University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

Lady Mildred's bays panced proudly up Bond
street, and kept on their way to the publisher's, at
whose door they fretted and champed the bit—they
and their high-born mistress in attendance upon the
poor author who in this moment of despondency complained
of the misappreciation of the world. Of the
scores of people who knew him and his companion
as London celebrities, and who followed the showy
equipage with their eyes, how many, think you, looked
on Mr. Ernest Clay as a misappreciated man?
How many, had they known that the whole errand
of this expensive turn out was to call on the publisher
for the price of a single magazine paper, would have
reckoned those sixteen guineas and the chariot of a
noble lady to come for the payment—five hundred
pounds for your romance, and a welcome to all the
best houses and costliest entertainments of England
—a hundred pounds for your poem and the attention
of a thousand eager admirers—these are some of the
“lengthening shadows” to the author's profits which
the author does not reckon, but which the world does.
To the rest of mankind these are “chattels” priced
and paid for. Twenty thousand a year would hardly
buy for Mr. Clay, simple and uncelebrated, what Mr.
Clay, author, etc., has freely with five hundred. To
whose credit shall the remaining nineteen thousand
five hundred be set down? Common people who pay
for these things are not believers in fairy gifts. They
see the author in a station of society unattainable except
by the wealthiest and best born, with all that
profuse wealth could purchase as completely at his
service as if the bills of cost were to be brought in to
him at Christmas; and besides all this (once more
“into the bargain”) caressed and flattered as no
“golden dulness” ever was or could be. To rate the
revenue of such a pampered idol of fortune, what man
in his senses would inquire merely into the profits of
his book!

And in this lies the whole secret of the envy and
malice which is the peculiar inheritance of genius.
Generous-minded men, all women, the great and rich
who are too high themselves to feel envy, and the poor
and humble who are too low to feel aught but wonder
and grateful admiration—these are the fosterers and
flatterers, the paymasters of the real wealth and the
receivers of the choicest fruits of genius. The aspiring
mediocrity, the slighted and eclipsed pretenders
to genius, are a large class, to whose eyes all brightness
is black, and the great mass of men toil their lives
and utmost energies away for the hundredth part of
what the child of genius wins by his unseen pen—by
the toil which neither hardens his hands nor trenches
on his hours of pleasure. They see a man no comelier
nor better born than they—idle apparently, as the
most spoilt minion of wealth, vying with the best born
in the favor of beautiful and proud women, using all
the goods of fortune with a profuse carelessness, which
the possession of the lamp of Aladdin could not more
than inspire, and by bitter criticism, by ingenious
slander, by continual depreciation, ridicule, and exaggeration
of every pretty foible, they attempt to level
the inequalities of fortune, and repair the flagrant injustice
of the blind goddess to themselves. Upon the
class generally, they are avenged. Their malice
poisons the joy and cripples the fine-winged fancy of
nineteen in the score. But the twentieth is born
proud and elastic, and the shaft his scorn does not
fling back, his light-heartedness eludes, and his is the
destiny which, more than that of kings or saints, proves
the wide inequality in human lot.

I trust, dear reader, that you have been more amused
than Lady Mildred at this half hour's delay at the
publisher's. While I have been condensing into a
theory by scattered observations of London authors,
her ladyship has been musing upon the apparition of
the family carriage of the Gores at Mr. Clay's lodgings.
Lady Mildred's position in society, though she had
the entree to all the best houses in London, precluded
an intimate acquaintance with any unmarried girl—
but she had seen Eve Gore and knew and dreaded her
loveliness. A match of mere interest would have
given her no uneasiness, but she could see far enough
into the nature of this beautiful and fresh-hearted girl
to know that hers would be no divided empire. All
women are conscious that a single-minded, concentrated,
pure affection, melting the whole character into
the heart, is omnipotent in perpetuating fidelity.

“Ernest,” said Lady Mildred, as the chariot sped
from the publisher's door, and took its way to the
Park, “you are grown ceremonious. Am I so new a
friend that you can not open a note in my presence?”

Clay placed the crushed letter in her hand.

“I will have no secrets from you, dear Lady Mildred.
There is probably much in that note that will surprise
you. Break the seal, however, and give me your advice.
I will not promise to follow it.”

The blood flushed to the temples of Lady Mildred
as she read— but her lips, though pale and trembling,
were compressed by a strong effort of self control.
She turned back and read the note again in a murmuring
undertone:—

“Hear me before you condemn, dear Lady Mildred,”
passionately exclaimed Ernest, as she clasped her
hands over the letter and her tears fell fast upon them:
“I was wrong to leave the discovery of this to chance
—I should have dealt more frankly with you—indeed,
if I had had the opportunity—”

Lady Mildred looked up, as if to reproach him for
the evasion half uttered.

