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GUILDEROY. 
 
 A NOVEL. 
 
 Bv “ OUIDA.” 
 
 Auther of “ Under Two Flags” li Syrlin “Kujjino” etCi 
 
 New York : 
 
 THE F. M. LUPTON PUBLISHING COMPANY s 
 Nos. 72-76 Walker Street. 
 
r 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Lord Guilderot 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 candor which is always insolence. There can 
 be no greater mistake. The more intimate our relations are 
 with any one, be it in friendship or in love, the less should 
 we strain the opportunity to say impertinent and disagree- 
 able things. Intimacy does not absolve from courtesy, 
 though it is so often separated from it by the unwisdom and 
 the impetuosity of human nature. Indeed, there is even 
 a kind of meanness in taking advantage of our entry into 
 V 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 exercise. There are many 
 moments in friendship, as in love, when silence is beyond 
 words. The faults of our friends may be clear to us, but it 
 is well to seem to shut our eyes to them. It is doubtful if 
 > fault-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 everlast- 
 r ing thing which will survive all manner of bad treatment. 
 a But this is an exceedingly great and foolish error. Friend- 
 ship may be killed, like love, by bad treatment ; it may even 
 c*C die in an hour of a single unwise word ; its conditions of 
 existence are that it should be dealt with delicately and ten- 
 derly, being as it is a sensitive plant and not a roadside 
 thistle. We must not expect our friend to be above 
 
 \ i 83 1 ! 6 
 
4 
 
 GUIZDEBOY. 
 
 humanity. We need not love his defects, hut we should for- 
 bear 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 friend- 
 ship, 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 oest friends long absence 
 raises a mist like that which the Brahmin 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 Ms 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, 
 relics 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 fagades than this ; 
 some of it was regal and very imposing in its dimensions and 
 its decorations, 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 vejy distant days of early 
 British Christianity from some miracle of which the memo- 
 ries were lost under the mist of many centuries, ft had been 
 the site of a monastery in the days of Augustine and of 
 
GXJILDEUOY. 
 
 s 
 
 Bede, and then the stronghold of the race of which its present 
 lord was the sole male representative. The house, as it now 
 stood, had been built 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 entertainment ; it was also 
 in its way beautiful, but he disliked it. He had lived much 
 in Italy, and in these great rooms with their frescoed ceil- 
 ings, their sculptured cornices, their marble columns, their 
 seemingly endless coup d’oeil, he missed the Italian sun ; 
 they made him shiver in the gray, 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 tim- 
 ber 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 
 object in doing so. The day was late in September, but the 
 air was still warm. The dahlias and china-asters were glow- 
 ing in their beds, and the salvias, blue and red, made strong 
 bands of color where the sun’s rays caught them. There was 
 a fresh homely scent of damp grass from the 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 al- 
 ways. At times it wore a mute reproach to him for leaving 
 it so often alone there in its stateliness 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 
 seucer on the shelves, every lozenge in the casements, were 
 sacred. They opened it all, 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 
 sightseers who came on the public day to stare open-mouthed 
 at its splendors. Ho 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?” 
 
Kt7lLt>Elld¥'. 
 
 “ 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 philosophers, fine soldiers when they had to 
 draw the sword. They had the art of sufficing to them- 
 selves, 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 approached 
 him. 
 
 “ As I have not the honor of knowing what you are think- 
 ing of, how can I say whether I agree with it or not ? ” 
 replied his sister. 
 
 “It is too much trouble to put it all into words. If you 
 were a sympathetic woman you would guess it without ex- 
 planation.” 
 
 “ I am too matter of fact to be sympathetic ; you have told 
 me so often. All the common sense of the race has concen- 
 trated itself in me.” 
 
 “A woman with common sense is dreadful,” he replied some- 
 what peevishly. “ It is an unpleasant 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 ceuld drive twelve- horses if it amused you ; but I 
 think it would have* rather a circus-look, a soupgon of 
 Hengler. And where would be the devoted rustics, who 
 
GUILDEZOY : 
 
 7 
 
 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, 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 senti- 
 ment in the English breast which has been too much neg- 
 lected by the politicians. In Prance, Jacques Bonhomme 
 hates M. le Marquis savagely ; but in England, Bill and Jack 
 have a rude unavowed admiration for my lord duke. Hunt- 
 ing and cricket have done that.” 
 
 “ How well that comes from you, who never cared about 
 either 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 country if I had liked foxes and 
 wickets ! Hunting, to me, seems barbarous, and cricket 
 childish ; but as factors in the national life they have had 
 great uses.” 
 
 “ You are so very dispassionate that you are intensely 
 irritating,” said his sister. “Most people adore things or 
 hate things en bloc” 
 
 “ Happy people ! ” replied Guilderoy. “ They are never 
 troubled with an} 7 doubt or any divided inclinations. It 
 must be delightful to have the world sorted into goats and 
 sheep, into black and white, in that fashion. I 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 profoundly 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 some of 
 them 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 summons ; and in five 
 minutes the tea was brought, served in Queen Anne silver 
 and cups of old Worcester. 
 
8 
 
 GUlLLEllOY . 
 
 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 Ladysroad had been inscribed in the Doomsday 
 Book and had never belonged to any but his race. His 
 mother had been a Erenchwoman 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. Person- 
 ally he was handsome and patrician-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 favors, 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 is a fugitive 
 thing, and not apt to sit long quietly in an armchair 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, because 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 ! 97 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 Lady S unbury, 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 perfectly dignified woman. She 
 looked admirably at a state ball ; she received admirably in 
 her own house. She would have been admirable in a revolu- 
 tion, 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 avivre. Now to be facile 
 dj vivre is, as modern existence is 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 invar- 
 iably tuned to the same key, left him at the end of each of 
 her visits somewhat enerve and disposed to sympathize more 
 than he deserved with that very uninteresting 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 syrens. 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 moreover. An intellectual and intelligent woman, she 
 had married a silly man for his handsome person — a folly 
 clever women often commit. A proud woman, she was poor 
 with that most painful of all poverty, inadequate means to 
 sustain a preat position ; and a woman of strong affections, 
 she was doomed to see her attachment impatiently received, 
 or as impatiently shaken off, in all the relations of her life, 
 
&UTLDEBOY. 
 
 to 
 
 because she had not the tact to control her temper or to resist 
 her love of argument 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 affec- 
 tions ; 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 Sunbury ad- 
 mitted 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 Sun- 
 bury curtly and with emphasis. 
 
 He smiled, and walked up and down the library, with his 
 cup in his hand, 
 
 u What an uncomfortable habit you have of walking 
 about ! ” said his sister irritably, with the Queen Anne cream- 
 jug in her hand. 
 
 “ You think all my habits uncomfortable when you do not 
 think them improper,” he returned with perfect good 
 humor. 
 
 “ 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 worry- 
 ing and finding fault with him, after the manner of women. 
 She was a few years older than he, and her sense of her- 
 self 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 lie could not have filled, 
 and filled with honor. And here all his life was slipping 
 away from him, only occupied with idle dreams and passion? 
 
GUILDEEOY. H 
 
 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 he 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 ambi- 
 tion. It is a malady like suppressed gout. Nature, circum- 
 stance, your own temperament, and all the accidents of 
 birth joined together, which they so very seldom do for any- 
 body, to make it perfectly possible for you to have been a 
 great man. 
 
 Thus she spoke, and her voice emphasized imposingly 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 com- 
 forting to mediocrity. I am. not prepared to say that it is a 
 true one.” 
 
 “ I think it is true, but it is altogether outside my argu- 
 ment. 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.” 
 
 u c 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 wha 
 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 which is alone born of absolutely 
 pure disinterestedness.” 
 
12 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 u I have not the slightest qualification for governing any* 
 thing, not even a dog,” replied Guilderoy. “ All my dogs do 
 what they like with me — I am positively afraid of displeas- 
 ing them.” 
 
 u 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 a 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.” 
 
 u 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.” 
 
 u 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, pains-taking 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, 
 
GUaLDEROY . 
 
 13 
 
 therefore, it is the only candid and disinterested 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 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 public life with no possible taint 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 
 
 f mu should have taken a part, and a great part, in national 
 ife.” 
 
 “ 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 pre- 
 tending 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, author- 
 ity, and courtesy do not make a better product than genera- 
 tions 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 Lords is in 
 
14 
 
 GUILLEBOY. 
 
 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 oli- 
 garchy, with infinitely more honor abroad and prosperity at 
 home than they will ever get out of the professional politi- 
 cians and the salaried agitators whom it sends up to West- 
 minster.” 
 
 “ If it did it would be swept away.” 
 
 “ Is that so sure ? At all events, it would fall with dig- 
 nity. It is not dignified to pass bills which it knows to be 
 poisonous to the honor 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 aris- 
 tocracy ; and I know not why our House should fear its own 
 abolition. It is the country which would suffer far more 
 than ourselves.” 
 
 “ 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 spreading 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 its plumage look silvery and 
 gold ; he was murmuring all sorts of sweet things to his lady- 
 love, visible to him though not to his observer ; he was per- 
 fectly, ideally happy. Bound the tree 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 what sort of a person the lady is,” said 
 his sister, with some unpleasantness in her tone. 
 
 “Hot at all,” said Guilderoy. “She is to him what he 
 thinks her, at all events ; who wants more ? ” 
 
 And he continued to watch the dove cooing and fluttering 
 in the sunshine on the topmost branch of the great cedar. 
 
GUILDJEROT. 15 
 
 “ 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 of world’s ; and 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 hut what you 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 I mean, my dear. You have such tal- 
 ents, such great opportunities, so noble a character. I can- 
 not bear to see them all thrown away on women.” 
 
 He laughed, and moved a little away. 
 
 “ Every woman thinks a man’s life c thrown away ’ on 
 another woman; when a man’s life is given to herself 
 she thinks it ( consecrated ’ to her. You always use two 
 vocabularies for yourself and your neighbors.” 
 
 Lady 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 meta- 
 phor. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 “He really ought to make some marriage,” thought Lady 
 Sunbury, when she had left him, and took her way through 
 the drawing-rooms opening one out of another 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 V enus, 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 th# 
 
16 
 
 GUILDEEOT. 
 
 saints rolled into one would have seemed to her either ft 
 dowdy or an ecervelee , either a humdrum nobody or £ por- 
 tentous jade, if such on one had been called Lady Guilderoy. 
 She had a most ardent and honest desire to see her brother 
 married, and yet she felt that his marriage would be quite 
 intolerable to her. For a person who prided herself on 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 wcman whom he could 
 Vot 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 blot- 
 ting-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 
 correspondance 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 delight- 
 ful, 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 opponents, pleas- 
 ure in a flattering ciffiche ? God forgive me ! I have not 
 the smallest right to be exacting in such matters or hyper- 
 critical, 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 before his fancy, it had not 
 
GUILDEBOY. 
 
 17 
 
 been their fault probably ; much more probably his own. 
 
 He lit a match and burnt the letter, and remembered 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 ardor to indifference. He was not actually 
 indifferent. He felt that to become indifferent was a possi- 
 bility, and when this is felt, indifference itself is never far off 
 we may be sure. “ Elle vient a pas lents / mais elle vient .” 
 
 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 Hook at another 
 woman ; I shall be told fifty times a week that I am heartless. 
 Perhaps I am heartless, but I think 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 unconsciousness which made it less egotism 
 than habit. 
 
 He had done some things which were unselfish and gen- 
 erous 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 ordin- 
 ary matters he was selfish without being in the least aware 
 of it, as indeed happens with the majority of people. 
 
 When the letter was burnt he went to one of the windows 
 and looked out. The day was closing in, and the shadows 
 were taking the colors from the autumnal flowers and mak- 
 ing 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 
 
 2 
 
18 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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 of his 
 county sighed in vain for the various entertainments, the 
 balls, the dinners, and the hunting breakfasts, 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 sur- 
 rounded on three sides with moorland, and on the other side 
 shut in by the sea, and though his distant neighbors would 
 willingly have driven twenty miles to see him, he gave them 
 no invitation or permission to do so. The great fetes which 
 had celebrated his majority some fifteen or sixteen years 
 before had been the last time in which the reception-rooms 
 had been illuminated for a great party. 
 
 He was an idol of the great world, which always con- 
 sidered 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 
 forefathers’ time the hospitalities of Ladysrood had been pro- 
 fuse and magnificent ; the closing of its doors was an affront 
 to the whole country-side against the unpopularity of which 
 the good sense of Lady Sunbury had in vain often protested. 
 
 “ I have no desire to be popular,” Guilderoy invariably re- 
 plied. “ There is nothing on earth so vulgar as the craze for 
 popularity which now-a-days makes people who ought to 
 know better only anxious to be fawned on by the crowd.” 
 
 66 6 Vox populi vox Dei,” said Lady Sunbury. 
 
 “ It always was in the esteem of the vulgar themselves,” 
 replied her brother. “ Myself, I wholly decline to believe 
 that the gods ever speak through the throats of any mob.” 
 “Can you call your own county people a mob ? ” 
 
 “ Oh, yes. A well-dressed mob, but a mob decidedly. If 
 you let them in by the great gate I shall go out by the gar- 
 den door.” 
 
 And they never were let into Ladysrood, infinitely to their 
 disgust. A few men dined with him occasionally, that was 
 all. It was not wonderful that his neighbors thought Lady 
 Sunbury would have been better in his place. 
 
 When he looked out on to the terrace now and saw the little 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 L9 
 
 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 persons. 
 
 “ 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 mo- 
 ment after he caught sight of the invader, and with 
 pleasure and astonishment recognized 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 
 <\wn country,” replied Lord Aubrey, “you would know that 
 1 had to attend a meeting in your own town yesterday. I 
 heard you were here, and I did not like to be so near Ladys- 
 rood 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 after- 
 wards.” 
 
 “ 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 thou- 
 sand 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 Lisle, 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-humored. 
 He carried his great height somewhat listlessly and indolent 
 
20 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 ly, and his gray 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 dedicated 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 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 gray skies and cold winds ? ” 
 
 “ I am delighted to be in the west of England since it 
 affords me a quiet day with you,” said Guilderoy 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 s-ame 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 conviction. Those forces 
 I have not.” 
 
 “ Here is your model hero ; the one perfect person endowed 
 with all the virtues and moral conscientiousness in which I 
 am so sadly deficient,” said Guilderoy to his sister, as he en- 
 tered her presence with his cousin as the sun descended over 
 the western woods. 
 
 “ I admit that I wish your life were more like his ; you 
 would probably be happier and certainly more useful,” 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 Fallas one is always right in the choice, if Her- 
 
GUILDEROT. 
 
 21 
 
 cules were 5 and if one is as intolerant of being bored as 
 Evelyn is, it L no kind of use to take her ; a divorce would 
 be sued for immediately.” 
 
 “ You do not regret your choice, surely ? ” said Hilda Sun- 
 bury, 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 misgiv- 
 ings visit one inevitably. A quel bon! One cannot 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 oneself 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 rooted in human 
 nature and in nature itself. All governments drift towards 
 it whatever they call themselves. 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 liave the courage of its opinions.” 
 
 “ Certainly the first virtue of an aristocracy should bo 
 courage,” said her cousin. u An aristocracy is nothing with- 
 out 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 valor 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 honor. A democracy cannot under- 
 stand honor ; 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. 
 
22 
 
 GTJILDEBOY . 
 
 Honor is an idealic and impersonal tiling; 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 / 7 said Guilderoy. “ Unless we 
 honestly believe that we are the natural leaders of the nation 
 by virtue of the honor 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 have that belief 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 anywhere, 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 . 77 
 
 “You may be a hindrance, without knowing it , 77 mur- 
 mured Aubrey ; “ a boulder in a highroad does not move, 
 but sometimes it overturns the carriage 'as effectually as 
 if it did . 77 
 
 “By which you mean 77 
 
 “ That when the Radicals of your country are disposed to 
 point to great landowners who lead their lives to very little 
 purpose except that of their own enjoyment, you, my dear 
 Guilderoy, are conveniently at hand to be pointed at, and to 
 sharpen the moral of their tale . 77 
 
 “ It is wholly impossible for them to know what I do with 
 my life , 77 said Guilderoy with some anger. 
 
 “Clearly; but they judge from w T hat 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 anywhere sooner than in England. I am 
 not saying that they have any business to make such re- 
 marks; I only say that they do make them . 77 
 
 “Let them make them and be damned ! 77 said Guilderoy . 77 
 
 “With all my heart , 77 said his cousin. “Only it is not 
 they who ever are damned ; it is always the poor, stupid, 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 23 
 
 hungry, gullible crowd, which is led astray by them, and ia 
 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 confess that men 
 in our position owe it to the country not to leave politics 
 wholly in the hands of professional politicians. The profes- 
 sional politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a 
 questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a metier 
 it is wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the 
 pursuit of it. To the professional politician national affairs 
 are a manufacture into which he puts his audacity and his 
 time, and out of which he expects to make so much percent- 
 age for his lifetime. I say that we have no business, be- 
 cause 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 murderer 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 endeavor 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 ingratitude,” 
 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 become so hopelessly 
 vulgar ! ” 
 
24 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “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 my- 
 self on no better intellectual 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 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 the word duty,” said Guilderoy. “ It is 
 puritanic and illogical. If we are what science seems to 
 prove, mere automata formed of cells and fibres accidentally 
 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 con scious- 
 ness 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 restrains from steal- 
 ing 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 
 conscience is exclusively a human possession, though it may 
 have become larger in human than in other animals. But it 
 is strong enough in me to make me sensible that I am in a 
 very great measure responsible for my actions, and all the 
 philosophies on earth will never talk me out of that belief. ” 
 “And the belief has sent you to the House of Commons?” 
 “Just so ; I admit the pathos — I admit the justice of your 
 implied satire. But I go to the House of Commons because, 
 feeling 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. 
 
GBILDEROY. 25 
 
 He walked about a few minutes restlessly, then, his sister 
 Saving left the room, he asked with some abruptness: 
 
 “You came last week from Marienbad ? 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 sullenness. “ There 
 can be no pleasure where there is no imprevu ; 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, be- 
 cause 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 pre- 
 tensions to much experience in the soft science, am aware 
 that you are most undeniably right. But how do you pro- 
 pose to get any woman — and any woman in love — to under- 
 stand that ? ” 
 
 “ I do not even hope it,” replied Guilderoy, wearily, “ I 
 only remark that the utter inability of women to understand 
 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 Penelope and 
 as amorous as Calypso to receive him on such terms.” 
 
 “ It would be love ; whereas now it is only love of posses- 
 sion.” 
 
 “You certainly ask a great deal of love, and seem to be in- 
 clined 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/ 
 
26 
 
 GUILDEROr. 
 
 added his cousin. “On my honor, 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 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 ac- 
 countable 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, 
 changeful, 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 emotions 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 involun- 
 tary as it was to love at all in the beginning.” 
 brey 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 annoyed ; she was indignant 
 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 changes of its 
 growth, so that instead 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 2 ? 
 
 out of the dreams of boyhood and of poets/’ answered Guil- 
 deroy, 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. But 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 become* 
 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 
 pure 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 discovery 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 wound 
 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 
 it was higher than his cousin’s, the doors of whose life stood 
 wide open to it all seasons through. If there was any- 
 thing in human nature which made him irritable, 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 
 l’Etoile are the flames of the Commune.” 
 
 For errors which were the birth of passion he had infinite 
 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 favorite lament. 
 
 Aubrey laughed. 
 
 “I should certainty pity his wife,” he replied. 
 
 “Why?” said Lady Sunbury, irritated. “She wouldi 
 have a very agreeable position.” 
 
28 
 
 GtllLDEROY. 
 
 “ Oh, no doubt/’ assented Aubrey. “ If she were satisfied 
 with position. Perhaps she would not be.” 
 
 “Women are not romantic nowadays/’ said his cousin, 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 — times 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 Sun bury* 
 and was fully persuaded that she spoke the truth. 
 
 Aubrey smiled. 
 
 He spent that day at Ladysrood, and then took his depar- 
 ture for his own place — Balfrons, in the north. Balfrons 
 was a mighty border castle which had withstood raids and 
 sieges from the days of Hotspur, and it gave its name to the 
 marquisate which he would inherit 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 would collect early 
 Latin manuscripts of Virgil,” replied Lady Sunbury. 
 
 “ Almost as dreary a paradise as his present purgatory.” 
 
 “ That is a matter of taste. You prefer to collect a num- 
 ber 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 manuscripts ” 
 
 “Not as harmless/’ said Lady Sunbury. 
 
 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 boldness and sureness ; his 
 sister sometimes told him that it was the only English taste 
 
GU7LDER0T. 
 
 29 
 
 lie possessed. He could ride many miles without passing the 
 limits of his own land, and much of this was the wild moor- 
 land lying high and wind-blown between the woods of Ladys- 
 rood and the cliffs by the sea. Over the short elastic turf he 
 could gallop for hours and meet no fence, or boundary mark, 
 ©r 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 re- 
 vived in the force it had had in his boyhood whenever he was 
 alone in the open air, or moor or shore or mountain. 
 
 The moor and the shore and the mountain could not hold 
 him very long, but while it lasted his sympathy 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 ro- 
 mance to his temperament and his thoughts. In the heart 
 of a man who 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 seldom that he saw anyone or anything on. these 
 moors beyond a pedler or a turf-cutter, a carrier’s cart creep- 
 ing slowly across the track which led from one hamlet to an- 
 other, 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 distin- 
 guish the uncouth figures of village lads about wdiom several 
 lurchers and other dogs were jumping and yelping excitedly. 
 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 crea- 
 ture.” 
 
30 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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, as he 
 rode nearer, and the welcome shout was echoed with noise 
 and glee. “ Let un fire her out ! 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 twenty, beetle-browed, coarse-featured, with jaws like their 
 own bulldogs, and small dull savage eyes, items of that en- 
 lightened 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 im- 
 periously. 
 
 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 clamor ceased a little while, and one of them called 
 to him : 
 
 “ 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 fooling 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 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 31 
 
 spoke a wooden box of lucifer matches. There was a quan- 
 tity 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 we’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 ? ” 
 
 “’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 Guildero} 7 ’, 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 an- 
 other voice, and the suggestion was received with shouts of 
 applause. 
 
 “You are on my land, and I am a magistrate,” said 
 Guilderoy, controlling with difficulty his fury and disgust as 
 he dismounted, and holding his plunging horse with one 
 hand, with the other he struck the handle of his whip on the 
 door of the hut. 
 
 “ My dear^ do not be alarmed,” he said to the unseen occu- 
 
S2 
 
 GUILEEBOY . 
 
 pant 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 answered 
 through the door: 
 
 “ I can not 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 cub ; now go back to wher- 
 ever you came from, and do not forget that your misera- 
 ble 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 unremarked. 
 
 “ 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 northeast, 
 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 mutterings 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 key-hole. 
 “ 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 beautiful face, which 
 was pale but resolute ; a Gainsborough face, with wide- 
 opened, questioning eyes and tumbled auburn hair, of which 
 thick waves were escaping from a gipsy-shaped straw hat. A 
 gray, woollen dress was fastened round her waist by a leather 
 belt ; it had been obviously made by some simple country 
 seamstress, but there was an aristocracy in the look of the 
 
GU1LDER0Y. 
 
 S3 
 
 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. 
 
 j “ You are sure they are gone?” she asked, looking out 
 across the moor. 
 
 “ Perfectly sure,” returned G-uilderoy. “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 riding 
 another way, and 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 giva 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. 
 
 “ I will go now,” she said ; “ and I thank you very much, 
 though I do not know who you are.” 
 
 “I am a neighbor 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 aay,” 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 seethe 
 English climate is so detestable. I dislike 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-oub. 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “ Pray do not come with me. Our place is ten miles from 
 here.” 
 
 “ Neither my horse nor I mind ten miles,” replied Guilde- 
 roy, “and I most certainly insist on being allowed 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 car- 
 ried 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 I ran 
 as hard as I could, and they ran after me. I got in there just 
 in time to bar the door. Men are 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 com- 
 panion, and thinking of Bomney’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 
 
GUILDE ROY. 35 
 
 their cub. Of course, I had no business, really, to take it.” 
 
 “ Why did you, then ? ” 
 
 “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 endeavoring 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, inclined to 
 smile, for he was adored and flattered by all women of the 
 great world, and used to the most subtle compliments, the 
 most charming homage. “ You have not told me whom I 
 have the honor of speaking to. May I ask what is your 
 father’s name ? ” 
 
 “ Our name is Yernon. Vernon of Llanarth.” 
 
 “Is it possible that your father i3 John Vernon, of Llan- 
 arth ? ” he asked, in intense surprise. 
 
 He remembered the name, though vaguely. When he haa 
 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 memories 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 neighborhood.” 
 
 “Yes; and my father says it is very wrong of you. He 
 says you play into the hands of democrats ; that at the Radi- 
 cal 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 substance from the poor to spend 
 in foreign countries. Why do you ? ” 
 
 “ I did not look for a political lecture,” said Guilderoy. “ I 
 am always having one at home from my sister, and I am 
 not aware that 1 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 ? 
 
86 enjiiDERor. 
 
 The Vernons were alwaj^s Whigs, but never Radicals/ 
 
 “ He does not hold them. He is sorry that anyone hold# 
 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 which will have most weight 
 with you.” 
 
 It was not easy to persuade her, but she did at last con- 
 sent, 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 laden, the horse paced slowly 
 over the elastic turf, his master walking at his head. 
 
 a 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 hand- 
 some ; her expression had a curious mingling of innocence, 
 self-will, candor, 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, (C and what a fine character, 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 depuissance a puissance ' T 
 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 tranquillity in danger which she had showed, and the 
 self-possession and simplicity which were characteristic of her 
 manner seemed to him to be the acme of high breeding, 
 whilst joined to them were a naivete and a childishness 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 
 
GU1LDHR0Y. 
 
 37 
 
 remembered hearing what fine scholarship, what rare accom- 
 plishments, and what elegant dilettanteism 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 deli- 
 cate 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 made 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 sink- 
 ing ; 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.” 
 
 C( 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 1 had Ladysrood, I 
 would live there all the year round.” 
 
 “ How happy Ladysrood and its master would be.” 
 
 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. 
 
 
38 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “ 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 Vernon 
 frankly. 
 
 In such innocent interchange of speech they wended their 
 way 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 bilberry 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, over-topped with luxuri- 
 ant unclipped shrubs, between tall privet hedges. 
 
