brightening thought gave
token presently that the incubation had been successful.
The gilded note-paper was pushed aside, a broad
and fair sheet of “foreign post” was hastily drawn
from his blotting-book, and forgetful alike of the unachieved
cup of tea, and the waiting “devil” of Marlborough
street, the felicitous author dashed the first
magic word on mid-page, and without title or motto,
traced rapidly line after line, his face clearing of lassitude,
and his eyes of their troubled languor, as the
erasures became fewer, and his punctuations farther
between.

“Any answer to the note, sir?” said the maid-servant,
who had entered unnoticed, and stood close at
his elbow, wondering at the flying velocity of his pen.

He was at the bottom of the fourth page, and in
the middle of a sentence. Handing the wet and blotted
sheet to the servant, with an order for the messenger
to call the following morning for the remainder,
he threw down his pen and abandoned himself to the
most delicious of an author's pleasures—revery in the
mood of composition. He forgot work. Work is to
put such reveries into words. His imagination flew
on like a horse without his rider—gloriously and exultingly,
but to no goal. The very waste made his
indolence sweeter—the very nearness of his task
brightened his imaginative idleness. The ink dried
upon his pen. Some capricious association soon
drew back his thoughts to himself. His eye dulled.
His lips resumed their mingled expression of pride
and voluptuousness. He started to find himself idle,
remembered that had sent off the sheet with a broken
sentence, without retaining even the concluding
word, and with a sigh more of relief than vexation,
he drew on his boots. Presto!—the world of which
his penny-half-penny inkstand was the immortal centre—the
world of heaven-born imagination—melted
from about him! He stood in patent leather—human,
handsome, and liable to debt!

And thus fugitive and easy of decoy, thus compulsory,
irresolute, and brief, is the unchastised toil of
genius—the earning of the “fancy-bread” of poets!

It would be hard if a man who has “made himself
a name” (beside being paternally christened), should
want one in a story—so, if you please, I will name
my hero in the next sentence. Ernest Clay was
dressed to walk to Marlborough street to apply for his
“guinea-a-page” in advance, and find out the concluding
word of his MS., when there was heard a footman's
rap at the street door. The baker on the
ground floor ran to pick up his penny loaves jarred
from the shelves by the tremendous rat-a-tat-tat, and
the maid ran herself out of her shoes to inform Mr
Clay that Lady Mildred — wished to speak with
him. Neither maid nor baker were displeased at being
put to inconvenience, nor was the baker's hysterical

mother disposed to murmur at the outrageous clatter
which shattered her nerves for a week. There
is a spell to a Londoner in a coronetted carriage which
changes the noise and impudence of the unwhipped
varlets who ride behind it, into music and condescension.

“You were going out,” said Lady Mildred; “can
I take you anywhere?”

“You can take me,” said Clay, spreading out his
hands in an attitude of surrender, “when and where
you please; but I was going to my publisher's.”

The chariot-steps rattled down, and his foot was on
the crimson carpet, when a plain family carriage suddenly
turned out of Grosvenor square, and pulled up
as near his own door as the obstruction permitted.

Ernest changed color slightly, and Lady Mildred,
after a glance through the window behind her, stamped
her little foot and said “Come!”

“One moment!” was his insufficient apology as he
sprang to the window of the other carriage, and with
a manner almost infantile in its cordial simplicity, expressed
his delight at meeting the two ladies who sat
within.

“Have you set up a chariot, Ernest?” said the
younger, laying her hand upon the dark mass of curls
on his temple, and pushing his head gently back that
she might see what equipage stopped the way.

He hesitated a moment, but there was no escape
from the truth.

“It is Lady Mildred, who has just—

“Is she alone?”

The question was asked by the elder lady with a
look that expressed a painfully sad wish to hear him
answer, “No.”

While he hesitated, the more forgiving voice next
him hurriedly broke the silence.

“We are forgetting our errand, Ernest. Can you
come to Ashurst to-morrow?”

“With all my heart.”

“Do not fail! My uncle wishes to see you.
Stay—I have brought you a note from him. Good-by!
Are you going to the rout at Mrs. Rothschild's
to-night?”

“I was not—but if you are going, I will.”

“Till this evening, then?”

The heavy vehicle rolled away, and Ernest crushed
the note in his hand unread, and with a slower step
than suited the impatience of Lady Mildred, returned
to the chariot. The coachman, with that mysterious
instinct that coachmen have, let fall his silk upon the
backs of his spirited horses, and drove in time with
his master's quickened pulses; and at the corner of
Chesterfield street, as the family carriage rolled slowly
on its way to Howell and James's (on an errand connected
with bridal pearls), the lofty-stepping bays of
Lady Mildred dashed by as if all the anger and scorn
of a whole descent of coronets were breathing from
their arched nostrils.