“I have seen you daily, it is true, but every hour is
not an hour for confession like this, and besides, my
new love was a surprise, and what I have to confess is
a change in my feelings still more recent—a constantly
brightening vision of a life (pardon me, Lady Mildred!)
deeper a thousand fold, and a thousand times
sweeter and more engrossing than ours.”

“You are frank,” said his pale listener, who had recovered
her self-possession, and seemed bent now, as
usual, only on listening and entering into his feelings.

“I would be so, indeed,” he resumed; “but I have

not yet come to my confession. Life is too short,
Lady Mildred, and youth too vanishing, to waste feeling
on delusion.”

“Such as your love, do you mean, Ernest?”

“Pardon me! Were you my wife—”

Lady Mildred made a slight motion of impatience
with her hand, and unconsciously raised the expressive
arching of her lip.

“I must name this forbidden subject to be understood.
See what a false position is mine! You are
too proud to marry, but have not escaped loving me,
and you wish me to be contented with a perfume on
the breeze, to feel a property in a bird in the sky. It
was very sweet to begin to love you, to win and join
step by step, to have food for hope in what was refused
me. But I am checked, and you are still free. I stand
at an impassable barrier, and you demand that I should
feel united to you.”

“You are ungrateful, Ernest!”

“If I were your slave, I am, for you load me with
favors—but as your lover, no! It does not fill my
heart to open your house to me, to devote to me your
dining hours, your horses and servants, to let the
world know that you love me, to make me your
romance—yet have all the common interests of life
apart, have a station in society apart, and ambition not
mine, a name not mine, and hearth not mine. You
share my wild passions, and my fashionable negations,
not my homely feelings and everyday sorrows. I have
a whole existence into which you never enter. I am
something besides a fashionable author—but not to
you. I have a common human heart—a pillow upon
which lies down no fancy—a morning which is not
spent in sleep or listlessness, but in the earning of my
bread—I have dulness and taciturnity and caprice—
and in all these you have no share. I am a butterfly
and an earth-worm, by turns, and you know me only
on the wing. You do not answer me!”

Lady Mildred, as I have said before, was an admirer
of genius, and though Ernest was excusing an infidelity
to herself, the novelty of his distinctions opened to
her a new chapter in the book of love, and she was
interested far beyond resentment. He was talking
from his heart, too, and every one who has listened to a
murmur of affection, knows what sweetness the breathings
of those deeper veins of feeling infuse into the
voice. To a palled Sybarite like Lady Mildred, there
was a wild-flower freshness in all this that was irresistibly
captivating. A smile stole through her lips instead
of the reproach and anger that he expected.

“I do not answer you, my dear Ernest, for the same
reason I would not tear a leaf out of one of your books
unread. I quite enter into your feelings. I wish I
could hear you talk of them hours longer. Their
simplicity and truth enchant me—but I confess I can
not see what you propose to yourself. Do you think
to reconcile and blend all these contradictory moods
by an imprudent marriage? Or do you mean to vow
your butterfly to celibacy, and marry your worm-fly
alone, and grovel in sympathy rather than take love
with you when you soar, and keep your grovelling to
yourself.”

“I think Eve Gore would love me, soaring or creeping,
Lady Mildred! She would be happier sitting by
my table while I wrote, than driving in this gay crowd
with her chariot. She would lose the light of her life
in absence from me, like a cloud receding from the
moon, whatever stars sparkled around her. She
would be with me at all hours of the day and the night,
sharing every thought that could spring to my lips,
and reflecting my own soul for ever. You will forgive
me for finding out this want, this void, while you loved
me. But I have felt it sickeningly in your bright
rooms, with music and perfume, and the touch of your
hand all conspiring to enchant me. In the very hours
when most men on earth would have envied me, I
have felt the humbler chambers of my heart ache with
loneliness. I have longed for some still and dark retreat,
where the beating of my pulse would be protestation
enough, and where she who loved me was blest
to overflowing with my presence only. Affection is a
glow-worm light, dear Lady Mildred! It pales amid
splendor.”