 “ You are safe now,” he said to her, as she sprang down 
 from the saddle. “I will bid you good-day here, and will call 
 on your father later. Give him my compliments, 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 hand- 
 some, 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 y6ur protege, the 
 cub?” 
 
 “ I shall keep him in the garden.” 
 
 “ Like Sir Rogerley 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 be- 
 hind 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 J ” 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 39 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 “ Where have you been, my dear, all these hours ? ” 
 a voice asked 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 shoul- 
 ders, 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 humor, too, about 
 the delicate lines of his mouth ; he had once, like Ulysses, 
 known well the cities and the minds of men. 
 
 u 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 educa- 
 tion, 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, 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. 
 u You are very kind if you think it, for my poor little girl, 
 though she is not unpossessed of some learning, is wholly ig- 
 norant 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 be brought out into the world. But 
 I hesitate to do so. The child would be wretched amongst a 
 
40 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 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 sovereignty, 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 in- 
 deed true that I have the honor 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 
 civilization, 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 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 seven- 
 teen 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. JDivitias miseras .” 
 
 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 colored gray by a village plasterer ; but John Ver- 
 non, 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 gray Flemish pot, which 
 filled the centre. 
 
 “ When you have only sixpence to spend you may as well 
 buy a welbmade thing as an ill-made thing,” said John Ver- 
 non, as his guest complimented him ; “ and if you have only 
 Michaelmas daisies and dahlias to set out, you may as well 
 see that they harmonize.” 
 
 He did the honors of his homely table with perfect grace 
 and simplicity. His guest understood whence the girl had 
 taken her high-bred repose. The repast was very simple : 
 
QtflLDmot. 
 
 41 
 
 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 better. The keen air of the 
 moors had 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 color 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 conspicu- 
 ous by their insolence and their forwardness. 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 insouciance of a 
 Rosalind. 
 
 “ Are you never dull here ? ” he asked her. 
 
 “ Oh, never,” the child answered, with some indignation. 
 “ 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 cer- 
 tainty 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.” 
 
 “ Why should you be dull ? Have you had any misfor- 
 tune ? ” 
 
 “One big one, perhaps.” 
 
 “ The death of anyone ?” 
 
 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 understanding we 
 «hould at least have indulgence.” 
 
42 
 
 GUILDEKOY. 
 
 ie A gentle doctrine ; few practise it. Would you be indub 
 gent to me ? ” 
 
 “ Gladys does not understand how you can want indul- 
 gence,” said John Vernon. “ The lord of Ladysrood 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 Guilderoy, 
 as he saw how the child’s face changed in a moment from 
 eager expectation to disappointment. 
 
 “We are hermits,” replied Vernon. “I have forgotten 
 whdt 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 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 thoughtlessly. 
 I should indeed regret a meeting which has given me so much 
 pleasure if I were the means of letting a snake creep into 
 your orchard grass.” 
 
 He found in his host the most captivating of companions. 
 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 por- 
 tents of the political world. He was pleased to find himself 
 once more in the company of a man of the world, and his con- 
 versation fascinated and interested his guest in no little de- 
 gree ; it had a flavor 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 with autumnal blossoms. The 
 sun had come out and shone on the warm, red brick-work of 
 the cottage where the thickness 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 
 
GUTLDUROT- 
 
 43 
 
 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 the clock in the church tower 
 half a mile off tolled four. 
 
 He was pleased, interested, and angered with himself that 
 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 abruptly, 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. ,; 
 
 “Ho; lam not joking at all. I have seen a perfectly 
 beautiful person whom I am disposed to marry. I imagined 
 that you would be pleased/' replied Guilderoy, which showed 
 that, despite his experience in women, he knew but little of 
 their characters. 
 
 “ Good heavens ! ” cried Lady Sunbury again. “ Is it 9 
 turf-cutter’s daughter, or one of the gypsies ? ” 
 
44 
 
 GVILDEROY. 
 
 “No ; it is neither. Do not alarm yourself. She is the 
 daughter of John Vernon — a very nohle gentleman who has 
 been living here ten years without my knowing it." 
 
 “ As you never take the trouble to visit your neighbors — 
 
 “ I shall visit one neighbor to-morrow and take you with 
 me." 
 
 “ Good heavens ! 99 said Lady Sunbury a third time. “You 
 actually speak as if you were serious ! ’ 9 
 
 “ I am quite serious/' 
 
 He proceeded to tell her the story of the fox-cub and the 
 *abin. 
 
 She listened with astonishment in her eyes mingled with 
 « 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 narrative 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 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 i§ very handsome," he answered. “You will see her 
 to-morrow. We will go over to Ghristslea." 
 
 “How very impetuous }mu 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, annoyed 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, 
 
GUILDEROY, 
 
 45 
 
 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 attention to it his engineers and superintendents 
 would have been more vigilant, and the catastrophe might 
 not 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. Everyone 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 believe, by writing for scientific and historical re- 
 views and other learned works. When I heard his name I 
 remembered 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 any- 
 thing so cold as a sense of duty; it was a gentleman’s 
 instinct to suffer anything rather than let others suffer 
 through him.” 
 
 The heritage of such fine and sensitive honor 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 
 fast man on earth to do anything in any way similar.” 
 
 “ I do not presume to pretend that I should. But if there 
 6e one thing which I admire more than another,” said Guil- 
 deroy, angrily, “it is men who sacrifice themselves to what 
 they consider the duties of property. 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 h*s a good-looking daughter ! ” 
 
46 
 
 GU1LLER0Y. 
 
 “ 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 that 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 honored 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, per- 
 haps 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 he had 
 known the country people like a reasonable being, his 
 daughter would not have been likely to interest 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 herself in that 
 spirit of which women of her character consider the 
 display to be due to their dignity and their families. Guild- 
 eroy 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 pru- 
 dence 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. Anx- 
 iety and apprehension made her restless, and she wandered 
 
GUILDEIIOY . 
 
 47 
 
 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 
 coups de tete / a weakness inherited from the warm Gascon 
 blood of his mother’s race. 
 
 Indolent, nonchalant, and easily swayed as he was 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 remarkably 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 Yernon was of irre- 
 proachable character if of eccentric habits, and that the 
 causes of his poverty were of the highest honor 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 educat- 
 ed by a recluse, and deprived of all the natural umusements 
 and companionships of her age and sex.” 
 
 “ I understand,” said Lady Sunbury, with a shudder. 
 
 She could see the girl exactly as she was : a wild creature 
 without gloves, her brain filled very likely with godless phil- 
 osophies, and her hair never properly brushed ] handsome, n<? 
 
48 
 
 QTJILDEROY. 
 
 doubt, or Guilderoy would never have looted at her or 
 thought twice about her, but untrained, imprudent and irre- 
 ligious. 
 
 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 pos- 
 sibility 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 favor 
 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 imagination 
 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 absurd- 
 ity in offering his whole future to a child whom he had seen 
 but once the day before. But the absurdity of his inten- 
 tions did not strike him — he was too enamored 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. 
 
 When he sent in his card at Christslea he was at one© 
 ushered into the back study, which John Vernon used: a 
 small room made dusky by the ivy which shrouded the win- 
 dow, 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 pre- 
 face whatever. 
 
 “ It is you who will, I hope, be kind to me. My dear sir, 
 I come to beg from you the honor 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 bewildered and in- 
 credulous amazement; he had always heard that his neighbor 
 of Ladysrood was capricious and eccentric. Was he left 
 now, he asked himself, in the presence of a madman ? 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 4 & 
 
 “It is not complimentary either to her or to me that you 
 should be so greatly astonished,” said Guilderoy with annoy- 
 ance. “Allow me to repeat my words. I have come over 
 this morning to solicit the honor of your daughter’s hand. 
 My position is known to you, and on my character, though it 
 might not satisfy precisians, you will not find any very seri- 
 ous stain. I venture to think that my proposals may not be 
 altogether intolerable to you.” 
 
 “It is not that,” said John Yernon, still breathless. “It 
 is — it is — the child is a child — she is not of marriageable 
 years — she is a baby — and good heavens ! you have only 
 seen her for ten minutes, yesterday. My dear Lord Guilde- 
 roy, if this he 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 
 honor 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 work in vague bewilder- 
 ment. “ Why ? Why, I have a thousand reasons. I have 
 said she is the merest child. She knows nothing 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 discourte- 
 ous 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 insult 
 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 yesterda}^ 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 eaten of the drug of Love in Idleness, 
 and Titania and her crew have played with jmu. Go home 
 and laugh at your freak to-morrow, and thank the Bates that 
 I am not a man to take you at your word and keep you to it. 
 Good day.” 
 
50 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 u I shall not go away until I have received from you such 
 answer as I wish,” replied Guilderoy. The unlooked-for op* 
 position 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 Yernon. “ 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 any one marriageable 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. Yernon, of Llanarth, has one heri- 
 tage at least which kings might envy,” said Guilderoy with 
 his courtliest grace and an accent of reverent sincerity. 
 
 “ 1 thank you,” said Yernon with some emotion. 
 
 He had never supposed that anyone remembered an act 
 which had always seemed to him very simple and always 
 absolutely enjoined by duty and honor. 
 
 “ But there is nothing more for me to do,” he added, u than 
 in all seriousness to reply that I must with regret decline the 
 honor 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.” 
 
 66 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 Yernon, 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 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 51 
 
 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 honor. It was difficult to reject 
 such a suitor, and yet he was wholly determined to reject him 
 in exorably. 
 
 “Give him Gladys !” he thought ; “why, he would tire of 
 her in three days ! ” 
 
 “ I know what you are thinking,” said 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 living 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 in- 
 jure 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 affections 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 
 marriage is the almost universal failure that we see it is. But 
 you do not want a disquisition, you want an answer. My 
 dear lord, I can only repeat what I said before, that I thank 
 you for the compliment you pay me, that I apologize to you 
 if astonishment make me appear discourteous, but that what 
 you wish is wholly and forever impossible.” 
 
 Guilderoy rose and bowed with a faint smile. 
 
 “ Forever is a large word. You tempt me to deceive and 
 to defy you, and to endeavor 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 unknown 
 to me ? It is possible. Ghe is not a prisoner. But I doubt 
 very much if, with all your power over her sex and your ex- 
 perience 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 
 
52 
 
 GUILDEBOT , 
 
 it without your knowledge and concurrence. But 1 shall 
 hope, of course, in time to convert 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 returned 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 hirm 
 self astonished at the sudden intensity and warmth which 
 his own desires had obtained from the fanning wind of opposi- 
 tion. 
 
 “ I am perfectly certain that you will not keep in the 
 same inclination,” 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 occasion- 
 ally as my landlord and neighbor without allowing the 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 unwillingness 
 with which his proposals were received. No one else in all 
 the world, he thought, would have failed to accept them with 
 ardor 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 te 
 see Gladys that day. 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 53 
 
 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 questions, 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 in- 
 stead of in Italy / 7 he said, as he took his cup of tea. “ That 
 is what I am going to do . 77 
 
 Lady Sunbury was not glad. Human nature is full of con- 
 tradictions. 
 
 “ You will never pass the winter here , 77 she said, with some 
 violence. “ Never. For you will never keep in the same 
 mood or the same mind for two weeks ! 77 
 
 “ I shall keep in this , 77 he answered. “ And you will 
 oblige me very much if you will drive over to Christslea to- 
 morrow. John Vernon is quite a respectable person, though 
 he has lost all his money ; indeed, more respectable perhaps, 
 than if he had multiplied it . 77 
 
 “And why should I call on Mr. Vernon ? 77 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 of the 
 world to do that sort of thing , 77 said Guilderoy, carelessly ; 
 “ and I shall marry his daughter in February : I told you last 
 night that I should do so . 77 
 
 His sister was silent for a few moments. Her lips turned 
 pale with rage. 
 
 “ And I do not even know her ! 77 she said, in a suffocated 
 voice. 
 
 “ Really that is no one’s fault but yours , 77 said Guilderoy. 
 “ I asked you to drive there this morning and you refused. I 
 do not know her very much myself . 77 
 
 “ You must be mad ! 77 
 
 “So Mr. Vernon said, but I believe not; of course, one 
 
54 
 
 GUILDEEOY. 
 
 can never be quite sure. There are insidious lessons in the 
 brain which do not declare themselves. Many statesmen’s 
 actions which appear unaccountable are really caused by un- 
 suspected 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 G-uilderoy. “ 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.” 
 
 “ It Mr. Vernon, whatever else he be, is a man of the 
 slightest sense, he will forbid so abnormal, so unnatural, 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 honor re- 
 ceived, 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 admirable 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 re- 
 gretted. I abhor dissensions, 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 insen- 
 sate 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 S5 
 
 the most bitter and violent reproaches, and bear off the tri- 
 umph of the last word at any cost. But with Guilderoy she 
 was conscious there were limits which she could not pass 
 and retain his affection ; that a quarrel, if forced upon him, 
 would have no reconciliation 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 an- 
 ger 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 men- 
 tioned 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, petitions, political 
 gossip, with a little note from one of her sons at Eton asking 
 for fifty pounds ; but they sufficed her for an excuse and she 
 sent word to her brother that she was extremely sorry that 
 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 your- 
 self.” 
 
 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 con- 
 scious of how utterly her usually ever-present wisdom of 
 judgment had played her false at this moment. If pride had 
 not forbade it she would gladly have returned. 
 
 As the train swep£ round a bend on the rocks she saw in 
 the distance the gray 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 ; u even 
 if there were anything serious in what he said, one week of 
 wet November weather will drive this fancy from his thoughts 
 
56 
 
 QUlLbEUOT. 
 
 and see him in Paris going southward. He will no more eft 
 dure 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 far- 
 ther 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 re- 
 jected the society of his county for any one of his neighbors 
 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 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 opposed 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 restric- 
 tion annoyed him, and by its annoyance stimulated the fancy 
 which had entered into him until it became something kin- 
 dred 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 
 conventionalities. He had created in imagination a thousand 
 qualities from women which he had never found in them ; he 
 had wanted at once passion and purity, high spirit and sub- 
 mission, romance and ignorance of all the emotions which 
 make up romance; he had desired innumerable utterly op- 
 posed and contradictory 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 indifference 
 and frank repose of her habitual manner attracted his taste 
 and stimulated his vanity. 
 
 Her eyes were as unclouded, her cheeks as cool, her candor 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 57 
 
 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 moment and interest : a pleasure 
 which he could not deny himself. 
 
 Vernon was very proud. He felt as bitterly as 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 Guilderoy. The world always at- 
 tributes 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 ir- 
 ritation at Guilderoy's proposals were most sincere, 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 ob- 
 scure ways in which he honestly believed the most content 
 and the least temptation to lie for any woman. But opposi- 
 tion and warning 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 increase them. From 
 being slightly enamored, 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 kuife 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 w T ho 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 
 
58 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 one for which the waywardness of human nature might have 
 prepared him. But he had a little forgotten what human 
 nature was like, living 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 unequal to the great position and responsibilities 
 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/ 5 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 neighbor with little 
 cordiality, though he could not resist on his own part a cer- 
 tain 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. 
 
 “Ho,” 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 Guil- 
 deroy, 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 
 
GUILDEBOT . S9 
 
 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 prepare such a platter, 
 and therefore I have never entered public life.” 
 
 “ Public life in England is a very poor thing, that I grant,” 
 said Yernon ; “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 uninteresting, unintelligent, 
 untrustworthy, illogical. The doctrine of the supremacy of 
 mere numbers can never be either admirable or stable. Th® 
 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, 6 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 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 which makes its statesmen 
 mountebanks, 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, become inevitably what you 
 are.” 
 
 “ And what is that ? ” 
 
 “ A man perfectly accomplished and perfectly useless, 
 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, 
 Lady Sunbury, is always telling me the same thing, 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 
 
60 
 
 GUILDJEEOY . 
 
 prize-cattle ? Opening town-halls ? Lecturing on poetry 
 to the most unpoetical race on earth ? Sending youths to 
 the university 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 democ 
 racy 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 yielding up good land out 
 of fear to be cut up into chess-boards of vegetables to appease 
 the laboring man, in the illogical belief that people hunger- 
 ing for all I have will be contented because out of cowardice 
 I offer them a cabbage ? Which of these things do you 
 think is useful ? 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 ve 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 the more in its place is not 
 dignified, and it will do nothing against the deluge.” 
 
 “You are not so languid as I thought,” reflected John 
 Vernon, as Guilder oy continued with some warmth: — 
 
 “ The Greeks only let their helots loose once a year ; we 
 have given ours every day of the year, whether feasting or 
 fasting. Never before was there such abject abdication of 
 birth, breeding, property, and learning before 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 when once it has begun, but I think that we may 
 abstain from degrading ourselves by swearing that we con- 
 sider 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 pre* 
 tend that there is, to obtain a little ephemeral and fictitious 
 popularity. I do not suppose 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 recognize the fittest in the howling mob 
 of a manufacturing city, or the crowds of hinds gathered at a 
 hiring.” 
 
 “I am altogether with you, said John Vernon, “ but I 
 should like you to show me that you are of the fittest. Liv* 
 
GtTILDEROY. 
 
 65 
 
 ing in Italy, making love to innumerable women, and buying 
 statues and pictures, do not prove it.” 
 
 “If I distressed myself ever sc I should not affect the re- 
 sult,” said Guilderoy. “Ail the public functions of English 
 life are become grotesque. Parliamentary government com- 
 pels every statesman to be nothing but a delegate. There is 
 no real leadership possible. Even the great Cecil is com- 
 pelled to bawl to mass-meetings. Public speaking has ex~ 
 tinguished statesmanship. Can you imagine a Richelieu, a 
 Warwick, or a Choiseul consenting to scream out the explan- 
 ation of his projects and his motives to a mob ? Would the 
 solitary of Varzin rule Europe as he does if he had to solicit 
 the applause of Bremen porters, and describe his designs to 
 Ltibeck clothsellers ? What nation in the mass could ever 
 be capable of comprehending the delicacy, the intuition, 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 productive 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.” 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Vernon had been very unwilling to visit Ladysrood. He 
 had refused continual invitations and entreaties 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 avenue which led to 
 the front entrance of the house. 
 
 The light sparkled over the sculptured pinnacles, the high 
 
62 
 
 GUILVJSROY. 
 
 metal roofs, and the lofty towers of the composite hut noble 
 pile, and the whole residence wore an air of welcome and 
 gayety 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 no- 
 bilities 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 wan- 
 ton waywardness of Guilderoy’s caprice. 
 
 It was a brilliant day, though cold, and the reddened 
 woods were glowing in a sun less pale than usual in an Eng- 
 lish autumn. The great house had a sunshine sparkling 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 play- 
 ing, while the peacocks drew their plumes over the terrace 
 pavement. All that the place held, from its armory to its 
 hot-houses, from its State apartments where Tudor and 
 Stuart sovereigns had slept, to its secret hiding chambers 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 Frossart 
 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 regret- 
 ted it. 
 
 “ It is so bad a climate,” he said after a pause.' u 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, prob- 
 ably, 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.” 
 
GUILDEROY. 63 
 
 “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 something 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 honored 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 honor. 
 
 The child looked suited to the house ; she wore a plain 
 gray frock with a pale blue sash, and a wide-brimmed gray 
 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 pen- 
 sive, and gay and animated, was as lovely as any face in the 
 marbles or the canvases of his galleries. She was only a child, 
 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 infinitely younger 
 in many things than children reared in the world can ever 
 be, whilst on the other hand the conversation and compan- 
 ionship 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 caus- 
 ing 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 
 
64 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 outdoor things and outdoor movements, than to see her dis* 
 sect a rabbit or hear her discuss a 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. ei It will 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 command and of decision. The opposing 
 influences surrounding 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 exaggera- 
 tion when he thought he saw in her an embodiment of 
 Shakespeare’s heroines, with the freshness and the frank- 
 ness, the simplicity and the strength of a more unsophisti- 
 cated and heroic time than her own. 
 
 u How charming is a young creature who has seen noth- 
 ing, and is ready to understand everything instinctively,” 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 monot- 
 onous, 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 dau’y* 
 maid,” 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 consider her a companion for a man of the 
 
OU1LDEROY. 
 
 65 
 
 •world wlio lives 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 sud* 
 den finding and recognizing of a piece of her own home land- 
 scape had seemed to her a miracle which she could in no way 
 forget. Her enthusiasm 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 Eng- 
 land 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 grown 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 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 color ! ” 
 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 the 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 a small dining-room belonging to 
 the Queen Anne suite of apartments, and when it was ovey 
 
66 
 
 GV1LDEB0 5\ 
 
 John Vernon ashed 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 belonged 
 to the oldest part of the house, and had deep embrasured win- 
 dows, 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 preoccupation to lead the girl to the other end of the 
 room, where there was a beautifully illuminated Horse of the 
 fifteenth century under lock and key in a glass case. 
 
 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. 
 
 While he turned the leaves over and explained to her the 
 minatures 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 
 
 ! )arted as she listened, and the fairness of her throat looked 
 ike a lily beside the gray 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 Her* 
 rick is right — 
 
 Gather your roses while ye may, 
 
 Old Time is still a-flying! 
 
 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. “It’s name is Love. Have 
 you ever thought whether you would give it welcome ? ” 
 
 • She looked at him in perplexity. 
 
 “No,” she said, slowly. “At least, I am not sure. I love 
 tny father. Is that what you mean ? ” 
 
 “ That is not at all what I mean,” said Guilderoy with a 
 
QtllLDEBOT. 
 
 67 
 
 smile as lie glided on to one knee before her, and "held the 
 missal on her lap. He was in no haste to dispel this uncon- 
 sciousness — 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 color 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 chang- 
 ing the gray of her fawn to silver. Her face was in shadow, 
 and her drooped eyelids as she looked down 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. 
 
 She was a little startled. Her eyes left the study of the 
 Horse and looked with bewilderment at him. 
 
 “I do not know,” she stammered, while, without her know- 
 ing 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 ; “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 
 
68 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Five minutes later John Yernon closed the catalogue, and 
 turned to 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 dissension. 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 reproach 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 inaudibly. 
 
 John Yernon understood that she was lost to him, and that 
 to strive against fate any longer was useless. 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 69 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 “My dear Hilda/’ wrote Guilderoy to his sister, “I an 
 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 empowered to choose the 
 companion of my destinies. As I am the more interested of 
 the two in such a choice, I have ventured to make the selec- 
 tion without applying to you. I should be sorry if you should 
 persist 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 taree , or an American advent- 
 uress in search of a title — the only three persons to whom 
 you would, I think, be justified in objecting vi et 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 
 
to 
 
 aXTILDEnOT . 
 
 himself away in some moment 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 eye- 
 brows ; (( Je lui donne une quinzaine /” 
 
 “ 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 superciliousness, of disdain, 
 all these years of romantic caprices and 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 in- 
 finite 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 affair, and that is a good deal for 
 him to admit.” 
 
 “ 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 any- 
 body beneath him, and it is merely a matter of good feeling 
 with him to ask your approbation ; 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 concern me ? 
 What should concern me if not the honor of my family, the 
 reputation of my brother, the purity of my father’s namej 
 the respect of my own native county ? ” 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 71 
 
 u Those valuable things are all safe enough/’ said Aubrey, 
 carelessly. “ Evelyn is a fool in some ways, but he will not 
 buy a peche a quinze 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, com- 
 ing 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. 
 
 “ Others may present her. I shall not,” said Lady Sun- 
 bury. 
 
 “ 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 liked him, 
 though he monopolizes all the amiability of his family,” re- 
 plied 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 Au- 
 brey, 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 immeasurably, and all that, but we 
 cannot alter it; and after all it is his own affair. And you 
 wouldn’t like Madame 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 y 
 if she be a dairymaid,” said Lady Sunbury ; and towards 
 evening she wrote a letter which was almost kind in tone, al- 
 though the kindness was marred and jarred by many proph- 
 ecies of ill. 
 
 “It is strange how certain both she and John Vernon are 
 that we shall be miserable ! ” thought Guilderoy when he 
 received it. 
 
 He had received another letter that day from Italy which had 
 
72 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 also irritated him excessively ; a letter full of those useless 
 reproaches, those unwise rebukes, those injudicious and vio- 
 lent 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 hands of Gladys Vernon. 
 
 He was a man of sudden impulses, romantic fancies, and 
 very hasty action which was united with an indolent and 
 vaguely philosophic temper. The letter was imperious, re- 
 proachful and passionate. It produced on him the opposite 
 effect that it was intended to produce 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 w T ho are tender of heart aud }^et 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 co- 
 erce him by force he grew restive, and men much less amia- 
 ble and gentle were much easier to direct and 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 its choice, he thought, but only 
 right as long as his companion pleases him and leaves him 
 free. If she fastens a fetter on his foot, the very fussing 
 and fretting of the sparrows were better than the columba- 
 rium 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 ve- 
 hement 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 ana he galled 
 
GUILbEnOY. 73 
 
 by it, each had 5n 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 probability ; 
 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 al- 
 lowed a too dominant and insistent tone of appropriation 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 at- 
 tributes to his mistress;' he knew her to be imperious, exact- 
 ing, and perilous and disdainful when offended. They were 
 defects which in daily life poison peace more cruelly than any 
 others. 
 
 Beatrice Soria in Paris or Naples, visited at intervals and 
 seen only in her superb bloom of beauty, had a great and irre- 
 sistible 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 conscience 
 smarted and his impatience rebelled under the lash of her in* 
 passioned reproaches and recall* 
 
74 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 a I swear that I will make your daughter happy, if humaa 
 means can command happiness/* said Guilderoy a few days 
 later when they were alone. 
 
 4i For six months, perhaps/* said Yernon with impatience. 
 
 “ 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 pas- 
 sions — all which is inevitable in human nature, and in utter 
 defiance of which marriage, the supreme idiotcy of social laws, 
 has been made eternal ! ** 
 
 a You are not encouraging. 7 * 
 
 “I desire so little to encourage/* said John Vernon with 
 6ome violence, “ that if you will take back this evening the 
 promise you have given my child this afternoon, 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 Guilderoy ; 
 “ but I will risk their realization. I think she 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 months* time you will say, 6 1 am tired of re- 
 pose: give me passion.*** 
 
 “ And do you think so lovely a ereature incapable of in- 
 spiring it ? ** 
 
 “I think she will be incapable of inspiring it in you be- 
 cause she will be your wife/* replied John Yernon. 
 