What a boon from nature to aristocracy was the
pride of the horse!

Lady Mildred was a widow of two years' weeds,
thirty-two, and of a certain kind of talent, which will be
explained in the course of this story. She had no personal
charms, except such as are indispensably necessary
to lady-likeness—indispensably necessary, for
that very reason, to any control over the fancy of a
man of imagination. Her upper lip was short enough
to express scorn, and her feet and hands were exquisitely
small. Some men of fancy would exact
these attractions and great many more. But without
these, no woman ever secured even the most transient
homage of a poet. She had one of those faces you
never find yourself at leisure to criticise, or rather she
had one of those siren voices, that, if you heard her
speak before you had found leisure to look at her
features, you had lost your opportunity for ever. Her
voice expressed the presence of beauty, as much as a
carol in a tree expresses the presence of a bird, and
though you saw not the beauty, as you may not see
the bird, it was impossible to doubt it was there. Yet
with all this enchantment in her voice it was the most
changeable music on earth—for hear it when you
would, if she were in earnest, you might be sure it
was the softened echo of the voice to which she was
replying. She never spoke first. She never led the
conversation. She had not (or never used) the talent
which many very common-place women have, of
giving a direction to the feelings and controlling even
the course of thought of superior men who may admire
them. In everything she played a second. She
was silent through all your greetings, through all your
compliments; smiled and listened, if it was for hours,
till your lighter spirits were exhausted and you came
down to the true under tone of your heart; and by the
first-struck chord of feeling and earnest (and her skill
in detecting it was an infallible instinct), she modulated
her voice and took up the strain, and from the echo
of your own soul and the flow of the most throbbing
vein in your own heart, she drew your enchantment
and intoxication. Her manners were a necessary part
of such a character. Her limbs seemed always enchanted
into stillness. When you gazed at her more
earnestly, her eyes gradually drooped, and, again her
enlarged orbs brightened and grew eager as your gaze
retreated. With her slight forefinger laid upon her
cheek, and her gloved hand supporting her arm, she
sat stirless and rapt, and by an indescribable magnetism
you felt that there was not a nerve in your eye, nor a
flutter toward change in the expression of your face,
that was not linked to hers, nerve for nerve, pulsation
for pulsation. Whether this charm would work on
common men it is difficult to say—for Lady Mildred's
passions were invariably men of genius.

You may not have seen such a woman as Lady
Mildred—but you have seen girls like Eve Gore.
There are many lilies, though each one, new-found,
seems to the finder the miracle of nature. She was a
pure, serene-hearted, and very beautiful girl of seventeen.
Her life had been hitherto the growth of love
and care, as the lily she resembled is the growth of
sunshine and dew; and, flower-like, all she had ever
known or felt had turned to spotless loveliness. She
had met the gifted author of her favorite romance at
a country-house where they were guests together, and
I could not, short of a chapter of metaphysics, tell you
how natural it was for these two apparently uncongenial
persons to mingle, like drops of dew. I will
merely say now, that strongly marked as seems the
character of every man of genius, his very capability
of tracking the mazes of human nature, makes him
the very chameleon and Proteus of his species, and
that after he has assimilated himself by turns to every
variety of mankind, his masks never fall off without
disclosing the very soul and type of the most infantine
simplicity. Other men's disguises, too, become a
second nature. Those of genius are worn to their
last day, as loosely as the mantles of the gods.

The kind of man called “a penetrating observer,”
if he had been in the habit of meeting Mr. Clay in
London circles, and had afterward seen him rambling
through the woods of — Park with Eve Gore,
natural, playful sometimes, and sometimes sad, his
manner the reflex of hers, even his voice almost as
feminine as hers, in his fine sympathy with her character
and attractions—one of these shrewd people I say
would have shaken his head and whispered, “poor
girl, how little she understands him!” But of all the
wise and worldly, gentle and simple, who had ever
crossed the path of Ernest Clay, the same child-like
girl was the only creature to whom he appeared utterly
himself—for whom he wore no disguise—to whose

plummet of simple truth he opened the seldom-sounded
depths of his prodigal and passionate heart. Lady
Mildred knew his weaknesses and his genius. Eve
Gore knew his better and brighter nature. And both
loved him.

And now, dear reader, having drawn you the portraits
of my two heroines, I shall go on with a disembarrassed
narrative to the end.