“But you should have a glow-worm's habits to
relish it, my dear poet. You can not live on a blade
of grass, nor shine brightest out of doors in the rain.
Let us look at it without these Claude Lorraine
glasses, and see the truth. Mr. Thomas Gore offers
you £300 a year with his neice. Your own income,
the moment you marry, is converted from pocket-money
into subsistence—from the purchase of gloves
and Hungary water into butcher's meat and groceries.
You retire to a small house in one of the cheaper streets.
You have been accustomed to drive out continually,
and for several years you have not only been free from
the trouble and expense of your own dinner, but you
have pampered your taste with the varied chefs d'œuvre
of all the best cooks of London. You dine at home
now, feeding several mouths beside your own, on what
is called a family dinner—say, as a good specimen, a
beefsteak and potatoes, with a Yorkshire pudding.
Instead of retiring after your coffee to a brilliantly
lighted drawning-room, where collision with some
portion of the most gifted society of London disciplines
your intellect and polishes your wit and fancy,
you sit down by your wife's work-table, and grow
sleepy over your plans of economy, sigh for the gay
scenes you once moved in, and go to bed to be rid of
your regrets.”

“But why should I be exiled from society, my dear
Lady Mildred? What circle in London would not
take a new grace from the presence of such a woman
as Eve Gore?”

“Oh, marvellous simplicity! If men kept the gates
of society, a la bonne heure!—for then a party would
consist of one man (the host), and a hundred pretty
women. But the “free list” of society, you know,
as well as I, my love-blind friend, is exclusively masculine.
Woman keeps the door, and easy as turns the
hinge to the other sex, it swings reluctant to her own.
You may name a hundred men in your circle whose
return for the hospitality of fashionable houses it
would be impossible to guess at, but you can not
point me out one married woman, whose price of
admission is not as well known and as rigidly exacted.
as the cost of an opera-box.—Those who do not give
sumptuous parties in their turn (and even these must
be well bred and born people), are in the first place
very ornamental; but, besides being pretty, they must
either sing or flirt. There are but two classes of
women in fashionable society—the leaders or party-givers,
and the decoys to young men. There is the
pretty Mrs. —, for example, whose habitation
nobody knows but as a card with an address; and why
is she everywhere? Simply, because she draws four
or five fashionable young men, who would find no inducement
to come if she were not there. Then there
is Mrs. —, who sings enchantingly, and Mrs.
—, who is pretty, and a linguist, and entertains
stupid foreigners, and Mrs. —, who is clever at
charades, and plays quadrilles, and what would Mrs.
Clay do? Is she musical?”

“She is beautiful!”

“Well—she must flirt. With three or four fashionable
lovers—”

“Lady Mildred!”

“Pardon me, I was thinking aloud. Well—I will
suppose you an exception to this Mede-and-Persian
law of the beau mondc, and allow for a moment that
Mrs. Clay, with an income of five or six hundred a
year, with no eyes for anybody but her husband,
poor, pretty, and innocent (what a marvel it would be

in May Fair, by-the-way!), becomes as indispensable
to a partie fine as was Mr. Clay while in unmarried
celebrity. Mind, I am not talking of routs and balls,
where anybody can go, because there must be a crowd,
but of petits soupers, select dinners, and entertainments
where every guest is invited as an ingredient to
a well-studied cup of pleasure. I will suppose for an
instant, that a connubial and happy pair could be desirable
in such circles. What part of your income
of five or six hundred a year, do you suppose, would
dress and jewel your wife, keep carriage and servants,
and pay for your concert-tickets and opera-boxes—all
absolutely indispensable to people who go out? Why,
my dear Ernest, your whole income would not suffice
for the half. You must `live shy,' go about in hackney-coaches,
dress economically (which is execrable
in a woman), and endure the neglects and mortifications
which our pampered servants inevitably inflict
on shabby people. Your life would be one succession
of bitter mortifications, difficulties, and heartburnings.
Believe me, there is no creature on earth
so exquisitely wretched as a man with a fashionable
wife and small means.”

Lady Mildred had been too much accustomed to
the management of men, not to leave Ernest, after this
homily, to his own thoughts. A woman of less
knowledge and tact would have followed up this argument
with an appeal to his feelings. But beside that,
she wished the seed she had thus thrown into his
mind to germinate with thought. She knew that it
was a wise principle in the art of love to be cold by
daylight. Ernest sat silent, with his eyes cast musingly
down to the corner of the chariot, where the smallest
foot and prettiest chaussure conceivable was playing
with the tassel of the window-pull; and reserving
her more effective game of feeling for the evening,
when they were to meet at Mrs. R—'s, she set him
down at his clubhouse with a calm and cold adieu,
and drove home to bathe, dine alone, sleep, and refresh
body and spirit for the struggle against love and
Eve Gore.