 His heart was heavy and his forebodings were founded on 
 his knowledge of mankind. He was well aware that his dis- 
 like to such a marriage for his child was ingratitude to fate 
 
GUI L DEBOY. 
 
 71 
 
 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, lie had learned to 
 know that happiness comes from within, not without. He con- 
 sidered that the contentment which she had learned with him- 
 self 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 unhappiness to both of them. 
 He saw few probabilities 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 forgotten that she existed 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 Ladys- 
 rood. He had said nothing to the child alone — what was the 
 
76 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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 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 sor- 
 rows 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 parlor of Christslea Gilderoy and John Yernon 
 sat long in conversation that evening. 
 
 Neither convinced the other. 
 
 The incipient friendship which had begun to grow up be- 
 tween them had been disturbed and diminished by the pre- 
 cipitancy of the one and the opposition of the other. Vernon 
 considered himself dealt with in bad faith, and Guilderoy 
 grew impatient at the discontent 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 com- 
 panions 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 appreciated, whilst yet he respected 
 all the more a man who accounted material and social ad- 
 vantages 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. 
 
 John Yernon heard all this with little patience. 
 
 “I do not doubt your generosity or your justice,” he said 
 more than once. u 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 wished for 
 a hundred women before her and will wish for a hundred 
 women after her. You will tell me that you feel differently 
 to her to what you have done to others, and no doubt you be- 
 lieve it ; but you are mistaken. You feel precisely the same, 
 
GU1LDKR0T. 77 
 
 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 what 
 greater proof any man can give of the honesty of his emo- 
 tions than to desire to make anyone his wife whom he loves ? ” 
 
 “ That is quite true,” replied 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 wholty certain that my poor child will not have the knowl- 
 edge, 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 the fad- 
 ing flames, and your fire will die out on her altar.” 
 
 “ I am tired of the syrens who throw the sulphur,” replied 
 Guilderoy. “ ‘ Et puer et nudus est 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 companion, 
 but he was none the less certain of the truth of his own pre- 
 dictions. 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 forever. 
 But with Love, as with anger, he knew that it was waste 
 of breath to argue. 
 
 Guilderoy read the last letter of Beatrice Soria 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 blamable 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 
 
78 
 
 GUILDEEOT. 
 
 velvet curtains which the servants had drawn at nightfall, 
 hut 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 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 refresh- 
 ment 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 mis- 
 leading 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 but 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 observation of the lives 
 of others told him that it was very possible. 
 
 Fancy and admiration had hurried him into an action 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 
 
GUILDEJROT . 79 
 
 scarcely his, and of the tenacity of whose character he had 
 had evidence. 
 
 He desired to possess her beauty, and he was fascinated 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 temperament 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 amusement 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 sueh as was needed to outlast the stress of time ? 
 
 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 more- 
 over 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 for 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 
 forsaken 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 farewell 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 some- 
 
80 
 
 GtTiLbmor. 
 
 tiling 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 anxiety 
 when those days had passed. To his astonishment he re- 
 ceived no answer at all ; days became weeks, weeks months, 
 and silence alone followed on his declaration 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 w^as impossible to do ; no man can 
 insist on, or emphasize by unasked repetition, 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 receiv- 
 ing them. Meanwhile he felt free to do what he was bent on 
 doing, and used all his powers of persuasion to induce Yernon 
 to shorten his probation. 
 
 Yernon 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 Guilde- 
 roy, who smiled. 
 
 “ I will teach her,” he answered. 
 
 “ Yes,” said John Yernon, with pain and impatience, “ and 
 when she has learned the lesson it will have grown dull to 
 you, and the teacher will go elsewhere. What 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 satis- 
 fied ; she desires innumerable things which can never be 
 satisfied : and among them as the most mythical and the 
 most impossible she desires — poor soul ! — the man’s con- 
 stancy ! ” 
 
 Where other men would only have seen the gain and hostor 
 
GUILDEROT. 
 
 81 
 
 of such a marriage, he saw the gray 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 sym- 
 pathies of two natures which mutually supply each other’s 
 needs ; it is like the sunshine and the shower, and can no 
 more be brought into human life by any endeavor than they 
 can be brought on earth by the efforts of science. Happiness 
 is the dew of the heart, making all things green spring 
 where once the soil was barren ; but it is not in human nat- 
 ure 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 talis- 
 man 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 ! Deos ridere credo , quum infelix vocat. 
 
 But Yernon’s wishes and his regrets could not stay the 
 flight of time, nor change a caprice which opposition or warn- 
 ing only served to inflame ; and before he was wholly sensible 
 that the winter was gone, violets and hepatica were abloom 
 in his orchard grass, and the little fishing fleet were setting 
 out for its springtide harvest of the sea, and March was 
 ended, and Guilderoy claimed from him a promise which he 
 had no choice but to fulfil. 
 
 They were married in the private chapel of Ladysrood 
 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 summer Sundays at Christs- 
 lea, 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 Yernon 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 
 
82 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 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 landscape; ever and anon he 
 came in sight of the sea, gray 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 spreading woods and stately towers and pleasant gar- 
 dens which lay behind him under the pale gray 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 beyond all things. But John Vernon 
 did not see as the world sees, and he would with much surer 
 confidence and greater joy have known that his daughter had 
 gone to a lovelier 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 because a lamb was 
 born, or a sea-mouse was washed up by the tide, or the first 
 daffodils blown 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 himself, as he walked 
 over the moors, and he looked at the yellow gorse shining be- 
 fore him in the light of the afternoon, and tried to hope that 
 “ straight was a path of gold ” for her. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Guildkroy had a palace of his own in Venice, placed on one 
 of the curves of the Grand Canal, one of the oriental palaces 
 with Moorish windows and carved and painted walls, and a 
 water-story of white marble, with great pointed doors and 
 
GUILDEBOF. 
 
 83 
 
 wide flights of water-steps, and at its side one of the lovely 
 luxuriant green gardens of Venice, with acacia and cereus 
 droopping 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 primroses blooming on the Brenta 
 banks, and of the budding narcissus in the meadow grass of 
 the many islands. 
 
 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 mar- 
 bles, and the cloudless moonlight evenings of the Adriatic 
 city. 
 
 The charm of Venice is one of those emotions which must 
 be felt, not told, which are too delicate, too intricate and too 
 romantic to be ever coldly dissected and described. 
 
 Venice escapes alike the poet and the painter. They may 
 portray her past and paint her water-ways, but they cannot 
 embody her fugitive and unutterable fascination, 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 motion of 
 the pliant gondola, the amorous music floating down the 
 moonlit water, the shadowy splendor of the stately frescoed 
 chambers, were all in the sharpest and strongest contrast 
 with the rude coast, the gray boisterous water, the simple 
 ways and the narrow rooms, the misty mornings and the 
 chilly eves, the sober colors and the sombre moorlands of her 
 English home. It was a sensation which charmed yet hurt 
 her ; she felt much as one of her o^n 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 sun- 
 shine, 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 se- 
 cluded rooms of Ladysrood. There she would have felt less 
 frightened, more familiar j here the intense light seemed like 
 
84 
 
 GUILD EBOY. 
 
 a million curio ut? creatures all staring at her, and when the 
 bold eyes of the gondoliers looked at her with a smile in them 
 she felt herself color scarlet as at some violating touch. 
 
 Guilderoy, who had felt from his earliest years the magic 
 of the Adriatic, grew impatient with his companion 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 discernment was 
 not profound enough to let him see this. The girl was be- 
 wildered 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 pastures. 
 
 The scenes around her were too beautiful and intoxicating 
 for her to know how to bear them, even as were the ardors 
 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 shining 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 beau- 
 tiful and marvellous ever to be repeated, and yet with a vague 
 awe and terror touching its beauty with a darkness that en- 
 hanced its light. She never in after days saw the gold sun- 
 beams 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 embarrassment and apprehension which she had 
 felt in that April time of love. 
 
 66 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 ner eyelids fell. 
 
 (( I can feel but I cannot speak , ” she might have an- 
 swered 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 85 
 
 love to a statue or a corpse, sh« is so irresponsive. 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 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, tantalizing and yet alluring, enhancing his pas- 
 sions, though failing to arouse in him higher and stronger 
 emotions. He did not understand 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 ecstacy which 
 his own love was to her, and the bewilderment her own feel- 
 ings and agitation were to her. A man less impassioned and 
 more patient might have alarmed her less, and so succeeded 
 in calling out the timid intensity of her soul into actual ex- 
 pression; 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 wak- 
 ing 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 herself, and of all the strange emo- 
 tions 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 poet 
 ever 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 un- 
 intelligent. Before he had been in Venice a month he re- 
 membered with regret the warning which her father had 
 given him : “ You will soon wish for those who can thrust 
 the sulphur on the fading flames.” 
 
 His affection for her had increased since they had been to- 
 gether, for he had recognized since then more fully the deli* 
 
86 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 cac y, the honor and the high breeding of her character, but 
 his caprice was already losing something of its attraction, and 
 his passions were demanding more response to them. 
 
 “ I strive to make her happy,” he wrote to John Vernon* 
 u but I am not so sure as I wish to be that I succeed.” 
 
 John Vernon wrote back to him : 66 You do not succeed 
 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 responsive 
 passions ; but she yielded to him like a slave, and yet re- 
 sponded no more in feeling than if she were a form of ivory 
 or wax. It was seductive from its strangeness ; and yet it 
 was, he foresaw, what in a few months would fatigue him, 
 and be insufficient for him. 
 
 u It is a pity that we need go home so soon,” he said once 
 with regret. 
 
 She turned to him with a smile : u Oh, no ! Ladysrood is 
 even dearer than this.” 
 
 “ We cannot go to Ladysrood,” said Guilderoy with a 
 little impatience. u 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 gipsy 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 al- 
 ways 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 nonsense about me.” 
 
 Gladys was silent. Her feelings were all primitive and 
 direct. She was far from understanding complexity of senti- 
 ment or the existence of two morbid yet contradictory feelings 
 at the same moment. 
 
 u I love Ladysrood,” she said, with a great longing in her 
 voice, u and I love the country. All the time we have been 
 here I have been thinking o£ that line of Browning’s : — 
 
 “ Oh, to be in England, now that Aprils there J *• 
 
 Guilderoy looked at her in surprise. 
 
GUILBEBOY . 
 
 87 
 
 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 
 1 could not promise to be often there." 
 
 “ Yes, I remember. 5 ' 
 
 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* out- 
 look is narrow. Imperceptibly one adopts the small views 
 which make up its world, and the forces of one's mind get nar- 
 rowed 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." 
 
 Gladys did not reply. She looked down into the water 
 through which she was drawing her left hand, taking pleas- 
 ure 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 
 which 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 impatiently, 
 though tenderly ; “ I wish you to confide in me all your 
 desires, and, as far as it is mutually possible, I will do my 
 utmost to gratify them." 
 
 “ You are very good to me/' said Gladys with a little 
 hesitation. 
 
OUILDEHOY 
 
 “ That is not the language of love,” said Guilderoy with 
 annoyance. 
 
 The girl colored ; her lips parted to speak, hut words 
 failed her. She longed to tell him that she loved him with 
 all her soul, so far as youth can love, but she 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 antici- 
 pations which belong to those whose feelings are rather im- 
 passioned than profound, and whose imagination 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 character which is half developed 
 and still growing. 
 
 Every day the memory of John Vernon’s philosophic 
 warnings recurred more often to him, and he was more per- 
 suaded of their truth. And yet he was still greatly enamored 
 of her. Her physical beauty was too great to let him be 
 otherwise, and the sense of the absolute freshness and inno- 
 cence of all her nature were in a sense very lovely to him 
 after the many women, so unlike her, whom he had known. 
 
 And yet there was something wanting. She understood so 
 little, she responded so little, she was still so much more 
 frightened than she was happy at the dominance 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, before a week was out, acknowledged it 
 to his own soul. A man more patient and less voluptuous 
 by temperament and habit than he was might have seen by 
 intuition 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 his taste, have grown 
 suddenly at his touch into a goddess, and she did not do so. 
 
GUILD ER0T 9 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 There are few prettier scenes than the Piazzetta of San 
 Marco on a summer’s night. The gayety of the sauntering 
 crowds, the sparkling of the many lights, 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 faces of the women of Titian, and the mirth of the 
 boatmen of Mazzorbo pushing their fruit and their fish up 
 the market stairs by the Rialto. 
 
 This is the subtle and marvelous 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 Shakspeare, nor in any printed page of human 
 genius. 
 
 One evening they sat in the Piazzetta, with the soft sea- 
 born day fading in faint roseate sky, 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- 
 
90 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “ 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 tolerated in the 
 South were it not for two things — its sea-fogs and its Non- 
 conformists. We can keep the Nonconformists outside our 
 gates, but we cannot keep 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 the Salute dome ! 
 My dear, you cannot speak of this fog and of those fogs in the 
 same breath. The one is a film 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 metaphorically 
 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, be- 
 ing your father’s true daughter, do not spoil your pretty 
 mouth by their utterance.” 
 
 A shudder went over her face. She had acute intelligence, 
 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 ? ” 
 
GUILDEROY. 91 
 
 H 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 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 color in her 
 cheeks. 
 
 u 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 realize 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. 
 
 u No,” reflected Guilderoy, “ and that is why the innocent 
 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 : — 
 
 a 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 sym- 
 pathies — perhaps of other things 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. Whenever 
 you become a little conscious of your power you are fright- 
 ened. Well/if your mirror teaches you so little, look at other 
 
92 
 
 QUILBEitOY. 
 
 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 5 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 desire to give 
 the setting it wanted to this pearl he had found, and to 
 escape ridicule in the world as the husband 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 endeavored 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 lancee ,” he 
 continued. “ The life of society is full of small things and of 
 continual stir ; it is a strenua 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 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 passionately and pain- 
 fully : “ If I did not please him why did 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 real- 
 ize 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 to you. Your own ideal, I know, is to live at 
 Ladj^srood 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 
 charm*!” 
 
GU1LDER0T. 
 
 93 
 
 " But if I please you ? ” 
 
 “ Please others to please me/’ said Guilderoy aloud. And 
 he thought to himself : u 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 infinitely more 
 likely to develop high thoughts and gentle ones. I am con- 
 vinced that the wretched fretful pessimism, which is the 
 curse of modern art and literature, comes from the men who 
 follow literature and art crowding together in cities, and 
 leading the feverish existence of the clubs and of 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 convinc- 
 ed 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 Pome to the genius of 
 Cicero. 
 
 u 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 world is necessary, and the 
 climate of my own country intolerable 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 
 ^ood, yet shun it. Yes ; in that I am a man of my genera- 
 tion. In no age more than in our own, I think, did men see 
 taore clearly all that life might and ought to be, and fail more 
 utterly in making it even tolerable to themselves.” 
 
 He had forgotten that he was speaking beyond the com- 
 prehension of his companion \ that she knew nothing of the 
 moral phthisis of pessimism and the chronic typhoid of un- 
 rest. He forgot that the country meant to her only red 
 toses, green grass, a boat on a summer wave, a swing be- 
 tween two orchard trees, pet doves flying in the sunshine, 
 and a pet kid nibbling flowers — all the freedom, the play- 
 
94 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 time and the sport of eager healthful limbs, which it does 
 mean to all innocent and vigorous early life, whether of the 
 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, impa- 
 tiently. “Nay, forgive me, my dear; I have the greatest 
 honor and regard for Mr. Vernon, but he cannot be taken as 
 a rule for anybody but himself, for no one else has wonder- 
 ful power of self-denial, coupled with the contradictory 
 power of sufficing to himself. He is a nature $ elite. I am 
 made of less fine clay. I admit that I weary myself con- 
 sumedly when I have been a little while in my own com* 
 pany. 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- 
 colored livery, laced with silver, and accompanied by several 
 young men, and one large Russian gray-hound. 
 
 “ Good heavens ! ” Guilderoy murmured unconsciously, 
 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 lam 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 experience 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 remembers tenderly that he has 
 loved. 
 
01 TILDEROY. 95 
 
 She did not understand, but she vaguely comprehended 
 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 behind to say a few 
 words to the gondolier. The man brought him word an hour 
 later, in answer to his command, that the Duchess Soria was 
 staying at the Palazzo Contarini. 
 
 Throughout dinner he was abstracted and inattentive. 
 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 went out after dinner, when the moon 
 Was full, as it was this night ; and she had an uneasy sense 
 that he was we^ry and impatient of her company. 
 
 “ It is too cold," he answered, as in a reverie ; and he con- 
 tinued to pace up and down the chambers. 
 
 “ Cold ! " It seemed to her as warm as a midsummer 
 
 evening in England. 
 
 “ I think it is too cold for you," he answered, impatiently. 
 u If you would not mind, I would go out alone." 
 
 Her ear was quick and fine, and caught the accent of petu- 
 lance at any constraint. With great self-constraint she for- 
 bore 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 ir- 
 ritated 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 com- 
 panionship ; but the sense that he had to account for his ac- 
 tions irritated and weighed on him. The sweetness and sim- 
 plicity 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 
 *h ey drop into the habit of saying what is not true. Their 
 explanations cannot be always true] it is impossible that 
 
96 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 they should be so. Wise is the woman who never insists on 
 an explanation 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 gilding 
 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 re- 
 quired for its exercise, is a fact which lies at the root of a 
 great deal of human unhappiness and disunion. 
 
 The innate delicacy of John Vernon’s daughter supplied 
 the place of tact in her, and her mind was too childlike and 
 unsophisticated to harbor jealousy, however vague. 
 
 “ He would not have chosen me if he had not preferred me 
 to all others,” she would no doubt have said had any Mephis- 
 topheles been there to pour into her ear self-doubts and the 
 iwstlessness 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, u Why did he want me with him if he be not happy 
 anywhere with me ? ” 
 
 It was the pathetic, unwise wonder of the woman in a 
 child’s heart. 
 
 She heard one gondolier cry to the other, “ Palazzo Con- 
 tarini,” 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 Bialto hid it from sight. The 
 slow, soft, noiseless movement, which had something amor- 
 ous in its languor and caress of the water, was as unlike the 
 abrupt and noisy movement of her boat over the gray, 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 Jiis tone and the de- 
 mand 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 $o 
 so ; and yet she felt that he was disappointed in her, impa« 
 tient of her, wanted her in some way unlike what she was. 
 
GTTILDEROY. 
 
 m 
 
 There was a group of servants standing on the water- 
 entrance, enjoying the balmy night; they were all Vene- 
 tians, and what they said was unintelligible to her ; but she 
 heard them laugh as the gondoliers went from the stairs, and 
 though she knew nothing of its objector its meaning, she re- 
 sented the laughter and was hurt by it. She withdrew from 
 the window, and bade her woman shut the casement, though 
 the moon was pouring its radiance through the chamber, as 
 on Christabeks. She was too young to feel jealousy, and too 
 well accustomed to obedience to feel rebellious ; yet a vague, 
 unanalyzed pain was in her heart. Would he be long ? she 
 wondered. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Gutlderoy meantime went on with a quickly beating 
 heart to the water-gate of the Palazzo Contarini. 
 
 u Is it possible that I love her still ? ” he asked himself 
 uneasily as his boat glided through the green shadowy wa- 
 ters, 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 Palazzo Contarini, 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 recognized at the entrance. 
 
 He stood on the edge of the steps and waited. The water 
 flowed past him bronze-green in the full moonlight with a 
 melancholy and monotonous soufid in its ebb and flow. With 
 one of the strange contradictions of human temper he pas- 
 sionately 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 wel- 
 come. Of his own free will he had broken off those terms of 
 privileged intimacy, and he knew well enough that he 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 command them. He 
 despised his own inconstancy, but he could not control its 
 regrets and its forebodings. 
 
98 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 He was kept waiting some little time standing there on 
 the top stair, whilst the gondoliers mnrmured 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 cham- 
 ber 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 sensa- 
 tion 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 on© 
 nearer him. 
 
 “ My dear friend,” she said with a little smile, “let me 
 felicitate you. I saw Lady Guilderoy on the Piazza. She is 
 very beautiful, but surely she is very young. A beau cle faut / 
 yes, we always say that. It would be plus beau 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 
 you know is my habit at this season. 
 
 Guilderoy murmured something, he knew not what. He 
 was so surprised and troubled by the easy indifference of a 
 reception so different to the scene of passionate reproaches 
 for which he had been prepared, that he could not recover his 
 composure. He remained standing, gazing down at her, 
 while the color came and went on his cheek. 
 
 She was unmoved : she had been for days prepared for 
 such a meeting. Women are always in extremis . When 
 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 contrary, wholly under the domi- 
 nation 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 involun 
 
GUILDEROY. 9g 
 
 , , Tt wa * 7 hat a boy would have said and he knew it 
 and yet he could not restrain the words. 9 
 
 “What was the use of answering it?” she renlied in th* 
 
 a " d ■*"*““ “>”• f2 capote' 
 
 What is done is done. You know the proverb.” 
 
 -out it was not done then.” 
 
 “ What did you expect ? That I should entreat you for 
 
 my sake „o pause and change your mind ? My dear friend 
 you were very vain.” ,y inena 
 
 “Vain ! ” repeated Guilderoy. 
 
 He knewthat he i could not recall to her passions and affeo- 
 
 He n coIld 1C ? 6had V , d r taril - V thro ™ back on her hands] 
 twT v, remi , nd , her of ller Past love for him, when 
 that love had been wholly incapable of retaining his allegiance 
 
 a flush ° Pi ” i0 ” <* »» 
 
 “ You are not heroic. Men are not heroes except in their 
 own eyes. 1 ou wished to marry. You married. P There is 
 no more to be said. I hope it may agree with you. It does 
 not agree with most people. ” y uoes 
 
 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 wearLme 
 and had no power to hold him. And yet, now“LT this ms’ 
 sion was altogether of the past, it allured him back to ii It 
 assumed a thousand hues which it had never worn before 
 * a , le “ *™th, he asked himself now, always loved her 
 
 caprice ? * 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 de^d ? 
 
 entail 1 mS011 ^ P ile ° f silk cushions and ori- 
 
 ental 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 
 ot the jewel up and down the soft pale flesh, polished as ivory, 
 
 where his bps so often had h-ngered. Paradise was shut to 
 ted it ’ and 16 had ° ° Sed t l$ doors bimself, and he regret- 
 
 yeS e olTr a ver ^ beautiful women, then eight-and-twenty 
 years old. bhe was tall and exquisitely formed, whilst her 
 
100 
 
 &UILDEHOY. 
 
 face 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, Sicilian, 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 himself ; 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 de- 
 stroyed 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 tid 
 ings of his marriage had reached her, she had received th^ 
 greatest blow that it is possible for a proud woman to re* 
 ceive. 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. 
 
 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 farewell; and 
 when now she had been asked to receive him she had con- 
 sented, 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 au 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 101 
 
 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 ? 99 said the Duchess. 
 
 “ 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 enamored 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 tiresome 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 ? 99 
 
 Guilderoy colored. 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 sensi- 
 tiveness 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 indifferent 
 because already she had replaced him ? Was that the ex- 
 planation of her silence, of her apparent forgiveness ? Six 
 months and more had gone by since their last meeting. There 
 was time — more than time — for a woman of the world to have 
 substituted one sentiment for another. 
 
 He hated the thought. It seemed impossible to him that 
 the love she had borne him could have already gone elsewhere ; 
 
102 
 
 GU1LLEROT. 
 
 and yet had not his own passion faded and been false to her ? 
 Had he any title to expect 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 depres- 
 sion 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 woman 
 wholly devoted to himself, and suffering from his absence 
 and his inconstancy. 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 wayward, despotic, and disposed to overstrain the 
 great power which she had 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 allowed 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 apprehensions of vanity ; 
 for it was evident that of all indifferent matters his marriage 
 
GUILDEROY. 103 
 
 had been the most indifferent 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 regretted his 
 visit to her. He felt that he was insignificant 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 relations. 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 pre- 
 ferred that she should have upbraided him, reviled him, struck 
 him, done anything to him rather than tell him in that tran- 
 quil 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 be 
 always irritated with the woman, let her do what she may, 
 because, as he is conscious of having acted ill to her, her for- 
 giveness or her invective must alike appear a rebuke to him. 
 If she had indeed met him with any of that constancy and 
 fervor of passion which had tired him in her, she would have 
 reconciled him to himself. As it was, he felt, with passionate 
 annoyance 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 water 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 Beatrice Soria than 
 for any other woman, and cared longer. How 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. 
 
 (i Why not ? ” she replied, with a charmed sweetness in 
 
104 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 the words ; but they were wholly calm, and had no answering 
 emotion in them. 
 
 He held her hand a moment, then touched it with his lips 
 and left her. The heavy tapestry hanging before the door 
 closed on him. Alone, she rose from her couch with a fever- 
 ish impetuosity of some wounded animal, and paced to and 
 fro the length of her 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 forever 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 pur- 
 pose 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 aban- 
 doned herself to the convulsive and unrestrained grief of a 
 woman who is only sensible that 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 Soria alone 
 was at her ease, full of charm and animation, 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 10S 
 
 what he had meant by his warning to herself on the Piazetta. 
 
 She could never be like this exquisite woman, with her 
 perfect grace, her low sweet laugh, her easy gliding 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 inferiority made the girl twice as shy 
 and twice as self-conscious as she had ever been before. All 
 the childlike frankness and courage which had been so nat- 
 urally 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 ! 99 he said bitterly to himself, with the same restless 
 irritating consciousness that a man feels who has 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 ? 99 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 ! 99 thought 
 Guilderoy. “ We are fools enough to be troubled by what 
 seems to us an equivocal situation, a want of decency or dig- 
 nity, 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-room ! ” 
 
 If she had refused to see 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 far too much earnest- 
 ness into passing passions, and desired to give permanence 
 to intimacies which should be evanescent. 
 
 Guilderoy, who thought that he knew the whole gamut of 
 female emotions, was perplexed to explain to himself the mo- 
 tive and the character of her feelings. 
 
 There was an unaffected kindliness and sweetness in be* 
 
106 
 
 OXTILDEBOT. 
 
 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 Palazzo Contarini, was full of the 
 expressions of her admiration, to which he found it some- 
 what 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 confi- 
 dence and clearness between them ; that it would enable her to 
 guide her own conduct 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 himself is a cowardice 
 and a vulgarity. He felt that he should repent it forever 
 after if he were to be guilty of such an offence against the 
 unwritten laws of honor. Moreover he was conscious that he 
 could not speak of her with total indifference, because he was 
 not indifferent. And then, again, what would Gladys com- 
 prehend ? She was such a child : she would probably be dis- 
 gusted, alarmed and wholly unable to understand either the 
 confession or his motive for making it. So he kept silence, 
 and merely responded with acquiescence to her repeated inter- 
 rogations and affirmations 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 lit- 
 tle more of the world,” he replied, with a touch of impatience 
 at the last. 
 
 “ I shall never be like that,” said the girl despondently. 
 
 “ You do not want to be ; you are young ; youth has its 
 own charm.” 
 
 “ 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 boutades ; they are 
 only spoilt children. Women are very unwise, and are always 
 very unhappy, who attach too much importance to our idle 
 word&” 
 
 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 intelligible 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 dis- 
 charge the doubts and the desires at war in the speaker’s 
 
GUILLEROY . 
 
 107 
 
 mind. But her intelligence and the delicacy of her appre- 
 hensions 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 already felt 
 that he had ceased to be a lover as he drifted through the 
 sparkling sunshine or the starry night by the side of his 
 young companion. When there is absolutely no response, 
 passion soon grows tired alike of its demands and of its per- 
 suasions. He had been used to women who studied, stimu- 
 lated, 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 which 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 intelligence 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 petu- 
 lance. “ 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 besides Beatrice 
 Soria ; others, perchance, who had succeeded to the same privi- 
 leges and the same intimacy which had once been his. 
 
 He had voluntarily abandoned them, but he 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 forever out of sight under 
 the seaweed and the sand. 
 
 “Do you intend to be mute forever, as you were before 
 her, before all my friends ? ?? he said, irritably, as they 
 
108 
 
 QUILDEROT. 
 
 passed under San Giorgio Maggiore, feeling forced to rent 
 his irritation in some way. “ 1 really cannot understand 
 you, ray dear ; you have spirit enough when you choose. Do 
 you mean to sit like a country mouse in all London and Paris 
 drawing-rooms ? Do you mean to 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 con- 
 scious that he could not reproach or remind her of social ad- 
 vantages which she had received from himself. 
 
 Gladys* eyes filled with tears. Whenever her father had 
 reproved her it had been with gentle gravity and reasonable- 
 ness, not with petulant irritation like this. 
 
 “For heaven’s sake do not do that!” cried Guilderoy, 
 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, uneasily ; 
 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 be- 
 cause he had always sought and never found it. And, in- 
 deed, 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 to say that they do so if they cannot bear with our 
 infirmities, pardon our weaknesses, and make the atmos- 
 phere of our lives sweet and clear ? 
 
 “If you would like to go to England,” he said, abruptly, 
 “ I have no objection. You can go to the first Drawing-room 
 instead of the second, and we can go to Ladysrood for Whit- 
 suntide. 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 Contarini, 
 
GUILDE'ROT . 
 
 109 
 
 in which he expressed his regret that he was recalled sud- 
 denly to England, and must thus lose the honor of seeing the 
 Duchess Soria again in Venice. It flattered Beatrice Soria 
 to learn that he should have left Venice with so much pre- 
 cipitation. 
 
 Men only flee from what they fear, not from what is indif- 
 ferent. 
 
 “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 superhuman 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 v 
 whether I believe the marriage is for Guilderoy’s ultimate 
 peace, I do not.” 
 
 “Why?” 
 
 “ For a thousand reasons. You always repent in 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 ! ” 
 
110 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “ 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 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 coup 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 con- 
 tent with the courtesy of her husband, 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 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 herself with perfect 
 grace and repose. She was undisturbed by the novelty of the 
 scene and the magnificence 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, 
 
GUILDEROY, HI 
 
 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 sat- 
 isfied 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 under- 
 stand it.” 
 
 “You are thinking that I shall ill-treat her,” said Guilde- 
 roy, annoyed by what he fancied the other’s silence meant. 
 “I assure you everyone 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 conscientiously avoided, he viewed 
 with impatience the useless brilliancy of Guilderoy’s intelli- 
 gence, 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 Sunbury 
 said to him once. 
 
112 
 
 GUILDEROY , 
 
 “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 responsi- 
 bilities of position. 
 
 “I do not know that I have done any good,” he thought, 
 honestly enough, “but at least I have not been idle.” 
 
 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 himself,” 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 exquisitely and spending money.” 
 
 “Then she will be very ungrateful,” said Lady Sunbury, 
 whose pride was pinched day and night by want of adequate 
 means to meet the demands of her position. “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 a 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 without question.” 
 
 “ That will depend on whether her temperament is suscep- 
 tible of delight in running up bills.” 
 
 “ Every woman has that temperment. Pray do not irritate 
 me any further. I opposed the marriage absolutely so long 
 as it was of any use to do so ; it was an absurd one — a 
 caprice, a folly. I have only accepted it to prevent the 
 world talking, and because I 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 
 incomprise 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 ” 
 
GUILDEROY. 113 
 
 **1 certainly will not irritate you,” said. Aubrey, who 
 knew that she could irritate herself unaided. 
 
 Lady Sunbury, though she had become reconciled, be- 
 lieved 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 intend- 
 ing it, make women as wretched ultimately as they make 
 them radiantly happy at the outset. 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 understand why 
 they do not forget as completely and 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.” 
 
 “ Perhaps he will get rid of them also.” 
 
 “ You cannot get rid of marriage. Unless your wife dis- 
 graces herself you can never get rid of it.” 
 
 u 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 Aubery went and called on his cousin’s 
 wife in the great Paladian mansion which had ever since it 
 was built been the town house of the Guilderoy family. It 
 was a noble house in its way, w r ith 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 gentlemen and fine ladies pass through them like 
 
114 
 
 QUlLDEROr, 
 
 f minted shadows on a wall. He found the girl alone in a 
 ittle 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 cheek with his lips. 
 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 tljat 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 splendor. 
 
 “ 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 honor ? ” 
 
 She smiled. Her smile was still the spontaneous, un- 
 studied, 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 protection. 
 
 “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.” 
 
 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 beauti* 
 ful things to be found in it, and this house is one of therm 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 115 
 
 You will get fond of it in time. At present I dare say 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 the English nobles were all like 
 you they would have no reason to fear the Deluge.” 
 
 “That was very good of your father,” replied Aubrey, 
 pleased and touched, “ I suspect the Deluge would come 
 all the same if all the saints and heroes in Christendom 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, with a smile. 
 
 “ For heaven’s sake do not speak to her of politics,” said 
 Guilderoy, entering the room. “She has a terrible bias to- 
 wards them already, and I insist that lovely women should 
 have nothing to do with social questions.” 
 
 “Her roses suit her better, certainly,” replied Aubrey, as 
 his eyes rested on her with a wistful contemplation. 
 
 “ That child will be very unhappy if she loves him, and prob- 
 ably 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 further into her nature 
 jifter half an hour’s conversation with her than Guildoroy 
 had seen of it after three months of the most intimate associ- 
 ation 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 chiefly 
 want.’* 
 
 Aubrey had little time or inclination in his career to 
 study fcne intricacies and fragilities of women’s temperaments, 
 but he was a man of quick sensibilities and swift penetration. 
 
 He vyelieved in feeling though the world thought him a 
 cynic. Politics had absorbed most of Ills own life, and the 
 emotions had not enjoyed much play in it. But perhaps for 
 
116 
 
 GUILDS ROT. 
 
 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 hitter and unsparing 5 but childre® 
 or dogs were never afraid. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 u Well, my dear, what do you think of life ? ” said John 
 Vernon to his daughter, when they went to Ladysrood for 
 Whitsuntide. 
 
 Gladys was standing in his little study. She wore a gray 
 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 colored. It would have been wholly impossible to her to 
 find words for the curious mingling of great joy and of ap* 
 prehensive disappointment which her marriage had brought 
 to her — the vague sense which she was possessed with that 
 love was at once bitter and sweet. 
 
 John Vernon saw the embarrassment she felt, and re- 
 gretted it. He would have been better satisfied with some 
 youthful outburst of undoubting enthusiasm and ecstacy. 
 
 “You have quite a look of the world already,” he contin- 
 ued, 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, 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 color 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 poul- 
 try and the pigeons,” said her father with a smile ; whilst he 
 thought, “ It is very early for your difficulties to have began, 
 Bay poor little princess ! 99 
 
GU1LDEB0Y. 
 
 117 
 
 iC In what way does your life seem to have any perplex- 
 (ty ?” he asked aloud ; “and when you feel any do you not 
 rake 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, be- 
 cause 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 speaking 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 dare say 
 that is imagination, my dear,” he said, repressing what he 
 felt. “ When the first ardors of love subside they alwaj^s 
 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 
 analyze. Self-examination is very apt to grow morbid. It 
 has its uses, burt 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 profound conviction that it 
 would bring but 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 morn- 
 ing 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 
 
118 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 to woo a little country girl without a penny to her fortune? 
 I think you do Lord Guilderoy injustice and dishonor by your 
 doubt.” 
 
 She gave a little sigh of dissent, faint and sad and incred- 
 ulous. 
 
 “ 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 Yernon, 
 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 feel- 
 ing already morbid and possibly baseless. 
 
 “ Do you 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 w T as a woman in feeling. 
 
 He laid his hands on her shoulders and kissed her fore- 
 head. 
 
 “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 only will you ever attain or be- 
 stow real happiness. Do not analyze either love or happi- 
 ness 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 dissatisfied, 
 whether she believed in happiness or had already ceased to 
 expect much of it. They said no more, and spoke of other 
 things. Much as he longed to know all the innocent secre- 
 cies of her mind, John Vernon would not aid her to continue 
 a self-examination which might so easily become self-torture. 
 
GXJILDEROT. 
 
 119 
 
 He knew that women are at all times over-fond of self-con- 
 templation 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 impatient 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 torment, turning in and out and stripping bare 
 the delicate nerves of their own organizations. 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 unfavorable 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 
 Yernon was unselfishly glad that the world would, if perforce, 
 surround his child so completely. Love can make its own 
 world in a solitude d 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 prob- 
 ably 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 perfume of the 
 rose, and the ears unconscious of the moledy of the fountain. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 i{ You are twenty-one years of ago 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. 
 
120 
 
 GtllLDEBOY . 
 
 u It is very sad if you can feel it to be so/* he said Serb 
 ously. 
 
 “ I do. I feel quite old. I suppose a woman who is not 99 
 — she was about to say “ not happy , 77 but checked herself and 
 said instead, “ who has lost her children can never feel young / 7 
 
 “ Not young at twenty ! My dear Gladys, you must be 
 jesting, though it is a very sad jest . 77 
 
 u Oh ! no. I am not jesting indeed , 77 she replied. 
 
 Aubrey looked at her with curiosity and tenderness. 
 u Happiness is a matter of temperament , 77 he said, vaguely. 
 
 “ I suppose so . 77 
 
 “ 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 . 77 
 
 She did not answer. 
 
 She was thinking how surely on the morrow she 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 greet- 
 ing, 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 umbilicus with 
 carved ivory ends, and made as completely like such a little 
 messenger of the Caesars 7 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 7 labor, and the 
 great jewel two or three thousand guineas ! 
 
 “ Do you think anybody’s wishes are ever granted ? 99 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 
 humored us with our selected toys. 7 ' 
 
 “ Have you had your wishes ? 77 
 
 No j for I always wished before everything for a strictly 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 121 
 
 private life, wholly beyond all possibility of comment or in- 
 terference from the world. As it is I have the felicity of 
 being one of those people who cannot move a step without 
 reporters being after them, which to ine so absolutely 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. “ Between them they 
 will make life altogether unsupportable 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 pub- 
 lic pillory which will await it.” 
 
 “ That I believe,” said Aubrey. “But it is, I suppose, 
 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 had said that beauty 
 smileless is as a fair landscape without light ? ” 
 
 She had walked a little way from them in the autumn sun- 
 shine. 
 
 “ 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 happier 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 : 
 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 returned 
 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 Antoin- 
 ette’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 it 
 
122 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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 Eng- 
 land. 
 
 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 v which had come to her instinctively was perfect in 
 its high breeding and comeliness. Society followed, imi- 
 tated, and crowned her. But she was not liked ; men thought 
 her cold, women considered her rude ; everyone who knew 
 her was jealous of her, or offended by her in some way or an- 
 other. The world, like her husband, did not find her 
 “facile,” and in the frivolities and crazy caprices of the so- 
 ciety of the close 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 color 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 sympa- 
 thetic even to what she dislikes ; happiness gives suppleness f 
 softness, and indeed force to the character as sunshine ripens 
 and mellows fruit. 
 
 But she was not happy ; she loved her husband passion- 
 ately, 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 influ- 
 ence, 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 hey 
 oarriage panels as she went to Court, 
 
GUILDEBOY. 
 
 123 
 
 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 that her want of interest in 
 all which went on around her was due to this disappoint- 
 ment ; but it was not that only which made life void of satis- 
 faction 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 marriage, 
 she was now absolutely nothing in his existence ; nay, was 
 even perhaps something which perpetually annoyed and irri- 
 tated him by the mere sense that she was there, forever, 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 mo- 
 ment 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 mono - 
 tones de la vie . 9 99 
 
 “ That is surely rather descriptive of ecstacy. The ecstacy 
 which, in the nature of things, must have the lightning’s 
 brief duration as it has its brilliancy. Happiness, I have 
 always held, is rather a matter of our own individual temper- 
 ament than of circumstances or of the passions.” 
 
 “A philosopher’s view; true, no doubt, of philosophers, 
 hardly of mankind in general ; of womankind, certainly not 
 true.” 
 
 “Ho. Women are the creatures of the emotions ; a cold 
 word, a letter a day late, a sigh which they overhear and 
 think is not for them, suffices to make them wretched. I 
 hope you do not find Gladys over-sensitive ? 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.” 
 
 “ Ho, I do not think she is impressionable,” replied Guilds 
 roy. “ She is certainly not impassioned.” 
 
124 
 
 GUTLLEROY. 
 
 “ 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. Coldnes* 
 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 dare say you alarmed her 
 at first with the violence of your ardor, and then you chilled 
 her with the carelessness of your tepid affections, and be- 
 tween the two the soul in her is scared, and shuts itself up 
 like an oyster, closing 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 indifference, 
 and if the heart of Gladys were now still asleep, it would 
 assuredly awake some day. 
 
 “What idiotcy is marriage!” he thought. “A man sees 
 a woman, a woman a man, with no knowledge, no experience 
 of each other ; very often without even any affinity they 
 enter into the closest of all human relations 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 development and intolerably irritating to their inclina- 
 tions. 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 £* 
 gigantic lie as the scaffolding which supports society. Nom- 
 inally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous ^ 
 sometimes even polyandrous. Why is the fact not reeog* 
 nized and frankly admitted ? Why do we adhere to the fh> 
 tion of a fidelity which is neither in nature nor in feeling 
 possible to man ? Because property lays its foundations most 
 easily by means of marriage, therefore the individual is sac-* 
 rificed to property. I confess that it makes one almost side 
 with the Socialists.” 
 
 “ It is not very long since you came nere 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 ?” 
 
aUILVEROY. 
 
 12 $ 
 
 Gruilderoy was embarrassed. He was naturally sincere. 
 
 “ If I be not,” be said, with effort, “ the fault is certainly 
 my own, and no one else’s.” 
 
 He knew that he infinitely regretted his marriage, but he 
 eould 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 because he 
 was impatient of its obligations, and he received none of the 
 compensation which he had anticipated. His wife was 
 lovely, admired, and perfect in her manner in the world, but 
 he did not believe that she had one 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 his wishes invaria- 
 bly, 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 hex nature and character were wholly 
 unsuited to his own, 
 
 What he most wished for — living children, she had failed 
 to give him ; and this had been his principal object in marry- 
 ing at all; not from any philoprogenitiveness, but from pride 
 of race and strong dislike of the distant relative who was his 
 heir presumptive. 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 importance 
 in his projects and wishes, of less influence on his temper 
 and temperament, of less prominence in his life and his feel- 
 ings. 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 be- 
 fore 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 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 
 honor or her own. 
 
126 
 
 GUILDEBOT. 
 
 u On a les defauts de ses qualitfe” he thought often. u It 
 she had been more impressionable and more 6 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 forever between them and their 
 true comprehension of women. 
 
 Sometimes, when he was in a contented mood, he told him- 
 self 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 ca - 
 quetages 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 Gains- 
 borough, 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 him- 
 self ; but then this resignation is not the language of hap- 
 piness. 
 
 “ 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 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 with those who sighed 
 for them. “Because she has not even the very smallest of 
 stones in her shoe, she goes 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 ? ” replied 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 head- 
 long 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 so long as you 
 do not fatigue him, or bore him ; but the moment you do 
 either he jmts a cross against your name and avoids you. 
 If she does not understand that, he will avoid her. Avoid 
 
GVILBEROY. 
 
 127 
 
 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 a Venus or a Hottentot?” said 
 Aubrey. u I do not go quite so far as that, but I am certain 
 that Venus, when she can always be had, 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, 
 i 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 disappoint- 
 ment. Material advantages 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 
 lather to son, and all the incessant mortifications which awai'j 
 the contrast of a great position with a narrow fortune — felt 
 no patience with what appeared 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 you encourage her in it,” she added. 
 
 u I do not see 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 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. 
 
128 
 
 GU1LDER0Y. 
 
 Many times during the London season he put aside 
 weighty labors 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 slumbered underneath the 
 prosaic cares of a political career. His imagination was still 
 alive, and he had a vague consciousness that he was watch- 
 ing 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, very ignorant of 
 life, and totally unable to understand the caprices and vaga- 
 ries of the male temperament.” 
 
 “Well, if that goes on she will be a fool/' said Hilda Sun- 
 bury. “ 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 would entirely depend on her mood at 
 the moment.” 
 
 *0n her mood : not on her principles ? 
 
GUILDEROY , . 
 
 129 
 
 “ My dear Hilda — • point de phrases. That sense of princi- 
 ple resists in a woman all temptation from without only just 
 so 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 endeavor to make him 
 
 feel ; but the instant she ceases to care well, I do not 
 
 suppose that the Guilderoy scutcheon will then be the reli- 
 giously sacred thing to her which it appears to you. I have 
 great belief in the affections of women, but I have no belief 
 in what is termed their virtue. I mean that they are to be 
 controlled through the one, not through the other. Moralists 
 gay 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 passionate, 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 externals, in ceremo- 
 nials, in social dignities. In social duties, bound in the buck- 
 ram 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 infinitely pitiful to all woes of 
 the passions 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 shy- 
 ness from ever expressing anything which she felt. 
 
 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 felt was indifferent to him. The 
 demonstrations of his passion had not lasted long ; they had 
 left her with remembrance of a fervor and a frenzy which 
 she could neyer forgot, and which made the mere mechanical 
 
130 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 caresses of habit wholly intolerable to her. If she had 
 never been loved in this way she might have lived content- 
 edly 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 conventional embraces, was to her 
 an unendurable torture. She appeared to him cold when her 
 whole senses and emotions were writhing under the care^ 
 lessness and indifference 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 admira- 
 tion, 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 comprehension taught her this very soon, and occasional 
 phrases which she overheard from the women most inti- 
 mate 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 something more disdain- 
 ful than pity. The sense of that gave her a calmness quite 
 foreign to her nature, and a strength of self-repression inju- 
 rious at her years. 
 
 She had had everything to learn of the world into which 
 she was launched ; but she soon became acquainted with its 
 intricacies, its meanings a demi-mots, its profound heartless- 
 ness 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 
 affections which Guilderoy did not give to her he took else- 
 where. He did not, indeed, ever offend her by notorious 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 131 
 
 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 endeavor 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 amusing.” 
 
 “ And were I amusing, 1 should have no power to amuse 
 you,” she thought, though she did not say it. She was not 
 amusing, because she was 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 dis- 
 liked 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 re- 
 ceptions, in large house parties, in all the crowd and move- 
 ment of fashionable life, she was always glad to see Aubrey 
 come to her side and to feel the shield of his kindly friend- 
 ship between her and the impertinences of fine ladies and the 
 embarrassing homage of men who, seeing that she was neg- 
 lected, 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 indi- 
 cations of all that she needed to know in the bewildering mazes 
 of fashion and precedence. 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 
 
132 
 
 GUILDER OY. 
 
 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, u 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 invi- 
 tation 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 
 the power to control all their mysterious influences ; and all 
 that it was necessary for her to know and avoid, she learned 
 from him. 
 
 “ 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. 
 
 “ She has one great impediment to success in this age of 
 vulgarity and new families,” he said once to his brother 
 Ronald. 
 
 “ What is that ? ” asked Lord Ronald. 
 
 “ High breeding,” answered Aubrey. 
 
 Yet despite this drawback he succeeded in making her, al- 
 most against herself, a leader of society. He knew that 
 Guilderoy would never pardon a woman who bore his name 
 if she did not attain eminence in society. Guilderoy imag- 
 ined 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. 
 
 €i 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 133 
 
 and only the best people, if she never made an error in the 
 date of a title, or a mistake in the smaller intricacies of eti- 
 quette and precedence, 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 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 
 world, so omit nothing which is necessary to the education of 
 the world. Besides, I confess that social etiquette has a cer- 
 tain 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 en- 
 tertain 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, be- 
 cause 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 trades- 
 men. The Victoria Cross men would at least allow of some 
 *ort of analogy to the old reasons for knighthood. 
 
 Gladys always listened and followed him with sincere in« 
 terest 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 pos- 
 sessed much more interest for her than the fashionable friv- 
 olities of the hour. 
 
 “ It will be time to think of politics twenty years hence,” 
 said Guilderoy tocher, but she thought of them already, and 
 often went taihe Ladies’ Gallery to hear Aubrey, 
 
134 
 
 GUlLDEROr. 
 
 He spoke well ; not with any great brilliancy of rhetoric, 
 but with admirable lucidity and logic, great force of persua- 
 sion, 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 you 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 un- 
 less one has been trained by having passed one’s early years 
 in the Commons. I could never have had that parliamentary 
 education. I succeeded 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 ef- 
 forts 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 ma- 
 chine that ever was constructed for grinding down superior- 
 ity into mediocrity ; that is why it is so immensely popular 
 with the middle classes.” 
 
 “ But if you believe in oligarchy, you might at least sup- 
 port 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 power 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 nations 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 self- 
 ish, so crowded, that it must make those outside of it despise 
 it even while they envy it ? You have said yourself that 
 
GUILDEROr. 
 
 135 
 
 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 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 / 7 
 
 “ Certainly, my dear ; and does any Cuyp out of Ladys- 
 rood, any Murillo 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 my income is large, I 
 have never sold my family Holbeins nor my ancestral oaks. 
 I have a very strong sense of noblesse oblige , though I have 
 not, I admit, the virtues of my cousin Aubrey . 77 
 
 He spoke with some irritation, and for the first time a 
 vague sense of annoyance, at the opinion she had of Aubrey, 
 gtirred in him. 
 
 “ He and I , 77 he continued, “ have always been the indus- 
 trious and the idle apprentices in the eyes of our families. 
 He early chose Athene and I Yenus. But though I grant 
 he has a monopoly of the virtues, yet I have an ounce of 
 conscience left I assure you, and alt that I have inherited 
 will pass out of my hands as it came into them, intact to 
 your children . 77 
 
 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 indignity which allowed 
 others to send their household goods to the market, 
 
 “ Who has filled your head with these fancies of utility ? 77 
 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 noth- 
 ing of enjoyment ? 77 
 
 And he left her with some impatience. She could neither 
 persuade nor allure him, because she possessed no influence 
 upon him. 
 
 u She will be all her life that most depressing thing, a 
 conscientious woman , 77 he thought, with a smile and a sigh, 
 as he drove to his favorite club. “ If she had married Au- 
 
136 
 
 GUILDEEOT. 
 
 bre}^ 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 ; hut 
 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, hut in actual fact he was only 
 bored by them. She had not known how to interest and di- 
 vert him ; she, was transparently truthful, full of high ideals 
 and high thoughts, and possessed with the terrible earnest- 
 ness 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 gayety 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. 
 
 u 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 he? 
 age was the sense, perpetually weighing on her, that he re- 
 gretted his hasty marriage. 
 
 She felt that she was a burden on him ; and though she 
 never said it, its consciousness was ever present with her. 
 
 The existence of incessant change which she perpetually 
 led gave her rather sadness and bewilderment 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 homeless- 
 ness and restlessness which were not suited to her tempera- 
 ment. 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 peo- 
 ple were so soon considered so, and always detested as a conse- 
 quence. She did her best to endeavor 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 simplic- 
 ity and gravity upon her for her to easily adopt the tone of 
 
GUILDEROY. 13 f 
 
 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. 
 
 u Did I frown ? ” said Gladys, very sorrowfully. u I did 
 not know it. Indeed I am very sorry.” 
 
 u 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 ? ” 
 
 She colored at the ridicule of 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.” 
 
 “ You 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. 
 
 u But that is just what they must not do,” said Guilderoy, 
 considerably irritated. u 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 te 
 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. <( he ridicule tue . 
 It kills grace, it kills charm, it kills popularity. It would 
 afflict me immeasurably if for the want of a little flexibility 
 you were considered a precisian in the world. It is Hilda’s 
 
138 
 
 GTTILDHTtOY. 
 
 style, I am aware, but it is a most uncomfortable style, most 
 distressing in its effect upon others, and not at all the style of 
 our day.” 
 
 “ TJne societe gangrenee / ” Oh, we know all that ; it 
 has been said admirably by Balzac, and more or less since by 
 all his imitators,” continued Guilderoy, impatiently. 66 It is 
 really not necessary, my love, that you should either preach 
 or philosophize about it. There are always numbers of writ- 
 ers and wits who make their livelihood by repeating all that 
 kind of thing as well as it can be said ; and lam myself con- 
 vinced that no amount of condemnation will ever alter mat- 
 ters by a hand’s breadth — not even condemnation so weighty 
 and so terrible as yours ! ” 
 
 She colored, 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 moor- 
 lands 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 intelligence, 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, u has undergone 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 de- 
 moralization as well as democracy. It is much more than 
 leste , it is constantly outrageous. We have always been a 
 very profligate nation, though we have professed great chas- 
 tity ; and in this generation the impudent people are upper- 
 most, 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 ? ” 
 
 4t Of course not, my dear child. Why will you suggest ab^ 
 
GUILD EROY. 
 
 139 
 
 surdities ? You do not wait to hear my conclusion. I was 
 about to say that modern society, being no longer high-bred, 
 but only u smart,” no longer distinguished, but only rich, 
 as immoral as it can possibly be, and having even ceased to 
 be able to tell a gentlewoman from a cabotine when it sees 
 one, good manners are altogether thrown away upon it, and 
 it only laughs at them.” 
 
 u 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 estimating 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 blocking 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 raillerv against him with his 
 female friends. 
 
 Material sorrows everyone can understand, though even 
 these everyone 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- 
 liealtli, all these wants and pains physical, are easily com- 
 prehended, even by the unsympathetic ; 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 
 
140 
 
 GUILDEROT . 
 
 never urged, but merely suggested. Her character 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, when women stayed at home, 
 whether in palace or in cabin. It had strength, truth, can- 
 dor, honor, purity ; but, like 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 necessities, and 
 the weaknesses of others. 
 
 There is a fatal law which philosophers might possibly 
 trace out to some law of compensation, which usually makes 
 the women of perfect purity and candor 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 le pluie et le beau temps in the great world for 
 those she disapproved or favored. 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 de- 
 tested ? ” 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.” 
 
 “ 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 bien trempe . 
 
 “ To Evelyn to have his wife a mere country chatelaine 99 
 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 
 
GTJILDEBOY. 
 
 141 
 
 Medea or a 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 moreover no patience with people to whom these 
 things are not second nature. There only remain you and I. 
 We must undertake her training in these things.’* 
 
 u 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 segis of her approbation and pro- 
 tection. 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 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 indignant 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 women, 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 impassive 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 brave and tender sentiments which he had expressed 
 so constantly before marriage with her* and which were now 
 
142 
 
 aUILDEROT. 
 
 never heard of from him. He seemed utterly to have for- 
 gotten 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 lqver which 
 he had seemed to be. He was a man wholly surrendered to 
 the influence of the moment, and taking all his color from it. 
 
 Very soon after his union with her, the habitual influences 
 of his life had begun to reassume their force over him; the 
 poetry and earnestness which had never been more than mo- 
 mentary with him had ceded place in turn to the instincts 
 and modes of thought more common to him. He had never 
 been insincere, although 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 endur- 
 ing weight with him. But in all this he was not false, 
 although be seemed to her to be so. He followed his own 
 varying moods, and if she became of but slight account in his 
 existence, it was because lie honestly forgot that she ought to 
 be of any. 
 
 But all these complications and vacillations of character 
 were too intricate for her to follow, and she only felt a con- 
 tinually growing sense that she had been intentionally de- 
 ceived 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 his claims will- 
 ingly. 
 
 He could not live without stimulant, distraction, move- 
 ment, excitement; they were all drugs indispensable to his 
 existence; and m the fumes of tlTem such an idyl as had 
 smiled at him for a moment amongst the autumn flowers of 
 Christslea had no chance to retain its spell. He had been 
 quite sincere in it ; as sincere as when lie had assured her 
 father that he sighed for the nude and childlike soul of a 
 virgin love. He had not conscientiously plsfyed a part} 
 
QUILbUROY. 
 
 143 
 
 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 imagi- 
 nation, 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 milage had faded: but the 
 obligations he had taken on himself when under the charm 
 of it, remained behind it. 
 
 How 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 sit- 
 ting 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 they hide. He knew, in his own conscious- 
 ness, 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 in 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 un- 
 dulating form and the voluptuous grace of an odalisque, com- 
 bined with an impudence 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 observed, was satisfactory, 
 no doubt, hut vague, comprising as it did everything what- 
 ever from the Lord Chancellor down to the lowest attorney of 
 Smoke Street. Be she what she would she was lovely to look 
 
144 
 
 GUILDEMOY. 
 
 at, had caught the eye and amused the ennui of an exalted 
 personage, and had, by audacity, cringing, and cleverness, 
 placed herself in the highest rank of society. Some great 
 ladies still did not know her, indeed, but they were the ex- 
 ception. Mrs. Percy Shiffton was really seen “ everywhere.” 
 She laid siege to Guilderoy, and succeeded in beguiling him. 
 She amused him infinitely, quite as much by what she was 
 not as by what she was. Her constant endeavor to persuade her- 
 self and everybody that she had been born in the purples was 
 a perpetual comedy to him ; whilst the great rarity of her 
 peculiar loveliness, 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 ; 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 whom she met at every turn and in every house 
 except at that of Her Grace of Longleat, at Balfrons, and at 111- 
 ington. The very exclusion of the lady from the houses of 
 his relatives served to suggest to her the terms of intimacy ex- 
 isting 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 tropi- 
 cal 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. What 
 does 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.” 
 
 “ My dear Ermyntrude,” replied Lady Sunbury, “ there are 
 plants which only grow the stronger for being broken off; 
 
GTTILbEKOT. <145 
 
 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 j 
 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 anywhere, 
 ignorance is bliss.” 
 
 “ I am not a mischief-maker,” replied Lady Sunbury with 
 hauteur and dignity. 
 
 “ I am afraid you are, sometimes,” thought Ermyntrude 
 Longleat ; and she communicated her apprehensions 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 jealously 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 her ; she 
 was sensible that his life 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 comprehension 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 realized 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 forever prefer her to all others ; she 
 learned that it was rather almost all others whom he pre- 
 ferred to herself. He was, indeed, never unkind to her, or 
 
146 
 
 GUILDEHOY. 
 
 otherwise than courteous. The greatest want of kindness 
 which he ever showed was in a lack of attention to what she 
 said, a restrained hut yet perceptible weariness whenever she 
 was alone with him. He was liberal even to extravagance 
 In all he gave her, he was scrupulously punctilious in polite- 
 ness to her before his household or his friends, and he was 
 seldom ruffled to the utterance of even an impatient sentence 
 to her ear. But, all the same, she felt that she was very 
 little, perhaps nothing, to him ; and when she recalled the 
 adoration of the first few weeks of their union she felt a cold 
 like ice close in about her 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 preoccupation 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 recognized 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 impassive- 
 ness and unpleasantness which my sister and many like her 
 of the old school think so necessary 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 what- 
 ever you wish,” she answered him with tears brimming iu 
 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 exaggeration. a X 
 
GUILDEROT. 
 
 147 
 
 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 j “ I want 
 only justice.” 
 
 “ Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a wo- 
 man,” he said irritably. “ One can never hint a fault to 
 them but what they think we are brutal and ungenerous. 
 All that I ask of you is to enjoy your life — at least to look 
 as if you did. It is no immense demand assuredly. You 
 have everything which attracts and pleases other women, 
 and yet nothing 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 
 Jow 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 had 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 mono- 
 syllables ? 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 ex- 
 pressions of affection, and she had the overwhelming con- 
 sciousness that she was too indifferent to him for him ever 
 to take the trouble to penetrate or analyze her feelings for 
 him. 
 
 “ I wish I could please you,” she said, instead of the words 
 that 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 tem- 
 per and more easily interested. It is so much, my dear, for 
 a woman to be amiable ! And nothing is so unamiabie as 
 the tendency you display to brood over your own wrongs 
 
148 
 
 GUILDEROT . 
 
 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 5 and I more, 
 even than most men, abhor everything approaching to a 
 scene. Remember that, dear, and try to be happy. If 1 
 have not made you so it is my misfortune, not my fault.” 
 
 He believed what he said. 
 
 “ It will be terrible,” he thought when he was alone, u if 
 she become la femme incomprise. There is nothing on earth 
 so distressing, so uncon sollable, so absolutely unreasonable 
 upon earth. At present she is young, and really lovely, and 
 it does not matter much ; but years hence, it will be unbear- 
 able, and how is one to check it ? It is always a malady 
 which grows. Good Heavens ! why were women made like 
 that — always analyzing your feelings and their own, always 
 teasing you to tell them that what is dying is not dead, al- 
 ways 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 un- 
 derstand 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 extreme irri- 
 tation. 
 
 “ I have always been kind to her,” he would have said, if 
 anybody had reproached him ; and he was indeed wholly una- 
 ware that anything of kindness was lacking in him. He had 
 had a nervous dread of her displaying 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 realized how 
 easy it was for them to enchain and charm him, and how im* 
 possible for her. But her fears took no definite shape ; even 
 her sense of pain came rather from the idea of her own in 
 sufficiency to him than of his inconstancy to her. 
 
GU1LDER0Y. 
 
 149 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 One day Gladys, returning unexpectedly from a drive and 
 going upstairs to her own rooms without summoning any ser- 
 vant, 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 marriage, when she had been hired for her by Lady 
 Sunbury. 
 
 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, stam- 
 mered, and protested. 
 
 “Denial is of no use,” said Gladys. “You have opened 
 the safe with a false key, for I have its own key on my chain 
 as you know. Put back the rings. You took three.” 
 
 The maid, trembling in every limb, 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 1 ” 
 
 “Have you taken anything before ? ” 
 
 “Hot much,” she muttered. “I never touched the safe 
 before, so help me God ! But you are very careless with 
 your money, my lady, and it is a cruel temptation 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 h&Ye trusted 
 
CUILTJEROY. 
 
 150 
 
 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/ 5 said the woman with ill- 
 concealed scorn. u 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 thi » moment/' she said ; 66 I will not arrest 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 curtsey, murmured a hypocrit- 
 ical blessing on her, and tried to kiss her hand. But Gladys 
 motioned her away. 
 
 u Leave the house in ten minutes, or I will not answer for 
 my longer clemency.” 
 
 The maid curtseyed a second time, and withdrew in 
 silence. 
 
 “ You young fool ! ” she thought. u You have never looked 
 if your other jewels are safe, and you little guess the nest- 
 egg I have laid up from your carelessness every month since 
 I have been in your service. Trusted me ! Ay, you trust 
 everybody, you born simpleton ; and you go through the muck 
 of the world as if it were a meadow of daises ! ” 
 
 When 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 virtues 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 indefi* 
 nitely more honest.” 
 
 But to Gladys the matter was not so light. 
 
GUILLEBOY. 
 
 151 
 
 To a nature which is very faithful, honest, and truthful, 
 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 played against one of its para- 
 graphs. She supposed it referred to some critique or essay 
 of her father’s ; his scholarly work fpr the press 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 
 color 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 jest- 
 ingly of the tender relations existing between one of the 
 largest landowners and the most influential peers of the 
 southwestern counties and an olive branch brought from the 
 antipodes ; suggested with a sneer that the olive in this case 
 would not mean peace, and recommended 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 Iago, 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 whom they attack forbids them to descend 
 into the mud of public 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 
 whi^h slept under her outward seriousness and serenity 
 ^aped up in her. She seized the paper from the corner 
 
152 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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 poli- 
 tical 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 heartbreaking entreaty into his face. 
 
 “ Of course it is not true, my dear,” he answered, avoiding 
 her gaze ; and he said in his soul, “ God forgive 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 Shoreditch. When I 
 think that they drink Burgundy and drive in broughams, 
 while we send other men who snatch a watch or purse to the, 
 treadmill, I feel that our whole hollow system of society and 
 civilization 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 the 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 to whom it is utterly out of his power to con- 
 sole. 
 
 “ You have seen him flirting with her. All that means 
 nothing. You must not put any false construction on it. 
 She is a pretty woman and audacious ; but she has neither 
 the good breeding nor the good taste which coiud ever make 
 
GUILDEROY. 168 
 
 her really charming to a man who has both. How can yon 
 read these foolish and villainous news-sheets ? ” 
 
 “ This one was sent to me marked. I thought it was some- 
 thing 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 com- 
 passion, 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 endeavored 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 evidence of her indigna- 
 tion given to his cousin would only cause dissension and dis- 
 union, 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 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 inevitably irritate him. He 
 will see and know nothing of it. He never reads newspapers 
 
154 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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 
 not 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 knowledge 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.” 
 
 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 sneak 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 absolutely 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 ha felt for her because she was 
 physically beautiful and so did him honor 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 himself would give you 
 were he here.” 
 
 “ I will try,” she answered 
 
 “ That is not enough. You must say ? *1 will,* You will 
 keep your promise once given I know*” 
 
QUIZ DEROT. 
 
 155 
 
 She hesitated a moment ; then she said in a lo'v jmce :-- 
 “ You can judge best, I daresay. I wll .\ not ,®P e£ J 'f 
 “That is right? and brave, and wise. One day jou wWl 
 thank me ” slid’ Aubrey; he kissed her forehead gravely 
 with his accustomed salute and left her. 
 
 It had cost him much to keep to * °” e 1” f ?' it £ 
 semblance almost unsympathetic. He elt t ,\ 
 met Guilderoy upon the staircase of the house it would 
 been a hard sTruggle not to have insulted him m her behalf. 
 But L knew S the advice which be bad given her was 
 sound. She would have to learn to bear such trials as t 
 in silence. Probably much heavier ones would await her in 
 
 th “ PoTchild ! ” he thought sadly. His heart was heavy as 
 he walked towards Westminster. His thoughts went back 
 to the days of liis early and secret marriage : the fatal m 
 take of his boyhood, which had been confessed to his father, 
 S t. n. "Z create in the world. He roc.««d tk. .m- 
 niense devotion, the exaggerated constancy, wh.ch . 
 
 Xen in the ardor and loyalty of youth to one whose worth- 
 fessness he had learned too late. How strange how contra- 
 dictory how cruel, he thought the caprices and the awaids of 
 fate - 7 He who in’the loneliness of rank and power would 
 have deemed a great, a disinterested and a faithful love th 
 dearest of earth’s treasures, had been betrayed w ere m 
 giveTheart and soul and honor; and his cousin tc . whom i o 
 mve constancy was impossible, and to receive it was wean 
 some, had the 7 whole life of this beautiful child centered m 
 him, and was moved by it rather to impatience and anno)- 
 an ce than to any other emotion. ^ 
 
 “He will want some day what he throws away 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 un- 
 likely that Guilderoy would ever be met by any such chas- 
 tisement in kind, and that in the treasure-house of love it is 
 frequently those who give the least who most receive. 
 
GUILDEBOr. 
 
 * 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 “ I have not a doubt the Shiffton woman had it put in her* 
 self 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 com- 
 promised,” 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 minauderies of the peacock. She 
 is not of that type.” 
 
 “No, she will not flirt,” said the Duchess. “But she may 
 do worse. If she is refoulee sur ellememe , she may throw her- 
 self 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.” 
 “ 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 favorite 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 were loves, whilst they lasted; in most of 
 the ‘ affairs ? of our days what is there except vanity, adver- 
 tisement, often avarice, sometimes reclame , 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 loves 
 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. 
 
QUILDEROY. 
 
 15 1 
 
 4t 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 unsympa- 
 thetic. Every woman seems to him unsympathetic and un- 
 reasonable, who does not at once understand his desertion of 
 her.” 
 
 He felt the greatest anger against his cousin ; he had al- 
 ways been impatient of his many changes and his countless 
 passions, and he had blamed him for wasting 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 interference 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 re- 
 monstrance of any kind have upon a temperament like his 
 cousin’s ? 
 
 If he did not care for his wife, what condemnation or per- 
 suasion could ever induce him to do so ? Feelings are not 
 to be called into existence by censure or argument. 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 she was so silent and looked so uninterested, 
 that none could, in common parlance, “ get on ” with her 5 
 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. 
 
 Was it true ? That wonder, that doubt haunted her every 
 hour. It occupied her every thought. It almost made her 
 
158 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 forget her little dead boys 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 tempt- 
 ing. Yet the impression grew more strongly upon her that 
 it was true. There was, or she fancied there was, an insol- 
 ence of triumph in the black languid eyes of Olive Shiffton, 
 whenever they met hers across a crowded room, which to her 
 tortured fancy confirmation 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 ifc ; 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 comprehend that women might pardon in^ 
 constancy, where it was loyally confessed and generously 
 atoned for ; she could imagine that there might be relations 
 which only became closer, sweeter, and dearer for temporary 
 separation and offences of the passions ; but neither of these 
 was her case. Guilderoy neither confessed nor atoned, neither 
 quarrelled with her, nor admitted that he offended her. Ha 
 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. Ho 
 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 ? Ho 
 one in the world, she thought. Everyone seemed to consider 
 
GU1LDER0Y. 
 
 159 
 
 that such trials as hers were inevitable and mattered little. 
 Everyone seemed to hold that the material advantages of posi- 
 tion 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 consciousness which came 
 to her very early that it would seem to him inopportune and 
 wearisome. He was not a man to prolong passion after pos- 
 session, 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, without 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 ef- 
 faced, 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 what- 
 ever to wound. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 It was a fortnight after that day that she chanced to stop 
 her carriage one afternoon at a fashionable club ; old Lord 
 Balfrons, who scarcely ever stirred out of 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 inquire. 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 required the offices of his nephew. He was petulant, 
 eager, and unreasonable as great age, like youth, is apt to be 
 wken there is a chance that one of its whims may be thwarted ; 
 
160 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 and Gladys, afraid to vex him, did 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 Guilde- 
 roy 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 recognized the 
 gray 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 color 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 rap- 
 idly 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 sunbeams and the vapors 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. J ealousy seemed to her a 
 miserable and a vulgar thing ; a wretched weakness which 
 any woman of courage and pride should scout as a degrada- 
 tion ; 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 sunk her fathoms deep in indignity. 
 John Vernon had taught her the code of honor of a high-bred 
 gentleman, the kind of teaching which is unhappily omitted 
 from the education of most women, yet which is more neces- 
 sary 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 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 161 
 
 really cared at all ? The doubt which had so long festered 
 and ached in her heart became a certainty. She did not be- 
 lieve 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 mo- 
 ment.” 
 
 “He does not even wish me away,” she thought. “ So little 
 does my presence affect him ! ” 
 
 Aloud she answered : — 
 
 “ I will only stay three days : only time enough to see my 
 father.” 
 
 “ Your father should come into the world. It is a pity he 
 is so eccentric. He would be the most popular man in Lon- 
 don 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 honor,” 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 Ladys- 
 rood without announcing her arrival there to anyone. In the 
 coolness of the late summer afternoon she drove her ponies 
 over the moor to her father’s cottage. The sandy road, run- 
 ning between high banks of marl and sandstone, crowned 
 with, blossom and furze, with nodding foxgloves and with 
 
162 
 
 GUILDS EOT. 
 
 csmunda fern, was tlie 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 gray 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 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 dap- 
 pled 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 
 sweetbriar. 
 
 “ Why did you not tell me, my dear ? I would have 
 awaited you at Ladysrood,” said Vernon. “ What can possi- 
 bly 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 dans le mouvement , do they not ? I 
 suppose the mouvement is much wilder and more breathless 
 than it was in my day. However, my dear child, whatever 
 the sins of the world, I am 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 would not? like me to be absent 
 from it.” 
 
 “I will come with you willingly,” said John Vernon 
 u You know without you at Christslea, 
 
GU1LDER0Y. 
 
 163 
 
 * Non semper idem floribus est honor 
 Nernis, neque uno Luna rubens nitet Vultu.’ ” 
 
 “ I love to hear a Latin line ! ” said his daughter. “ It 
 makes me feel young again.” 
 
 “ Poor aged soul!” said Vernon, with a smile. “ Surely 
 Guilderoy often lets you hear one ; he is old-fashioned like 
 myself in his habit of quotation.” 
 
 u I never hear one from him,” said Gladys hastily and 
 coldly, Her father looked at her, but made no comment. 
 
 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, and to 
 please the old servants, had drunk a little cider and eaten a 
 piece of honeycomb, sitting in the porch, she drove her father 
 home with her in the now darkening night to Ladysrood. 
 
 “I have to tell you a sad tale,” said Vernon, as they crossed 
 the moors. “ Your friend the fox has gone to his doom at 
 last. They say if one is born to be hanged no water can 
 drown one, and so I suppose if one is born to be hunted no 
 power can save one. You know the care I took of him all 
 these years, and apparently no life could be happier as we 
 vulgarly construe happiness. But Reynard had a soul above 
 butcher’s meat and inglorious safety. His instincts were too 
 strong for his wisdom. He could not get away above ground, 
 but we forgot to allow for his tunnelling powers. So one 
 fine morning last week there was no Reynard, and in his 
 stead was a hole bored under the fence and through the earth, 
 much further and deeper than any terrier we put in could 
 follow. It is only too clear ; he has gone to the joys of liberty 
 and an empty stomach. I fear you will be vexed, but indeed 
 it is no fault of ours. Ho prisoner of state ever fared more 
 sumptuously. But instinct was stronger than all owe tempta- 
 tions ; of course he will be hunted and run into one day, but 
 perhaps after all he has chosen the better part. No doubt he 
 is saying to himself — 
 
 * Better one hour of glorious life ! 9 ” 
 
 Gladys sighed as she heard the tidings, but the sigh was 
 not for the lost fox. She was thinking how much better it 
 had been if Reynard and she had never met each other ! 
 
 “ Really, my love, you should be a very happy woman,” 
 
164 
 
 &VILVEBOY. 
 
 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 spiri- 
 tualized in the white moonlight, with all its towers and pin- 
 nacles and fantastic corbels standing out against the starlit 
 sky. 
 
 66 Because the park is fine and the house is handseme ? ” 
 said Gladys, in a tone which he had never heard from her 
 “ Surely these are very coarse and material reasons for 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 neverthe- 
 less, 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 in- 
 difference with which many of the owners of such houses con- 
 sider 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.” 
 
 1,6 You will have other children, no doubt,” said Vernon, 
 “ and I should have thought there were already existing rea- 
 sons for you to be attached to your home.” 
 
 She did not reply. 
 
 “ I confess I am very attached to it myself,” he continued, 
 not wishing to dwell too seriously on the subject. u 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 contradictions of styles and epochs. 
 The only perfect house is a house in which one reads as in a 
 book the history of a race.” 
 
 It was nine o’clock. Dinner awaited them, served in the 
 small dining room of the Queen Anne wing of the house. 
 Vernon ate nothing, as was his custom at that hour, and his 
 daughter ate little ; her favorite dogs supplied willing appetites. 
 The dinner over, she and he strolled out on to the west ter- 
 race : the air was very warm, the stars brilliant, the sound of 
 the distant sea came to their ears on the silence ; behind 
 
GUILD EROY. 
 
 165 
 
 them were the lighted windows of the wings, before them the 
 quaint green garden, with its high clipped hedges, its fish- 
 ponds, its yew trees under which Charles Stuart had played 
 at bowls, and Elizabeth Tudor 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 tempta- 
 tion 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 mo- 
 ments ere he answered. 
 
 “ You could not help your longing,” he said at length. “ It 
 is just these inclinations towards base actions which some- 
 times enter the highest souls which 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 dreaming ! Why else should he 
 have married you ? ” 
 
 “ It was a caprice — he has so many caprices. Do you re- 
 member that line in the Phaedrus : — ‘ 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 sor- 
 row, 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? 
 
166 
 
 GUILDEBOT. 
 
 “ I think you speak very bitterly and hastily on small 
 grounds,” he said, resisting his desire to sympathize 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 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. Tine femme qui se respecte 
 rtest jamais jalouse. 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 constancy is not in nature, and therefore it is not de- 
 manded in law. I understand that you are in love with 
 your husband, and therefore it is impossible for you to under- 
 stand why he is no longer in love with you. I can tell you, 
 my child, that nature has made man inconstant ; utterly in- 
 constant 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 
 recognize 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, her 
 eyes still gazed into the shadowy woods which surrounded 
 the gardens beneath her. Her whole soul rebelled passion- 
 ately at the suggestion that she should accept inconstancy as 
 inevitable and forgive it as immaterial ; she had all the vehe- 
 mence, 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 re- 
 proach would be brought against him. 
 
 “It would have been no use, my lore,” he said, gently j 
 
\xUILDEROY* 
 
 167 
 
 « 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 actu- 
 ally 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 husband be indeed unfaithful 
 to you, which is a mere assumption on your part, you will 
 gain nothing by the endeavor to resent what you cannot 
 alter. After all, my child, if a woman cannot keep the affec- 
 tions she has once won, pride should keep her from lament- 
 ing her own failure, and tenderness should make her silent 
 on it. You seem to me to be drifting into a state of irrita- 
 tion and of aigreur , which can serve no purpose except that 
 of your enemies, if you have any, who 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 per- 
 ceive that, whatever she may feel, only a weak woman and a 
 silly woman degrades herself by the exhibition of conjugal 
 jealousy.” 
 
 She was again silent 5 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 fol- 
 lowed 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 un- 
 wholesome 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 accusation would incense 
 him greatly : if it be as you suppose, it could do no possible 
 good. You would drive him either into a subterfuge or a 
 rage. Neither are desirable results. Believe me, my dear, 
 a wise woman never asks questions. What is the use of ask- 
 ing them ? The person tormented takes refuge in prevari 
 
168 
 
 GTJILDEIIOY . 
 
 cation or in downright falsehood. His character is irritated 
 and injured, and the woman who has worried him sinks far- 
 ther and farther from any chance of ever obtaining his true and 
 voluntary confidence. Love may he won and confidence may 
 he won, but neither can be bullied.” 
 
 “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 marriage ? That 
 you must care so much that you will give him an affection he 
 cannot get elsewhere. I admit that this requires self nega- 
 tion, self-control, self-effacement, in a measure which it is ex- 
 ceedingly 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 exact- 
 ing. 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 adhe- 
 rence to her memories. My dear child, life is not all a poem 
 nor all a playtime. It is often monotonous, 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 upbraid- 
 ing are bad weapons, and cut the hand which uses them. I 
 never thought that Lord Guilderoy was of a character which 
 would give you happiness. I did 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 
 inconstant ; they cannot help being so, any more than the 
 vane can help turning with the wind. But he has many lov- 
 able and generous qualities ; to you he has been exceptionally 
 generous : think of his finer nature and pardon him its weak- 
 er side. This 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 denunciation and a sympathy 
 which would not pause to weigh or analyze. Her heart was 
 aching bitterly with passionate pain which would have will- 
 
GtTTZDEROr. 
 
 im 
 
 Ingly 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 advice sounds 
 very chill and unsympathetic to you, no doubt ; but it is sound. 
 It is of no use to rebel against woes which springs 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 woman’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 ! ” 
 
 u I shall not weep, believe me,” she said bitterly ; and she 
 drew herself away from his touch and went across the pave- 
 ment of the terrace into the drawing-room which opened on 
 to it. The wax-lights were shining on the red satin wall- 
 hangings, the rococo furniture, the Chelsea and Worcester 
 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. 
 
 u It was not my fault,” he thought. “ I did what I could. 
 It was the old story — si jeunesse scivait! Ah! si jeunesse 
 savait , 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 position and great pos- 
 sessions, 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 
 which stand about the throne of life — honor, unselfishness, 
 and sympathy ; they are not the smiling angels which yo^th 
 loves best, but they have a comfort in them by a dying bed 
 
170 
 
 &UILDEROY. 
 
 Try that they shall always he 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 hand 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 impossibili- 
 ties ; he would be sorry, he would be touched, he would swear 
 to be 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. 
 
 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 per- 
 haps she was in truth very wise ; she gained what she wanted 
 in the end.” 
 
 “ She had certainly a very pitiful spirit.” 
 
GTJILDERO?, 171 
 
 “ Do you think so ? Patience and silence are never piti- 
 ful 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 do not.” 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 “We often complain,” continued Vernon, with some dream- 
 iness in his tone, “ that others do not care for us, or cease to 
 care for us ; and we seldom ask ourselves if the fault is not 
 ours, if we are not often irritating and even intolerable to 
 them ; if we try to understand them in what is opposed to 
 us ; if we endeavor to give them what they wish, not what 
 we wish. Love, which 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 jus- 
 tified.” 
 
 “Ah ! my dear, the cases are not parallel. Both psychology 
 and physiology will tell you so if you study them. Gris- 
 eldis no doubt had never studied either, but she was wise 
 enough to act as if she had.” 
 
 “When 1 was a child and read the story, I despised 
 her.” 
 
 <c Then there is something of true womanhood lacking in 
 you, my dear.” 
 
 “ Is true womanhood abject slavishness ? ” 
 
 “ It is infinite abnegation of self.” 
 
 Gladys laughed, and there was a sound of hardness 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 bills when they have it not ; they make 
 a fuss over a quantity of useless undertakings which they call 
 
172 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 charity, or politics, as their taste is, hut they never sacrifice 
 themselves for one second of their time ; when they take 
 their lovers it is with a view of selfiagrandizement by some 
 affair which 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 set** 
 tlements, the custody of her children, and the consolation of 
 the newspapers.” 
 
 “ You are rather cynical, my dear. It is not becoming in 
 a young woman, and it is not lovable in an old one.” 
 
 66 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 some- 
 thing naturally grande dame in you which would have re- 
 belled 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 }mu in it at seventeen, 
 but it would not have been lovety to see you in it at seven- 
 and-twenty. What the French call un beaumariage 'xsziitex 
 all a magic wand to a maiden.” 
 
 She did not speak, but she gave an impatient gesture. 
 Yernon looked at her earnestly. 
 
 “ Do you absolutely regret yours ? ” he asked. “ Would 
 you undo !t 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 very different kind.” 
 
 “ You have a curious tenderness for him,” she said, bit- 
 terly.” 
 
 “ I do not think I have any,” replied her father. “ But 
 
GUILDEEOY, 
 
 173 
 
 I confess that, as a man of honor, I feel that both you and 1 
 are bound to give him some indulgence in return for the con- 
 fidence he placed in us, and for the great gifts (though you 
 think them mere vulgar considerations) which he has lav- 
 ished on you in an affection, 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, the 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 conceive 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 him. She felt 
 for the first time in her life that she had in all the world no 
 judge so just but none so unrelentingly severe as her father. 
 
 The question which sorely perplexed John Vernon was not 
 to change or control the caprices of Guilderoy, for he consid- 
 ered 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. 
 
 What 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 con- 
 fine his existence within the limits of such emotions and such 
 actions as would be likely to please the ear and meet the ap- 
 proval of a woman as young as Glad} r s. There is an in- 
 stinctive movement towards freedom, an instinctive aver- 
 sion to self-confession, in the breast of every man who lias 
 not outlived his enjoyment of the warmth of passion and the 
 pleasures of liberty. 
 
 “But alas ! alas ! ” thought John Vernon, “so few women 
 are wise enough to know this, and still fewer women are un- 
 selfish enough to act on it ! Her dignity, her demands, her 
 sentiments, her desires, her injuries, and her rights loom so 
 large usually in a woman’s sight that she never sees beyond 
 them, and thus forever misses truth.” 
 
 The exceeding justness of his nature made him able to 
 
174 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 conceive the irritation that it would be to Guilderoy to ac- 
 count for all his hours to a woman as young, and as incap- 
 able of comprehending his errors, as his wife was : and he 
 could admit the innumerable temptations to inconstancy 
 which his fortune, his world, and his disposition combined to 
 make irresistible and continual 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 forever till his last hour. 
 
 u It can never be the same thing between a man and a 
 woman,” thought Vernon. u 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 narrowed to what is to be told to his wife. 
 Other women have claims on his silence and honor : 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 fidel- 
 ity is more stimulated than that of a husband, more tempted 
 to remain true because uncertain of its tenure. Dumas fils 
 and many other writers are fond of pretending that fidelity 
 should be equal in both sexes, but they only put forward a 
 wholly untrue and impossible thesis, and make women 
 wretched because they incite them to demand what both 
 nature and law will forever unite to refuse them ! 99 
 
 He was grieved that Gladys was no wiser, no more mag-, 
 nanimous 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 martyrdom ? 
 
 “ 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 
 
OtllLDEROT . 
 
 175 
 
 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 he the slightest embarrassment to him.” 
 
 Her father sighed as he heard. 
 
 Against indifference the gods themselves are powerless. 
 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 unobser- 
 vant indifference has no quality in it of that kind which cata 
 be roused and changed into devotion or remorse. 
 
 “ I think he even likes me ! ” she said with greater bitter- 
 ness still. “ I annoy him sometimes because I am not pli- 
 able, or facile, or amusable enough ; but on the whole he likes 
 me, and if receiving an innumerable quantity of presents 
 were happiness I should be in Heaven. What he does not 
 give in feeling he atones for in furs and jewels and bibelots /” 
 “ I hope,” said John Vernon gravely, “that you do not say 
 this kind of thing to anyone save to me ?” 
 
 “ISTo.” She colored and hesitated; her nature was full of 
 scrupulous truth, and baseness was 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 revolu- 
 tionary maenad, and is troublesome 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 honor and grave and lofty character* 
 
176 
 
 GtTTLDimOY. 
 
 Yet he said more seriously, after a pause, in which they 
 passed down the long white rose-colored colonnade, which 
 was a favorite 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 
 or feeling. Ily a une pudeur de Vame. That sounds a sen- 
 timental 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 ten- 
 dency 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 ! ” 
 
 “ I never said so, Gladys,” replied her father with some 
 coldness. 
 
 She was silent, conscious that she bad 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 in- 
 tuition too well not to be sure that he must see even as Aubrey 
 saw 5 and she was angered against him that he did not admit 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 177 
 
 it himself with the indignation and epanchement 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 over- 
 head 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 Ober- 
 manns in the indulgence of it ; and even if Goethe had less 
 contemplated himself, 1 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 immense Me.* What a charming 
 morning, my dear! How the birds sing, and the leaves glis- 
 ten, and the roses smile ! There is so much in life beside 
 our own passions and pains, if we could but think of it. 
 c Taut qu’un arbre poussera, ce sera bon de vivre! * Is 
 there not a certain truth in that ? ” 
 
 “ To a gypsy, 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 im- 
 possible. One may have a day like this now and then — 
 twice in the year perhaps — and then one realizes 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 quantifies of things to be done; ques- 
 tions 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 moorlands 
 lying high and purple in the heat; I used to notice every- 
 thing then, from the dragon-fly in the fox-glove to the cloud 
 
178 
 
 GUILDER OY. 
 
 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 
 
 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 realization of his forebodings did not con- 
 sole 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 gray 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 country sight* 
 and sounds ; seemed to her infinitely charming in its peace. 
 
GUILDS EOT . 
 
 179 
 
 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 gray, sad at- 
 mosphere of a sunless London day. The season was at its 
 height; everyone 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, hateful. 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 accumulation 
 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 tea-gown made like asacqueof Lady Mary Wort- 
 ley Montague’s from a picture by Kneller, she sat there and 
 glanced at her correspondence. 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 bask- 
 ets of moss, and thinking with a pang of how the sun was 
 slanting westward over the moors and the sands of Christslea, 
 and the little 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 southernwood. 
 
 If only she had never left these ! How much happier she 
 would have been, let her father say what he might ! 
 
 She sighed wearily as she breathed the heavy London air: 
 heavy even here, where all that artificial and natural fragrance 
 could do to sweeten and to lighten it was done. This beauti- 
 ful boudoir, with its walls completely lined by old Saxe china. 
 
180 
 
 GTJ1LDEROY. 
 
 its ceiling exquisitely painted with flowers, its windows 
 draped with lace and cream-colored 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 
 «md 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 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 medi- 
 cine for sick souls, only, alas ! we never have time to take it, 
 or we dilute it so with a mixture of the world that all its vir- 
 tue goes out of it ! How is your father ? ” 
 
 “ He is as well as he ever is,” said Gladys, and she colored, 
 for she remembered what her father had 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 midsummer day.” 
 
 And he told her stories of his stay there, and touched on 
 matters of foreign policy in which she had become interested 
 by her attendance at debates. But he found her pensive and 
 preoccupied ; she was troubled between her natural instinct 
 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 embarrassment. 
 “But he said that a woman should not have any friend ex- 
 cept her husband — that was all ; and that it was I who had 
 done wrong in complaining to you.” 
 
 “But when her husband does not care to be even her 
 friend,” thought Aubrey, bitterly, as he said aloud ; “ I think 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 181 
 
 your father is quite right in theory, my dear ; quite right as 
 a general rule. But, to begin with, I am Evelyn’s cousin 
 germain, and am as much interested as you are in his honor 
 and happiness ; and, in the second, I am neither a young 
 man nor a thoughtless one. Your father is not, unhappily, 
 enough with you to be your adviser in the world ; and I 
 think I may so far try to supply his place without doing or 
 saying anything for which Evelyn 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 confidence. 
 
 “ You would do very 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 lying 
 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 under 
 them was printed : — “Duchesse Soria, nee Princesse Bran- 
 caleone.” 
 
 “Ha!” 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 very handsome.” 
 
 “But we never saw her again, as we left Venice the next 
 day, and I fancied that Evelyn did not like her.” 
 
 “Did you? Why?” 
 
 “ He was constrained before her ; and he seemed angry 
 that I admired her.” 
 
 “Poor little innocent!” thought Aubrey. “It will be 
 something more trying to you than Olive Shiffton 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 char- 
 acter 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 
 
GUILBEUOY. 
 
 1.82 
 
 a few years ago. But I have only seen her in the world. 1 
 have no intimacy with her.” 
 
 “ It was very kind of her to think of me,” said Gladys 
 gratefully. “ I did admire her so much ; I was so young 
 and so shy ; I felt so foolish before her.” 
 
 “ Well, the shyness is cured,” said Aubrey, with his indo- 
 lent, indulgent smile. “But the youth is not quite over as 
 yet, is it ? ” 
 
 “ I feel very old,” she said with a sigh. 
 
 He laughed ; he did not wish to refer seriously to his last 
 interview 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 with little warmth, and asked, with 
 much more genuine feeling, of Vernon’s health. Gladys 
 was touched by his tone and pleased by his entrance ; it was 
 so very rarely that ever he came there. 
 
 “Perhaps it is as my father says — a great deal 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 display. 
 
 “ 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 Guil- 
 deroy 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, c 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 Guilderoy, 
 with some constraint. “ You know she has been en retraite, 
 Soria was killed by another Neapolitan, two years ago, in & 
 duel.” 
 
 “ And how came you to see her yesterday ? ” 
 
 “ I met her in the park,” 
 
GTJILDEBOY 
 
 183 
 
 This was all true to the letter, hut not to the spirit. 
 Gladys, however, was not at that moment critical. She was 
 endeavoring with all her strength to he agreeable and pliant 
 to him, as her father had counselled her to be. 
 
 That night she saw the Duchess Soria at a ball at Marl- 
 borough 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 Madame 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, 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 fishermens 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 promise to say 
 nothing.” 
 
 Aubrey looked at her with an infinite compassion which he 
 could not reveal. 
 
 “ It is always best to say nothing, whatever be the provo- 
 cation,” he answered. “These follies pass. They are be- 
 neath notice while they last. They are butterflies ; you can- 
 not 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.” 
 
184 
 
 GUILD EBOT. 
 
 “ 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 oblivion. For _ these few in the 
 garden of life, the roses once dead, few flowers have frag- 
 rance. 
 
 Olive Shiffton 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 Shiffton, and of all of 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, 
 perchance for life. 
 
 But it would have been of no use to suggest any danger of 
 this sort, even if his delicacy and honor had permitted him to 
 do so. Fate is cruel and contradictory 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 common even 
 in persons of the quickest perceptions and intentions, Guilde- 
 roy 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 that 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 reverential 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. 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 185 
 
 “ No ; he is not fond of her , not in the least,” replied Au- 
 brey. “ But he has that sentiment that his wife is a part of 
 his own dignity, of his own hono»r, which so long survives all 
 attachment, and exists even where no attachment ever was, 
 because it is a form of personal vanitjr. He may slight her 
 himself, but he will let no one else slight her ; that is not a 
 matter of the affections, but of amour propre and of family 
 pride. It is the same kind of sentiment which he has for 
 Ladysrood, though Ladysrood se bores him to extinction. 
 
 “ He deserves to lose both Ladysrood and his wife.” 
 
 “ Ah, my dear ! if we had all only what we deserve we 
 should be most olus very ill off ! ” 
 
 The season went on its course and closed without her be- 
 ing rudely awakened from this last illusion. Many saw in- 
 deed 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 indifferent 
 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 cliar- 
 meuse. 
 
 One glance of inquiring scorn from the lustrous eyes of. 
 Beatrice Soria, as they had passed slowly in review the at- 
 tractions 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 emo- 
 tion so keen as the dread least any gossip of the town should 
 reveal to the Duchess Soria the frivolous story of his latest 
 intrigue. His feeling for the colonial adventuress had been 
 so entirely awakened by physical attractions, had been so 
 absolutely void of any kind of higher feeling, or any shadow 
 of esteem, that it became very rapidly distaste or dislike the 
 moment that he felt that it might imperil for him the regard 
 and impatience 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 the sunflower to the sun that sets. 
 
186 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 He had met her often since the evening in Venice; hut 
 though he had been frankly admitted to her presence, 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 indifferent to him. All that he could see was 
 that, to all appearance, no one had succeeded him in her 
 affections. 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 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 acquaintance with him and with his wife 
 with all the pleasant welcome due to bonnes connaissances 
 in society. 
 
 The mystery, and what was to him the mortification, of his 
 ignorance of the feeling 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 exclusion of almost every other 
 thought. 
 
 He had not known what he had felt when he had heard of 
 the death of Hugo Soria, in a duel with another Neapolitan. 
 He could not still be sure whether he felt regret at his pow- 
 erlessness to replace him, or relief that it had been made im- 
 possible that he should do so. He was conscious that it must 
 increase tenfold liis 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 understood that she was 
 adhering to the strictest rules of mourning and retreat. Ru- 
 mor said also, that she had received a severe shock, when in 
 the gay, roseate sunshine 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 masqued 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. Guilderov could see the scene aa 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 187 
 
 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 fascination of 
 terror as the black-robed bearers approached with their bur- 
 den ; he could see it all as though he had been there ; he 
 never thought of it without a shudder, and he strove to think 
 of it as little as he could. 
 
 Two years had gone by since that time, and she had re- 
 turned 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 those 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 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 im- 
 mense personal fortune, her marvellous charm, her great so- 
 cial reputation, and her irresistible power over men ; could 
 now be wooed, possibly won, by every living man except him- 
 self. 
 
 When he recalled the words of his letter of farewell, 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 honor 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 
 relations, 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 ; 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. 
 
188 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 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 admitted 
 with many others, he had had no word or glance which dis- 
 tinguished 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, u Call on the Duchess Soria ; show her every defer- 
 ence.” 
 
 That in wishing her to go there he was transgressing 
 against those unwritten rules of custom and social habits by 
 which men of the world are 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 centered for 
 the time on the woman whom he had lost, that he was in- 
 sensible 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 knowledge only increased the bitterness of his morti- 
 fication, and the keenness of his anxiety to penetrate the 
 mystery of her feeling towards him. 
 
 “ What does she think of me ? ” was the wonder incessant- 
 ly recurrent to his thoughts. She baffled all his desires to 
 learn as effectually as she had done in Venice. Ever since 
 he had written that fateful letter in the library at Ladysrood 
 he had never heard, or received from her, one syllable beyond 
 
GU1LDER0Y. . 189 
 
 the serene and colorless phrases of an ordinary social inti- 
 macy. 
 
 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 ac- 
 quaintances 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 
 cypresses at Sorrento. 
 
 Meanwhile to his wife he was kind. He was grateful to 
 her for her sincere and frankly expressed admiration of her 
 great rival, and he was touched, even whilst he betrayed them, 
 by the unconsciousness and confidence 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 feel- 
 ings away from her yet made him so far sensible of her mer- 
 its that he saw more of her and spoke more to her than he 
 had done for months ; and she, attributing the change in him 
 to his rupture with Olive Shifft'on, 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 dis- 
 play their dominion than was she. “ When you are sure 
 yourself, what matters who doubts ? ” She thought now ; 
 she was herself wholty 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 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 cold- 
 
190 
 
 QUILDEBOY. 
 
 ness of patience which runs side by side with the fervors and 
 ardors 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 garden party at Sion House. They had walked on to- 
 gether 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 : — 
 
 Quod si forte alios jam nunc suspirat amores, 
 
 Tun, precor, indos, sancte, relinque focos.’ 
 
 “ She is more unreasonable, then, than other women are in 
 our day, whatever they were in Tibullus’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 ?” 
 
GUILDEROr. 
 
 191 
 
 u I think you would like him. He is not of our time. He 
 reminds one of those studious and lettered gentlemen 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 ? ” 
 
 u 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 Guilderoy’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. 
 
 u I do not think she is by nature grave,” said Aubrey. 
 u The world oppresses her. There are natures which suffer 
 in it ; suffer from its banalite , 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 ? ” 
 
 <e She is in love with her husband,” said Beatrice Soria-, 
 
 with a delicate intonation of scorn. “ When that passes ” 
 
 u It will not pass.” 
 u 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 it should be so.” 
 
 “ I ! ” The word was a haughty refusal in itself. 
 
 “ You disappoint me,” murmured Aubrey. (i 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 advocate 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 pleas 
 
192 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 ures of vanity, I believe in the consolation of children, and 
 I believe — perhaps — in the sweetness of vengeance. But in 
 these alone. Lady Guilderoy will, no doubt, have all these 
 consolations and pleasures. If she require her husband’s 
 fidelity also she will be disappointed. Ho doubt she will be 
 at first disappointed very much. But she will also no doubt 
 find out qv! on pent s’ en passer” 
 
 “ You are cruel to her,” said Aubrey, with a sigh. 
 
 “ My dear lord,” said Beatrice Soria, u men wish women to 
 behave to them with sultry heat of passion when they w T ant 
 passion, and with perfect absence of passion when they have 
 ceased to want it. They require the tropics one hour, the 
 poles the next. They want fire out of ice ; when they have 
 effected the transformation they wish the fire to become ice 
 again. How 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 contradictions 
 that they very often make a woman who was tender, malle* 
 able, and generous before, a very devil, because they have 
 put the devil of pain and injustice 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. 
 
 She knew that he was aware of her past relations 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 permitted him some frank expression 
 of his thoughts. But here he felt that his words had been 
 wasted. She was not a woman to be moved by entreaty or 
 suggestion from any desire or intention of her own. 
 
 Aubrey raised his hat and turned away as others ap* 
 proached and occupied her attention. 
 
 u Certainly he behaved very ill to her,” he thought ; and 
 then the paucity and insufficiency of such poor, trite, com* 
 monplace words to express the unutterable* ineffaceable 
 
GUILDEROY, 
 
 1 C:C \ 
 I oO 
 
 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 gener- 
 ous, tender, and magnanimous. He had inflicted on her a 
 wound into which all her best feelings and instincts 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 46 You have invited Mme. Soria ? ” asked Guilderoy, look- 
 ing 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.” 
 
 u 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 invitation conditionally ; it 
 
194 
 
 GUILDEROY , 
 
 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 , 55 said Gladys in her unconsciousness. 
 “ Pray do not forsake England so soon. Lord Guilderoy is 
 so very anxious that you should honor us in the country.” 
 
 “ Lord Guilderoy is always so amiable / 5 replied the Duch- 
 ess Soria. “ And when his ambassadress is one so irresisti- 
 ble as his wife, his wishes are always certain to be crowned 
 with success . 55 
 
 “ When she says those graceful things so beautifully does 
 she mean them, do you think ? 55 asked Gladys when she re- 
 counted the result of her mission to Guilderoy on her return, 
 from Court that day. 
 
 “ My dear child , 55 said Guildeoroy 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 . 55 
 
 u I should be sorry to think it was only that , 55 she sai I 
 wistfully. “ I should like her to like me . 55 
 
 “ Of course, she does like you ; she has told me so , 55 said 
 Guildeoroy 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 favor, 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 gracefully, of seem- 
 ing interested when we are bored, of seeming to approve 
 when we disapprove, to agree when we disagree, to make the 
 most uninteresting stranger believe that he is the salt of the 
 earth to us : that is what social amiability means, and you 
 never attempt to acquire it . 55 
 
 “ It is hypocrisy , 55 said Gladys, with scorn in her eyes. 
 u It is nothing of the kind. Hypocrisy intends to deceive. 
 Social amiability knows that it deceives nobody — at least no- 
 body 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 at- 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 195 
 
 mostphere. 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 
 imbibed her unfortunate ideas that to be virtuous and truth- 
 ful it is primarily necessary to be what Sunbury calls infer- 
 nally disagreeable. It is not my language, it is his ; and I 
 ought to apologise for quoting it, but it is really so inimitably 
 descriptive ! 99 
 
 Gladys colored 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 w;hat he considered the most unsym- 
 pathetic and uncompanionable of her sex ; she knew that 
 she had just been doing her uttermost to please him and to 
 succeed in her mission to the Duchess Soria ; and she felt 
 unbearably and intolerably wronged by the injustice of his 
 censures and the contemptuous impatience of his tone. 
 
 u 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 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 the 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 endeavored to dissuade you from your marriage 
 with me.” 
 
 Before he had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently 
 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 passion- 
 ate outburst of one whom he had always considered physically 
 cold and mentally unperceptive. 
 
 It was a scene : it was not ftie first which had taken place 
 between them, but it was the most embittered. There were 
 words in it which stung his conscience, and there were other 
 
196 
 
 guilderoT. 
 
 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 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. 
 
 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 apprehension the possible ap- 
 proach to him of his wife’s entrance into that stage of sus- 
 picion 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 consider- 
 ation 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. 
 
 t( 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 anyone 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 indolent Italian 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 received her gra- 
 cious 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 Soracte villa, and 
 dinners of delightful gaiety and wit in her house in the 
 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. All that London could offer 
 to her— and it is very much when it is in the mood— it offered 
 
0 (TILDE ROY. 
 
 19 r 
 
 in return. The staircase of her hotel was as thronged as the 
 staircase 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 with hothouse plants and 
 flowers. The London mists and rains 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 
 orchidse. 
 
 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. 
 
 “ Voildj le passe de la duc7iesse,” he heard a diplomatist 
 smilingly say with a glance at him as he passed. “ Qui sera 
 son avenir ? ” 
 
 The jest made him irritated and mortified. He had been 
 her past indeed ! — her all in all, her one exclusive 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 in future ? Anyone ? 
 
 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, inten- 
 sified besides 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 wag 
 now capable of becoming. And she had nothing in return 
 for him except the tcaich 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. 
 
198 
 
 GUllDEBOY ; 
 
 He had thought her chain too closely fastened on him, 
 and he had cast it off in a moment of impatience and fatigue; 
 hut now he felt that there were no dust and ashes of humil- 
 iation 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 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 
 right could not be resumed at will. 
 
 Meanwhile, no sooner had his wife 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 pa- 
 tience 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 jus- 
 tice of such truth must constitute, she knew, the heaviest ac- 
 cusation 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 ; u 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 be- 
 fore 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 as she could, every- 
 thing she felt, and go out to a great dinner. The 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 eye- 
 lids were swollen. 
 
 “ How heavy your eyes are,” said Aubrey, meeting her 
 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 
 
GUILLEROY. 190 
 
 nothing really hopeless except death. Whilst a person 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 deceive 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 at all 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 received with incredulity, 
 and wherein compensations and condonations go hand in hand, 
 and are rarely refused. How long would she be without learn- 
 ing 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 ? Selenen 
 ego crimine solvo. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 The essay on friendship had been finished, and had found 
 its way into print in a famous review, though its writer de- 
 clared it a mere spurious and worthless offspring of the Lysis. 
 Guilderoy had on more than one occasion amused himself with 
 casting his thoughts on paper, and the world assured him 
 that he might attain eminence in letters if he cared to do so. 
 But he considered this flattery ; and even had it been true, 
 he would have considered it far too much trouble to obey its 
 suggestion. 
 
 \ Aubrey read the essay when it appeared, and approved 
 of it. 
 
200 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “ Only allow me to say, my dear Evelyn,” he observed one 
 summer day at Ladysrood, when they were alone on the ter > 
 race, “ that it is odd that any man who has such admifVble 
 theories as yours, should go so utterly against them as yon 
 do. I know no living person who is so little heedful of the 
 feelings of others, or so little constant in his own feeling?), as 
 yourself. Pray forgive me the remark. I am no doubt l^ar- 
 ing good manners outside the temple of intimacy in pres Mur- 
 ing to make it.” 
 
 u You are quite welcome to make it, and no doubt it is tiue 
 enough,” said Guilderoy, who nevertheless was not pleased. 
 “ I see how things ought to be ; I do not pretend to make 
 them what they ought. I do not think that I am a false 
 friend as you imply ■! ” 
 
 u I do not think you are a friend at all,” said Aubrey. 
 iC You do not care about men’s friendship, and with women 
 you have, if you remark them at all, something much warmer 
 than friendship. But what I meant to convey is that de- 
 spite your admirable knowledge of the sensitiveness of the 
 human soul, and of what is due to it in intimacy, you en- 
 tirely neglect observance of those duties.” 
 
 “ What do you mean ? ” said Guilderoy, a little annoyed. 
 u What I say,” replied Aubrey. “ You know the duties 
 of a sympathetic friend, but I fear you never fulfil them.” 
 a We are not bound to put our theories into practice. If 
 we were, authors would be a race apart — the missing link 
 between man and the angels. 
 
 “ Yes, I suppose no writer ever did, except Socrates, and 
 he got poisoned for his consistency.” 
 
 “ And he was not a writer, by your leave, my dear scholar : 
 only a teacher.” 
 
 “ True ; but really, Evelyn, your theories are so charming 
 that you should attempt to carry them out in your own life, 
 and perhaps you would be the happier for doing so ; egotism 
 is tempting, but it is not always so happy as it looks.” 
 
 “ I am not more of an egotist than most men,” said Guilde 
 roy, moved to a certain irritation. Aubrey raised his eye 
 brows. 
 
 In what way am I ? ” asked Guilderoy with petulance. 
 u Pray let us speak as if we were at the bottom of her well 
 with Truth.” 
 
 “ With all my heart ; but Truth, like most ladies* wijf 
 probably move us to quarrel about her ” 
 
&UILDEUOY. 
 
 201 
 
 H Oh no, pray continue.” 
 
 “ We T l, have you ever lived for anybody, except yourself, 
 in your life ? ” 
 
 “For a little while I did,” said Guilderoy, honestly ; and 
 he sighed, for he was thinking of the first period of his lova 
 for Beatrice Soria. 
 
 “ Oh, no, you did not even then,” said Aubrey, who knew 
 what the sigh and the answer meant. “ It was all self-indul- 
 gence, almost all love is ; at least when it is victorious.” 
 
 “ How can you divorce self and the passions ? v 
 “ Not easily, I admit.” 
 
 Aubrey was silent a moment, then he said suddenly ; 
 
 “ Will you allow me to ask you one thing ? Do you think 
 your wife is happy ? ” 
 
 Guilderoy’s face flushed slightly. 
 
 “ She is not of a Aappy disposition,” he said, evasively. 
 “ The world does not amuse her. Then she has lost two 
 children ; and she has very over-wrought expectations.” 
 
 “ Of you ? ” 
 
 “ Of me, of human nature, of life in general. Because her 
 father has the virtues of a saint and a solitary, she expects 
 every man to be a Saint J erome or a Basil.” 
 
 “Between Jerome and Basil, and Lovelace and Wildair, 
 there is considerable room for something else ; they are at 
 the two ends of the ladder of human desires.” 
 
 “ She sees nothing between the saint and the profligate.” 
 “ A woman usually only sees extremes. But I do not be- 
 lieve she knows knows anything about profligacy, and I 
 think you could easily make her happy if you chose.” 
 
 “ My dear Aubrey ! ” cried his cousin with much impa- 
 tience. “If there is a parrot phrase which is absolutely 
 senseless, it is that about making a woman happy. She is 
 happy, and you are happy in her happiness and your own 
 spontaneously, sans chercher ni vouloir , just as birds are in 
 the summer woods, or there is no happiness at all for either of 
 you. Happiness is not a kind of pastry that you mix and 
 roll out and put in the oven till it is done to a turn. It is 
 an immense pleasure, born out of heaven knows what, half of 
 the senses and half of the soul, but no more to be stabled or 
 harnessed than Guido’s coursers that run with Aurora. 
 Happiness elaborately made would not be happiness ; it 
 would bear the traces of effort, and would be utterly without 
 charm.” 
 
m 
 
 GUILDER OY. 
 
 “Nevertheless, in your essay you admit that friendship is 
 a delicate plant, which requires a fitting atmosphere and cul- 
 ture ; so also is love surely ; neither will resist neglect.” 
 
 “Are you speaking of love ? I thought you were speak- 
 ing of my wife,” said Guilderoy, in that tone of indolent in- 
 solence which was often his shield when he did not choose to 
 be questioned. 
 
 Aubrey rose and did not reply. He did not care to con- 
 tinue the argument in that tone ; and he feared that he 
 should say too much if he said anything more. 
 
 “Why should you be angry ? ” said Guilderoy. “She 
 might be if she were here. I assure you it is the only word of 
 disparagement which I have ever permitted myself about her. 
 She is exceedingly handsome; she is immaculately good; 
 and she is the daughter of the man I most respect upon 
 earth. But all these excellent things do not make up happi- 
 ness. Happiness is the child of harmony, who the Greeks 
 tell us was the child of Eros.” 
 
 Aubrey remained silent ; he felt more anger in him than 
 he wished to betray. 
 
 “ You should have married her, not I,” continued his 
 cousin. “You would have suited her most admirably. You 
 would have buried yourself in the northern mists at Balfrons, 
 and a Blue-book would have occasionally visited you as your 
 only oiseau bleu.” 
 
 “ You certainly should not have ever married at all,” said 
 Aubrey, who did not care for those jests. “ Catullus puts 
 Eros and Hymen in the same strophe, but no one else ever 
 succeeded in doing so.” 
 
 “ And he did not do it in practice, only in verse,” said 
 Guilderoy. 
 
 “ Hush, she is coming to us,” said Aubrey, as he saw the 
 tall and slender form of the mistress of Ladysrood approach- 
 ing the terrace on which they were sitting; the old gray 
 stone terrace of the west front, of which the buttresses and 
 flights of steps were half smothered in Virginia creeper and 
 banksea. 
 
 Guilderoy rose, and with that graceful courtesy which he 
 never neglected, took off his hat, and gave her his seat, 
 which was the most comfortable of all the lounging-chairs 
 there. He stayed a moment or two speaking of trifles, and 
 then went away. She looked after him wistfully. She 
 
GUILDEROY . 203 
 
 would have preferred less elaborate courtesy, and more of 
 his time. 
 
 u I am afraid I have disturbed him,” she said with appre- 
 hension. 
 
 u Not in the least ; we were just going away,” said Aubrey, 
 hastily, as he thought : u Good heavens ! is he bored if he 
 has to talk to her for ten minutes ? And yet if she were any 
 one else’s wife, he would spend whole years at her feet I am 
 certain.” 
 
 For that one August day he was alone with them. On the 
 morrow some half-hundred of fashionable people were to ar- 
 rive and bring their London and Paris life into the green 
 gardens and old walls of Ladysrood, which always seemed to 
 its chatelaine in discord with them. But it was only by hav- 
 ing the world with him there that Guilderoy could be in- 
 duced to pass some of the late summer or early autumn 
 months at home. He loved the place in his own way, but 
 life in it wearied him more since his marriage than it had 
 done before, when he had been able to bring with him any 
 questionable preferences of the moment or else stay there in 
 that complete solitude which at rare intervals soothed and 
 pleased him. 
 
 Aubrey looked at her where she reclined in the long, low 
 chair. She wore a white wool gown without ornament of 
 any sort. Her figure was still very slender, but her bosom 
 was full, and her arms were rounded, her shining hair hung 
 in loose waves over her forehead and was coiled behind in 
 heavy masses fastened with a gold comb. 
 
 How strange it seemed to him that his cousin should pass 
 his life in almost absolute indifference to her ! The vision 
 which Guilderoy had in jest put before him of a happiness 
 which might have been possible for himself, made his eyes 
 dim for a moment as he gazed at her. But he quickly ban- 
 ished so enervating a fancy, and spoke to her. 
 
 “ I wish,” he said, with hesitation, u that you could in- 
 terest yourself more in the life which goes on around you. I 
 know you do not care for it ; your early life unfitted you for 
 it ; but it would be well if you could simulate some enjoy- 
 ment of it ; you would become more popular and Evelyn 
 would be better pleased.” 
 
 u Popular ! ” she repeated with the accent of some young 
 duchess of the eighteenth century, to whom some one should 
 have counselled remembrance of the mob* 
 
204 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 “ I think it is quite disgraceful/* she added, “ the way m 
 which all society, with princes at its head, courts popularity 
 nowadays. I should never have supposed you would have 
 cared for it.** 
 
 “ My dear child, princes feel their thrones slipping from 
 under them ; they catch at any straw. But I did not mean 
 popularity for you in any low sense of the word. I meant 
 that you would be more generally liked, and so more able to 
 exercise the kind of influence which you would wish to pos- 
 sess. When society is aware that you think it a flock of 
 geese, it revenges itself by hissing loudly behind your 
 back.** 
 
 a It is welcome to do so.** 
 
 “ Ah ! that tone is just what I oomplain of ; it is too 
 cynical, it is too unsj^mpathetic ; you are too young to use it. 
 When the worst is said of it, there remains a great deal that 
 is interesting and profitable to study in society ; and when 
 you know that Guilderoy is always anxious that you should 
 be admired and liked, I do not consider that you ought to 
 shut yourself up in a shell of apparent ill-humor, which is 
 not really in any way your nature.** 
 
 “ I think it is becoming my nature.’* 
 
 “ God forbid ! I hope you will soon have other children 
 with whom you can play on the lawns yonder, and be a child 
 again yourself. Then you will forgive society, which is 
 after all only a very sick and froward child itself, and breaks 
 all its playthings.** 
 
 Her face clouded, and she did not reply ; her brows were 
 drawn together in a frown, half sullenness, half sadness, as 
 she looked out from under her long curling lashes at the 
 green woods of the home-park which stretched in the dis- 
 tance as far as the eye could reach. 
 
 “ You see,** she said at last, “ I can never amuse him . He 
 does not even talk to me if he can help it. He is always 
 amused and interested with other women ; never with me.** 
 
 “Perhaps you exaggerate that fancy.” 
 
 “Oh no; I felt it in Venice that first year. I am tiresome 
 to him. No one can alter that. It is a calamity ; nothing 
 can change it.** 
 
 “ It is not an uncommon calamity in marriage. Incessant 
 association is so often fatal to attraction. It is no fault or 
 failure in either very often. Simply proximity has destroyed 
 charm. But I knew* dear, this sad philosophy can be no 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 205 
 
 comfort to you. It is as useless for consolation as the cold 
 physiological demonstration of a surgeon to a mother that her 
 dying child has had the seeds of death in him from his 
 birth.” 
 
 “ Certainly, it does not console me,” she said, with a bit- 
 terness which was growing upon her every year more and 
 more. “ Physiology and philosophy explain everything after 
 their own fashion ; but I never see that they make anything 
 any better.” 
 
 “No,” said Aubrey. “Whether we are suffering from 
 bodily or mental pain the diagnosis with which our physi- 
 cians interest themselves has little consolation for us, espe- 
 cially when it leaves us uncured and incurable.” 
 
 “ Tell me,” she said abruptly. “You have known him all 
 his life. Is there any woman whom he really loves ? Some- 
 times I think there is,” 
 
 “ I hope there is — yourself.” 
 
 She made a gesture almost of anger. “ Pray do not fence 
 with me, and spare me these fadeurs. One does not look 
 for them from you. Answer my question.” 
 
 “ I am not in his confidence,” replied Aubrey, which he 
 could say with a measure of truth at least. “ I do not think, 
 if you ask me my frank opinion, that he is a man who has 
 ever distressed himself with a truly great passion. Men who 
 merely seek in love their own self-indulgence are not lovers 
 in the romantic sense of the word ; they are not lovers like 
 Montrose or Stradella, or Chastellard. To Henri Quatre, 
 Petrarch would have seemed a poor fool.” 
 
 “ These are generalities,” she said, impatiently. 
 
 “ And you want personalities, like a true woman ? ” said 
 Aubrey with a smile. “Well, my child, you would not get 
 them from me ; even were I in possession of my cousin’s 
 secrets, which I am not. I think your greatest enemy 
 could do you no worse turn than to help you to try and rake 
 amongst the cold ashes of your husband’s caprices.” 
 
 “The ashes may be warm,” she said with impatience. 
 “ Or there may be fresh fires.” 
 
 “ If there were,” replied Aubrey, “ believe me you would 
 only make them burn furiously by throwing on them the phos 
 phorus of an irritated and inquisitive jealousy. Believe me, 
 dear, there is only one couvr e-feu to which a woman can trust 
 to extinguish a glow which offends her; it lies in her own 
 wisdom and devotion. And do not again try to make me 
 
206 
 
 GUiLDEBOY. 
 
 fill the office of tale-bearer. If I knew anything of his affair®, 
 which I do not, I would not descend to such an ignominy, 
 even to serve you.” 
 
 She colored at the implied rebuke, and was silent. 
 
 “ You p„re not so amiable as you were, my child,” said 
 Vernon to her on one of the days in which she was with him 
 alone for a few hours. 
 
 “ I daresay not,” she answered, almost sullenly. “ The 
 world does not make one amiable.” 
 
 “ That depends on disposition/’ he answered. “ On the 
 whole, I think people who live in it are more amiable than 
 those who live out of it. The friction with others and the 
 variety of interests which it offers tend to give tolerance, pli- 
 ability and good humor to the character. The world is to 
 men and women what school is to children ; at the expense of 
 originality and meditation it teaches social wisdom and mod- 
 erates over expectation.” 
 
 “ To some, at least, it teaches all forms of self-indulgence,” 
 she said bitterly. 
 
 Her father looked at her. 
 
 “ You are thinking of Guilderoy ? ” 
 
 “ Yes.” 
 
 “ Then I think you do very wrongly, my dear. He has 
 many better qualities than his self-indulgence, which is only 
 the necessary outcome of great freedom to enjoy pleasure. 
 Why not dwell rather on those ? ” 
 
 She said nothing. 
 
 “ I do not think you have followed the counsels I gave you 
 when you first returned here from Venice,” he continued. “ I 
 do not think you at all endeavor to do what I told you to do.” 
 
 “ What would be the use if I did ? He would only con- 
 sider that I bored him if I offered him any demonstrations of 
 attachment. No one can make the happiness of another 
 person when they are wholly outside the other’s life, as I am 
 outside his. I have not the faintest idea of his real interests, 
 his real desires, or of what he does in the time he is away 
 from me, which is by far the larger part of his time.” 
 
 Vernon sighed. He had foreseen it all as clearly as though 
 a magic crystal had shown it to him. 
 
 “He is kind to me in many things — ± do not deny it — and 
 very generous,” she continued. “ But I feel that I am only 
 wearisome to him, just as Ladysrood is ; though he loves 
 Ladysrood, and he does not love me.” 
 
&U1LDEB0T' 
 
 20 7 
 
 « Why should you think he does not ? After these years 
 you cannot expect the caresses of a lover. * 
 
 “ He never loved me — never ! ” she said sadly. “ It was* 
 a caprice. He has so many caprices ! He regrets the cost of' 
 this one every day of his life, I know, though he is a gentle- 
 man and does not say so.” 
 
 u Are you sure you are not morbidly fanciful, my child ? 
 Cannot you be content with the sense that you are much 
 nearer to him than any other woman can be ? ” 
 
 She smiled. The smile was not the one which had used to 
 come on her face. 
 
 “ I am much farther off him than any other woman is ! 
 He would tell any stranger anything sooner than he would 
 tell it to me. “ My dear father ! All that you say, they call 
 vieuxjeu in our world : that world which you think should 
 make me so amiable ! ” 
 
 “ I may have old-fashioned ideas, dear,” said Vernon, 
 pained by her tone, “ but however fashions change, I do not 
 think humanity changes so very greatly under them ; and 
 taut que le monde est monde , I think that a woman will 
 make her own unhappiness by exaggeration of her wrongs, 
 and that a great and genuine devotion on her part will touch 
 any man soon or late.” 
 
 <( You are an optimist ; he alwaj^s says so.” 
 
 “ Hoes he ? Yet I was very far from optimistic when I 
 endeavored to dissuade you both from your union.” 
 
 She knew that he had indeed done his best to prevent her 
 marriage, and she said nothing more. 
 
 u My dear,” he added very gravely, u the fatal mistake of 
 every woman is to weigh the man in her own scales. You 
 might as well say the rosemary growing yonder in the earth 
 has the same needs and the same habits as the sea-gull flying 
 over there. It is this horrible pretension, or mistake, or ig- 
 norance, whichever it is, in the minds of women which makes 
 their own misery in so much. I am afraid you are now mak- 
 ing it as so many of your sisters have done before you to 
 their cost. The man is all in all to the woman, but she can 
 never be all in all to him, except in ^ome few first hours of 
 delirium. The woman can receive no happiness, physical or 
 mental, save from her beloved ; but he can find pleasure, if 
 not happiness, with those whom he despises. “L’homme 
 aime pour le plaisir qu ? il rec^oit ; la femme aime pour le plai- 
 $ir qu'elle donne.” Possession and intimacy confirm and 
 
m 
 
 QUlLDEfiOr. 
 
 strengthen the passion of the woman ; hut in ninety-nine 
 cases out of a hundred they destroy the man’s passion alto- 
 gether, and leave at their best but gratitude or tenderness 
 behind them. These are painful truths which every woman, 
 my dear child, has to learn. The happy women are those 
 w\ 10 learn, and do not fret at the lesson. The unhappy are 
 those who incessantly strive to resist the laws of nature. 
 I want you to be happy. But happiness will not come by 
 any effort that you make to dwell, or to force a man to 
 dwell, in an imaginary haven of impossibilities. Nor will it 
 come through any turbulence or bitterness of jealousy.” 
 
 Again she did not reply. Her heart gave no echo to the 
 words, and she felt almost bitterness against her adviser for 
 the tolerant wisdom of them. u He is not a woman ; how 
 can he tell what one suffers ? ” she mused impatiently. 
 
 “ I suppose I erred in her education,” thought her father 
 with sorrow. “ I suppose I forgot that, though in so inno- 
 cent a way, yet she lived wholly for herself when she was 
 with me, and had nothing to teach her how to live for others. 
 It seemed to be very lovely and harmless, that flower-like life 
 of hers amongst the boughs and the birds ; I suppose I forgot 
 that it would not fit her for those colder realities which the 
 selfishness of every man makes the woman suffer from .when 
 his affections desert her. And yet I tried to make her some- 
 what wiser, somewhat truer than most women are ; and I used 
 to think I had succeeded. He has undone my work very 
 rapidly — he and the great world together.” 
 
 Gladys meanwhile left him with a sense of injustice done 
 to her. 
 
 The tender sympathy of Aubrey was more welcome to her 
 than her father’s uttered and implied censures. She felt 
 what she had said — that it was for no use of her to be prodigal 
 of her love for a man who was not so much ungrateful to it 
 as he was, from indifference, unconscious of it. 
 
 “ I care for him but then he does not care for me ! ” she 
 thought as she drove through the green twilight of the 
 Ladysrood woods. 
 
 Who could help that ? What effort could change a dead 
 passion into a living one ? Sooner would the buried bodies 
 lying in the thyme-scented graveyard which hung above the 
 sea at Christslea, arise and walk. 
 
GUILLEMOT , . 
 
 209 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 The next day Aubrey left Ladysrood, and Guilderoy went 
 to Paris for a week ; at the end of the week their first circle 
 of guests would arrive ; at the end of the second week there 
 were to come to them some royal personages, and with them 
 the Duchess Soria. 
 
 Gladys had five days of quiet and rural solitude before her. 
 
 She spent them almost entirely with her father. When 
 the great house was filled, the life in it was more tedious to 
 her even than London ; her time still less her own, her 
 patience and courtesy still more severely taxed. Whatever 
 society might be to others, to her it seemed a treadmill never 
 resting, a camisole de force never laid aside, a formula inces- 
 santly upon the lips, a conventional imposture never aban- 
 doned for a moment. She was a child still at heart, and all 
 its ceremonies and etiquette and precedence were to her as 
 the weight of her jewels and the length of her train had been 
 to her at her first day at Court. Oh, for one cri du coeur in 
 the midst of all those polished murmurs of compliment and 
 calumny, and dissimulation, and veiled indecencies, and 
 masked innuendo ! — so she thought a hundred times a week 
 in it. 
 
 Older women, women either colder in their affections or 
 warmer in their passions, could find interest and excitement 
 in its intrigues, and its conflicting and contrasting interests ; 
 they could move in it as in a labyrinth of which they had the 
 silken clue ; they could play in it like movers of pawns and 
 knights at chess. 
 
 But she could not find that distraction and compensation. 
 There was something in her of her father’s distaste for the 
 hurry, the excitation, the falsity, the intrigue, and the inci- 
 dents, trivial and serious, which make up the interest of 
 modern society ; they had no power to attract and absorb her. 
 
 In these few days preceding the arrival of her husband and 
 her guests she was soothed and strengthened by the quiet 
 country atmosphere, in that homeliness and tranquillity 
 which had been about her from her cradle. When she was 
 
210 
 
 GtllLDEROT. 
 
 with her father self-sacrifice and fortitude seemed still posw 
 ble. In the feverishness of the world she lost her hold on 
 them. He tried to make her see that there was nothing new in 
 what she suffered from ; nothing more than was usual and 
 inevitable. He tried to imbue her with that toleration and 
 indulgence which it is the hardest of all trials to attaii) in 
 youth. He could add little that was new to what he had said 
 when she had before consulted him ; but that little he strove 
 to put before her with sympathy and pity, though its philoso- 
 phic reasonings seemed very cold to her. 
 
 To the imagination which pictures, and the heart which 
 craves, richer, fuller, more complete joys than human passion 
 and human possessions can ever bestow, the assurance that 
 such perfection is but a dream, and that the passions can 
 only be the flower of a day, appears a dreary creed which 
 lays the whole world barren. 
 
 “ My dear child,” said Vernon, “ you have only found what 
 most women who know much about men do find, that the 
 man they love is seldom either Achilles or Hector, Sydney or 
 Montrose, either heroic or idealic, but is generally rather like 
 a sick and fractious child who cries for what he cannot get, 
 and beats the hand which tries to soothe him.” 
 
 She smiled but sadly. 
 
 “ My dear, I only speak thus of my own sex in their pas- 
 sions,” he continued. “ There are other things in life be- 
 sides its passions, though I admit that there are none which 
 color it so deeply, or so infuse into it, irrevocably, bitterness 
 or sweetness. But there are other things ; it is in these 
 other things that you should find your allies. Guilderoy is a 
 man whose whole life should not be squandered in falling in 
 love and falling out of love. He has position, opportunity, 
 talent : he should have as time goes on some other aim than 
 breaking the hearts of women, whether your heart or those of 
 others. It is with that side of his life that your alliance, 
 your efforts, your interests should be. Cannot you see that ? ” 
 
 “ I cannot see what does not exist,” said Gladys coldly. 
 
 He has no other object in life than his own pleasure. He 
 says it is the only wise philosophy. I suppose it is, when 
 you are rich enough to carry it out.” 
 
 “ It is the Epicurean; but what joy will there be in that 
 without youth ? He forgets he makes no provision for 
 age.” 
 
 She was silent j age to her seemed so far off, that it was 
 
GUILD EDO Y. 
 
 211 
 
 without shape or meaning in her eyes ; her whole soul was 
 concentrated in her present. 
 
 Her father looked at her. There were regret, anxiety, dis- 
 quietude in the regard. 
 
 “ Gladys,” he said abruptly, u he told me once that he 
 thought you were cold. You are not so. Far from it. 
 How have you given such an idea of you to a man who is 
 your husband ? ” 
 
 She pulled some little branches of the sweetbriar hedge to 
 her nervously. She did not reply. 
 
 u How ? ” repeated her father. “ You must have failed to 
 respond to him in some way ? You must have disappointed 
 him at some time ? You must have shut your heart away 
 from his gaze ? Will you not answer me ? ” 
 
 Her head was turned from him and her voice trembled as 
 she replied : “ I so soon saw that he cared so little.” 
 Everything seemed to her to be told in that. 
 
 “ Are you sure that was not your fancy ? ” 
 
 “ Quite sure.” 
 
 u Even when you spoke to me that first day after your re- 
 turn four years ago ? You remember ? ” 
 u Yes : even then.” 
 
 She sighed impetuously. 
 
 u Even then,” she repeated. He had paid a great price for 
 me and he regretted the price — just as he does again and 
 again when he bids for a picture at Christie’s, or the Hotel 
 Drouot, and it falls to him. The picture has never been 
 painted which could satisfy him when he gets it home ! ” 
 Yernon echoed her sigh. It seemed to him hopeless to 
 change a state of feeling built on caprice and on indifference ; 
 on a temperament as shifting as the sands, and a discontent 
 grown out of self-indulgence. He looked at his daughter 
 with irrepressible sadness. 
 
 It seemed such a little while ago that she had run along by 
 that sweetbriar hedge in the sunshine, no taller than itself, a 
 happy, careless, fair-haired child, fresh as a “ rose washed in 
 a shower.” And she was here — a great lady, an unhappy wo- 
 man : a jealous and almost deserted wife ! He had foreseen 
 it all himself, but his past prescience of it made its sorrow 
 none the lighter. 
 
 Gladys sighed wearily. 
 
 Like all persons of poetic and ardent mind her ideals in 
 youth had been high and romantic } the man who had knelt 
 
212 
 
 GUILD EROY, 
 
 at her feet in the library of Ladysrood with the Horse on her 
 knee and the sunlight through the painted panes falling on his 
 handsome head, had seemed to her lover, knight, and hero all 
 in one. And what had she found him ? Only a master, neg- 
 ligent yet exacting ; indifferent yet arbitrary ; restless, hard 
 to please, and quite impossible to content ; who took his in- 
 finite social and personal charms elsewhere ; who spent his 
 time and his passions with others, and who considered that 
 he had fulfilled all the obligations of his position to her when 
 he had given her his houses to direct and his family jewels 
 to wear. 
 
 “ Yes, my dear,” John Vernon said in his own thoughts, 
 silently answering her own silence, “you make the common 
 mistake of all women. You think that the gift of yourself 
 gives you claim to the man’s eternal affections. It does not, 
 It cannot. I know this seems harsh to you, and cruel. But 
 it is the law of sex. Here and there are a mes $ elite, who 
 suffice solely and wholly, physically and mentally, to each 
 other ; but they have not met early in life, and they have not 
 married each other. Where marriage is hostile to love, is that 
 it substitutes material gifts of worldly goods, worldly advan- 
 tages, worldly position, gifts of houses and money and land, for 
 the sweet spontaneous gifts of the passions and the affections. 
 In savage races the man can treat his wife how he will, because 
 he has given so many ponies, or cattle, or buffalo-skins, for her. . 
 In civilized life he feels in the same way that he has paid for 
 her in material matters, and so is absolved from other and 
 more spiritual payment. There is something to be said for 
 the man’s views, only where is the woman who will ever per- 
 ceive or admit it ? ” 
 
 But all this he could not say to her. 
 
 “ If you have living children you will be happier,” he said 
 aloud, as the only suggested consolation of what he could 
 think. 
 
 Her face flushed, and she rose and pulled the shoots of the 
 sweetbriar impetuously off their stalks. 
 
 “ I shall never have children,” she said in a low and sullen 
 voice. “ Do you suppose that I would live with him — with- 
 out his love — only because he wishes for legitimate offspring ? 
 Cannot you understand ? I have made him know that ever 
 since — ever since — I first felt that he did not care for me/’ 
 
 “ And he accepts the condition ? ” 
 u Wlm I tell you that he does not care ? 9f 
 
GTJLLDEHOY, 213 
 
 The color burned in her cheeks ; a dark cloud of anger 
 hung over the fairness of her face. 
 
 “ One sees it in the world, I know/’ she continued : u women 
 who goon bearing children year after year to men whom they 
 know care nothing for them, but they must be without spirit 
 or senses, or dignity or delicacy ; they must be the wretched 
 beasts of burden that your Griseldis was ! ” 
 
 Her father looked at her with infinite pain. 
 
 “It is worse than I thought/’ he said briefly. “I do not 
 know how far he may be to blame — he has never opened his 
 heart to me, and I cannot judge — but Ido not think thatyou 
 cherish the spirit which can bring happiness either to you or 
 him. And I do not think that you have any right to refuse 
 that natural burden of maternity which, however little you 
 knew of life then, you still knew would be your portion if you 
 married him.” 
 
 “ The moment that he has ceased to love me, he has set me 
 free from all such obligations,” she said passionately. “ My 
 little children lie in their graves. When I shall lie with them 
 he can have others by some other woman, who will be more 
 grateful for his gifts and his position than am I.” 
 
 “ You pain me, Gladys,” said Vernon, with a sigh. 
 
 “ I cannot help it,” she replied, selfish with that concen- 
 tration of self which the sufferings of the heart and passions 
 always entail. 
 
 “ When I am with you,” she said with the tears rising to 
 her eyes, “I am in much what I used to be. I feel your in- 
 fluence. I believe as you believe in the power of self-sacri- 
 fice and patience. But I leave all the good you do me with- 
 in this little gate. I cannot carry it out into the world. 
 There I am only foolish, jealous, embittered, made cold or 
 made wicked, one hour this, one hour that. In the world I 
 see that women who are forsaken find consolation. Why 
 should I not find it if I can ? One of your classic writers 
 says somewhere that a woman has always one power of ven- 
 geance. Sometimes I feel that I will try and reach his pride 
 with that, since I can touch in no better way his heart.” 
 
 Vernon was silent for some moments; he understood all 
 the conflicting impulses at w ar within her, and he was at 
 once too merciful and too wise to meet them with the 
 empty conventional arguments of what is called in the world 
 morality. He believed, like Aubrey, that it is Qxdy by the 
 affections that women can or should be ever led. 
 
214 
 
 GUILDEBOY. 
 
 “ Other women have done that,” he said at last, “and have 
 repented it all their lives long. 
 
 ‘ Graviora quaedam sunt remedia periculis . 9 
 
 We cannot wound what we love without wounding ourselves 
 more profoundly still ; and to dishonor ourselves because we 
 feel ourselves humiliated seems to me the act of madness ; it 
 would be as wise to cut our throats because the cold makes 
 our hands ache on a winter’s day. By what you tell me, 
 you have set free your husband by your own choice ; you 
 cannot complain if he construes his liberty with a man’s 
 liberal and loose reading of the word. You have been too 
 quick to consider yourself neglected, and too quick to repu- 
 diate your own obligations. You have beauty, you have 
 youth, and you have the honor of the man you love, or have 
 loved, in your hands. If with all tha?s you can obtain no influ- 
 ence on him, and cannot rise to a higher level than that of 
 your own personal affronts and suspicions, you are not what I 
 thought you; and all the care and culture! have given to you, 
 and all the efforts I have made to render you in some little 
 degree wiser and kinder than other women, have been lost. 
 To feel that it is so will be the crowning disappointment of 
 my life, which has been neither so tranquil nor so contented 
 as others think it. For I am mortal, and I have found, like 
 all mortals, that ‘ life is a series of losses.’ Do not let me 
 lose you at least.” 
 
 She was touched to the quick if she was not convinced. 
 The tears fell upon her father’s hand as she kissed it. 
 
 But she promised nothing. 
 
 “Do not let us talk any more of this,” said Vernon. 
 “Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under 
 the microscope too often whether you be living or dead. I 
 believe you will always live your own life in such wise as I 
 should most wish. In dishonoring yourself you would dis- 
 honor me ; you will remember that. Let us go down to the 
 shore. Nothing soothes one like the sound of the sea. Who 
 has been mistaken enough to say that Nature was not loved 
 in classic eyes ? Why, all Greek and Latin verse is full of 
 it, from the roar of the waves in Homer to the chaunt of the 
 grasshopper in Meleager, and the birds singing in the rose- 
 mary of Tibullus ! ” 
 
GUILDEROY \ 
 
 215 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 Yernon was seated a few days later in the wicker chair of 
 his garden, with a volume of Terence on his knee, and the 
 dog at his feet when the old woman in cotton kirtle and coal- 
 scuttle bonnet who served as letter-carrier for some twelve 
 miles round, brought him a packet of publishers’ letters and 
 newspapers, and pamphlets, and one other letter in a hand un- 
 known to him, and enclosed in the thick blue paper which 
 usually bespeaks a legal correspondence. When he read it 
 he found himself the master of a modest little fortune. A 
 very distant relation in the colonies, whom he had had no com- 
 munication from for twenty years, and of whom he had 
 scarcely every known anything, had died childless, and had 
 left him the proceeds of a long life of sheepfarming, “ because 
 he is the only honest man I have ever heard of,” said this 
 Hew Zealand Diogenes in his testament. 
 
 The letter of these lawyers, who were wholly strangers to 
 him, moved him to a mingled emotion. He could not but be 
 thankful that his future years, brief as they might be, would 
 be freed from the atroe curoe, of reliance on precarious literary 
 labors ; but his heart ached that this good news had not come 
 earlier. A reluctant consent had been wrung from him to 
 Gladys’ marriage, principally because he knew that the state 
 of his health might any day leave her without a protector, and 
 that he had not means to bequeath to her any ease or elegance 
 of life. This knowledge had made him conscious that he had 
 no right to stand between his daughter and the brilliant and 
 secure position offered to her, from mere romantic apprehen- 
 sions which the future might never realize. But if this little 
 fortune had come to him before the visit of Guilderoy, he 
 would not have hesitated to place the test of long probation 
 betwixt him and his desires. Alas ! when fortune stretches 
 out full hands, it is so often too late for her gifts to be of 
 much use. Still he was thankful, as he sat in the pale sun- 
 shine amidst the honeysuckle and sweetbriar of his cottage 
 porch. 
 
 He loved learning with all a scholar’s tender and delicate 
 devotion, and it had often seemed to him almost a prostitution 
 
216 
 
 GUILLEMOT. 
 
 of it to turn his command of its treasures into a means of mak« 
 ing money. A sentimentality the world would have called it, 
 as it always calls everjr better emotion in us. 
 
 As he sat thus he heard the rapid trot of horses* feet com 
 ing up the sandy lane, sunk low between high flowering 
 hedges and banks which were in spring purple with violets. 
 
 “ Someone from Ladysrood,” he thought. 
 
 Ladysrood had become full of guests, and Vernon never 
 consented to go there when there was a house party ; he 
 pleaded utter disuse of society, and distaste for it ; and, in* 
 deed, few of the associates of Guilderoy had much in com- 
 mon with him. And he had an unchangeable resolution never 
 to give any human being the right to say that he had grati- 
 fied his own ambition, and secured his own interests, by his 
 daughter’s alliance. 
 
 “ Why should you persist in remaining so aloof from us ? ” 
 Guilderoy had said to him that same morning ; and Vernon 
 replied * — 
 
 16 Why should I renew acquaintance with the great world 
 when it and I have been strangers so long ? My life must 
 seem to you like that of a snail or a mollusc, fastened under 
 a cabbage-leaf or a ribbon weed. But it is a contented one. 
 Can you say as much for yours ? ” 
 
 Guilderoy was at a loss what to answer. 
 
 “ You are the only contented person I have ever met,” he 
 said evasively. 
 
 “ I am content because I have done with expectation,” re- 
 plied Vernon. “ What is discontent? Only desires which 
 are incapable of fulfilment. I quite understand that the 
 whole tenor of modern life inevitably produces it ; that is why 
 I live chiefly with the dead.” 
 
 “ A waste of your great intelligence, and a deprivation to 
 those who appreciate your society,” said Guilderoy. 
 
 “ My dear Evelyn,” said Vernon, u I am not vain enough 
 to believe in your flattery. Whatever my intelligence may 
 be worth I can put on paper, and if any really care for my 
 society they can come to Christslea — as you come.” 
 
 Guilderoy colored a little. He was sensible that he same 
 but seldom there. And yet he had great affection and ad- 
 miration for John Vernon. 
 
 “ It is a very great pity that he remains such a recluse,” he 
 said once to Aubrey, who replied : — “ You think my life dis* 
 tressingly wasted on the country. You think Vernon’s 
 
GUILDEBOY , 
 
 217 
 
 iressingly wasted on solitude. He and I think yours distress- 
 in gly wasted on pleasure. Which of the three of us is most 
 right ? ” * 
 
 “ Probably we are all three extremely unwise to judge of, 
 and for others.” 
 
 “ That may very well he. Possibly, too, all life is more or 
 less wasted, because men, with all their studies, have never 
 studied the secret of truly enjoying it. Possibly, too, Ver- 
 non in his hermitage is nearer doing so than either you or I.” 
 
 But though he had never gone thither, those of the guests 
 3>f Ladysrood who had learning enough to appreciate it often 
 sought his society, and the little cottage under the apple or- 
 chards had become a sort of intellectual Delphos to those men 
 of genius and learning who were numbered amongst Gruilde- 
 roy’s friends. It was no one of these now, but Hilda Sun- 
 bury, who lifted the latch of the little wooden gate and came 
 under the wild rose boughs to him. 
 
 Having begun by hating him as an adventurer and an ec- 
 centric solitary, she had ended in admiring him and esteem- 
 ing him. “ The only really sensible man I ever met ” she 
 often averred. 
 
 Vernon, on his part, liked her; he appreciated her strong 
 attachments and her strong common sense, which yet so 
 denied her those true charms — sympathy and the power of 
 silence. She had now driven over alone, ostensibly to consult 
 him about one of her sons, but in reality for another purpose. 
 When she had spoken of her son, of politics, and of the 
 weather, she hesitated a moment, and then said : — 
 
 “Mr. Vernon, you and I have one common object and de- 
 sire, the happiness of my brother and your daughter.” 
 
 “Certainly, my dear lady,” replied Vernon ; “but if you 
 mean that either you or I can do anything except wishing 
 for it, you are greatly mistaken. I have told you so very 
 often.” 
 
 “ A word in season surely ” 
 
 “Ah, no! It is just those words which are always most 
 aggravating ! I am sure you have some bad news for me. 
 Spare me, and tell it quickly.” 
 
 “ I ought not to tell you at all. But you have heard of the 
 Duchess Soria ? ” 
 
 “ Never.” 
 
 She gave him the outlines of the Duchess Soria's past, ss 
 
218 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 far as it had been connected with her brother ; and Vernon 
 heard with impatience. 
 
 “ It was broken off before his marriage, no 'doubt,” he said, 
 “ Why rake amongst dead leaves ? ” 
 
 “ Because leaves grow again.” 
 
 “ You mean ? ” 
 
 “ That Evelyn is more in love with this woman than he 
 ever was before, and that she comes to Ladysrood to-morrow. 
 Now what I wish to know is, shall you or I tell your daugh- 
 ter ? ” 
 
 Vernon heard with infinite pain. 
 
 “I knew how it would be,” he murmured. “But I con- 
 fess it is sooner than even I thought. My child is worth 
 more than that. Perhaps you mistake T ” 
 
 “ I never mistake,” she replied, with hauteur $ “ and if I 
 sacrifice the reputation of my brother to you, it is out of 
 sincere regard for your daughter.” 
 
 “ What do you want me to do ? ” 
 
 “Whatever you deem best. She must certainly not be 
 
 left to remain in ignorance, to receive Beatrice Soria ” 
 
 Vernon sighed. 
 
 “Dear madam, it is only ignorance — unless most wondrous 
 and perfect patience — which enables any woman to endure 
 her married life at all.” 
 
 “ You mean, then, you would leave her in ignorance ? ” 
 
 “ Yes. What good could knowledge do if it be as you 
 think ?” 
 
 “ Good heavens ! Surely there is such a thing as self- 
 respect ? ” 
 
 “Yes-; my child will always have self-respect, for she will 
 never, I am convinced, do anything to lose the respect of 
 others. Self-respect does not consist in making violent 
 scenes, or ill-judged reproaches, or discoveries which are for- 
 ever fatal to peace.” 
 
 “ You take the insult to your daughter strangely quietly.” 
 “ I have known the world in my time, my dear madam, 
 and I read your brother’s character before he had been ten 
 minutes in my study ; it is not a character from which any 
 woman can expect constancy. I thought, however, that he 
 was a gentleman : if he is as insincere and as unscrupulous as 
 you describe he is not one.” 
 
 “Not a gentleman!” 
 
 Lady Sunbury flushed crimson, and rose in bitter anger. 
 
GUILDJEBOTo 
 
 219 
 
 “ Hot if what you tell me is true.” 
 
 “ I did not tell you that he might be abused, but argued 
 v/ith ; and that your daughter might be warned and coun- 
 selled.” 
 
 John Vernon sighed wearily. 
 
 “ Dear Lady S unbury, you and I both spent all our intelli- 
 gence in warnings and in counsels before this marriage took 
 place. Action, now that it has taken place, would be worse 
 than useless.” 
 
 “My intentions are misunderstood,” said his visitor cold- 
 ly. “ All my inclinations would, of course, lie towards 
 screening and excusing my brother. But I thank God that 
 I have never allowed mere inclination to be the guide of my 
 conduct. I believe in duty, though I know the world of our 
 day ridicules and despises me. and my sense of duty made 
 me feel that I could not allow my sister-in-law ignorantly to 
 receive her most formidable rival.” 
 
 “I thank you for your feeling for Gladys,” said Vernon, 
 with emotion, “but neither you nor I should do any good in 
 lifting the band off her eyes ; it will fall soon enough of 
 itself. Besides — pardon me — you cannot tell that Guilderoy’s 
 feelings have revived for this lady. He cannot have told 
 you, I presume ? ” 
 
 “He has not told me, certainly. But I have always taken 
 means to be aware of my brother’s actions, and I know that 
 all relations are renewed between him and the Duchess 
 Soria.” * 
 
 Vernon covered his eyes from the sun with one hand. The 
 calm sweet light and the gay song of the mavises in the ad- 
 jacent orchard hurt him. 
 
 “ It is very sad if true,” he said at last. “ But interfer- 
 ence were worse than useless. It would only confirm your 
 brother in his infidelity, and inspire in my daughteT a resent- 
 ment which she could never forget. Dear madam, believe 
 me, marriage is a difficult thing. But, as law stands, we can- 
 not undo one once contracted without publicity, comment, in- 
 terrogation, every indignity which it is most frightful for 
 either a proud or a delicate nature to provoke. What then 
 remains ! Only to leave such peace as there is in it undis- 
 turbed as long as we can. I know that you believe in the ad- 
 vantages of interference. Ido not. When we are sure to do 
 any possible good by it, it is a dangerous meddling with fates 
 riot our own. When we cannot even be sure of so much as that 
 
220 
 
 QUlLLEROt. 
 
 we certainly cannot dare to attempt anything. Your brothers 
 wish for my daughter’s hand was, as you know, most unwel- 
 come to me, because I knew that he had not the stability, 
 nor she the experiance, to make happiness between them pos- 
 sible ; but since, unhappily, she is his wife, she shall not, I 
 promise you, whilst I live, allow either passion or injury to 
 fling his name to the howling calumnies and cruelties of the 
 world : not whilst I live.” 
 
 There was a great sadness in the three last words, and he 
 sighed as he said them. 
 
 u When I am gone be kind to her,” he added. 
 
 “ Where are you going ? ” 
 
 u Where we must all go.” 
 
 Hilda Sunbury looked at him in surprise and wonder. 
 
 “ Why should you speak so ? You are as likely to live 
 as she or I. You are in the full vigor and flower of your 
 intellect.” 
 
 John Vernon smiled. 
 
 “ Of my intellect, perhaps ; but, unhappily, living is a 
 physical question, and when the body succumbs the light of 
 the mind goes out too. I have always thought it the greatest 
 argument for the immortality of the soul ; for it is really 
 ridiculous to suppose that the hemlock could really destroy 
 such a mind as Socrates, or that the genius which created 
 Ariel and Caliban can have been killed forever because 
 Warwickshire leeches in the Elizabethan days were fools. 
 Plato, indeed- ” 
 
 Lady Sunbury rose in evident irritation. 
 
 “ Socrates and Plato ! Good heavens, Mr. Vernon, how 
 can you possibly think of such people when I have just told 
 you, at the greatest pain to myself, and perhaps even disloy- 
 alty to my brother, of what wrong is being done to your only 
 child ! ” 
 
 u My dear madam,” said Vernon wearily, ic if my child ul- 
 timately succeeds in keeping the honor of your brother’s name 
 intact, and bearing her own pain and dishonor in silence, she 
 will owe it to that which I have told her in childhood of those 
 two dear dead friends of mine. Perhaps you have never 
 read the Apology or the Crito ? Horace has said that a new 
 amphora keeps long the odor of the first wine poured in it ; 
 and as it is with the earthen vase, so it is with the human 
 mind in youth,” 
 
QUILLBftOY. 221 
 
 Lady Sunbury left the garden of Christslea with of- 
 fence. 
 
 She reflected that it was always wholly useless to look for 
 practical wisdom from the students of books. 
 
 She had been born with an ungovernable love of interfer- 
 ence with the affairs of others. She believed so conscien- 
 tiously in the excellence of her attentions, that she was sin- 
 cerely ignorant of the curiosity, love of authority, and 
 many another personal motive, w r hich were continually mov- 
 ing her to interfere, to govern the destinies and correct the 
 errors of others. Her detestation of the Duchess Soria had 
 been to the full as potent in her present action as her anger 
 with Guilderoy and her indignation for the wrongs of his 
 wife. Like many another woman of energy and exclusive 
 attachments, she could not resist the feeling that she had 
 been appointed by Providence to watch over, and save from 
 themselves all those who belonged to her : and though this 
 view of her mission had never yet had any other result than 
 to alienate and weary those whom she desired to serve, and 
 frequently to hasten their descent down that path which she 
 sought to prevent them from ever following, yet she never 
 could so alter her nature as to refrain from making the at- 
 tempt. Her husband hated, her sons feared, and her brother 
 often avoided her in consequence, but no power on earth 
 would ever have persuaded her that her failure to influence 
 them arose from her own fault. Alas ! most people carry 
 about with them a lanthorn like Diogenes, but they are for- 
 ever flashing its rays into the faces and the souls of others ; 
 they do not remember to turn its light inward. 
 
 Lady Sunbury indeed knew — no one better — that a woman 
 can no more restrain a man from inconstancy than she can 
 restrain the breakers of the sea from rolling up on to the shore. 
 She knew, too, by her own experience, that rebuke, reproach, 
 expostulation, publicity, only increase the evils against which 
 they passionately protest. But she did not choose to remem- 
 ber anything of what she knew. She was only ready to 
 blame her brother's wife for too passive acquiescence, as she 
 would have blamed her had she had recourse to any violent 
 indignation. She could not pardon her for having gained no 
 influence over Guilderoy, even as she would never have for- 
 given her had she succeeded in gaining any. She knew that 
 her sister-in-law was unhappy, and that such unhappiness 
 was at her age perilous in every kind of way ; but yet «hf 
 
222 
 
 GUILDEROY - 
 
 was rather impatient of her and critical of her than comp*,a 
 sionate. If she were not a simpleton she was wicked — quite 
 wicked — not to take such measures as would save her hus- 
 band from unfaithfulness and herself from sorrow. 
 
 And she, who had forgotten the saying that “ fools rush 
 in where angels fear to tread,” or else never imagined that 
 by any possibility she could be classed with fools, drove rap- 
 idly home to Ladysrood, where a large party was staying as 
 well as herself. “ It will be very difficult to see her alone,” 
 she thought, “but I will try.” 
 
 As it chanced, Guilderoy was out riding with several of 
 his friends ; the remainder of the guests were sitting, saunter- 
 ing, or playing afternoon games in the west gardens. There 
 was a large table spread under one of the great chestnuts, 
 where servants were serving tea, ices, fruits, wines, straw- 
 berries and cream — everything that was wished for or imag- 
 ined. Gladys was performing the part of mistress of a great 
 house, which had now become second nature to her, but which 
 never ceased to oppress and fatigue her with its tedium. 
 
 Society, like all other pursuits of life, requires to have an 
 object in it to be interesting. She had no object ; it did not 
 seem to her that anything of interest could possibly arise in 
 her life. She had pain in it, and a jealousy for which she 
 contemned herself, but these had both become so familiar by 
 habit that she had ceased to expect ever to be free from them. 
 Her want of interest in what went on around her gave her a 
 listless air, which all her really sincere efforts to be kind and 
 courteous could not repair. People felt that they were in- 
 different to her, that they bored her, that she would have pre- 
 ferred their absence to their presence, and there were many; 
 whose vanity made them bitterly resent this. She was mov- 
 ing now from one group to another, doing her best to be 
 amused by what so greatly amused everyone else, and failing 
 entirely to be so. She wore a Gainsborough hat, with long 
 feathers drooping to her shoulders ; she had on a white frock 
 of very soft embroidered gauze tissue, and a great sash of 
 broad pale blue ribbon was fastened at the side. 
 
 “ She is really a lovely creature,” thought her sister-in- 
 law. “ How wild he would be about her were she only some 
 one else ? s wife ! ” 
 
 Lady Sunbury joined the groups under the chestnuts and 
 bided her time. It was still early. There was a great deal of 
 laughter and flirtation and general diversion, the air was balmy ? 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 223 
 
 und the gardens delightful. Someone asked if they might dance* 
 the lawn was so smooth. The lady of Ladysrood assented ; the 
 musicians* who were always in the house* were sent for and 
 stationed where they were not seen* behind thickets of rho- 
 dodendron ; the people began to dance. 
 
 Gladys and Lady Sunbury were left almost alone. 
 
 “How strange that they can care for that!” said the 
 former* with dreamy contempt* as she watched the valsers 
 moving round. 
 
 “ How I wish you cared for it* my dear ! ” said Lady Sun- 
 bury. “ How I wish you cared for anything ! ” 
 
 “ Ho you ? ” Gladys looked suddenly at her with a strange 
 expression in her eyes. 
 
 “Certainly I do*” said her sister-in-law. “You would be 
 so much happier if you were — were — interested in what goes 
 on around you.” 
 
 “ I am very often interested ; I am not often pleased.” 
 
 “What does she mean ? ” thought Lady Sunbury. 
 
 “ I wanted to say something to you for a moment in pri- 
 vate. Could we go a little apart* do you think ? They ar© 
 all dancing.” 
 
 “Oh* yes. They will not miss me.” 
 
 She moved away from the gayety of the scene into a walk 
 known as the King’s Alley* because Charles Stuart had 
 paced up and down it in the dark days between Oxford and 
 Whitehall. It was a green walk enclosed on either side with 
 tall walls of clipped yew* above which stretched and met th e 
 boughs of massive beeches. It was sequestered and out of 
 earshot* though the music of the waltz came to them on the 
 air as they paced dowrn it. 
 
 “ You care for your father ? ” said Lady Sunbury. 
 
 “Ah ! ” It was an ejaculation rather than a word, but the 
 whole love of a lifetime was in it. “ It is no ill of him you 
 want to say, is it ? ” 
 
 “ Oh, no*” said her sister-in-law. I went to see him this 
 afternoon. I wanted him to tell you something which must 
 be told you. But he refused.” 
 
 “Be sure that it should not be told at all* then*” said 
 Gladys* coldly. 
 
 “Mr. Yernon is not infallible*” replied Hilda Sunbury, 
 growing angered. “ I consider that it should be told, and I 
 am the best judge of what is or is not for the honor of my 
 family. I do not wish you to receive the Duchess Soria.” 
 
224 
 
 GUILDEKOT. 
 
 Gladys stood still and looked at her. 
 
 “ Why ? ” she asked. 
 
 “ Because — because my brother was her friend— more than 
 her friend — before his marriage.” 
 
 “My dear Lady Sunbury,” said her brother’s wife very 
 calmly, “ if I am to decline to know all the women your 
 brother honored in that manner, I shall have to make great 
 excisions in my visiting list.” 
 
 “ Good heavens ! Can you make a jest of it ? ” 
 
 “ No ; God knows that it is farthest from my thoughts. But 
 the world would make a jest of him if I acted on your ad- 
 vice.” 
 
 “Do you mean to say that you were aware of what his re- 
 lations were with Beatrice Soria ? and what they have again 
 become ?” 
 
 Gladys grew very pale. 
 
 “I knew there was something — someone — it does not 
 matter who — it is not the first time.” 
 
 Her voice was faint with pain, but her face was calm. 
 
 “ Are you sure that it is Mine. Soria ? ” she asked, after a 
 moment’s pause. 
 
 “ Perfectly sure. You cannot let her come here ; you must 
 make Evelyn understand that. I speak as I do for your 
 honor and his.” 
 
 “ Or for our estrangement,” thought Gladys bitterly. 
 
 “ My father said I was not to be told this ? ” she inquired. 
 
 “Yes. He said it could do no good. He did not appre- 
 ciate my motives — my sense of duty.” 
 
 “ Neither do I,” said Gladys, abruptly ; and she began to 
 walk on under the beechen shadows. 
 
 “ I am sorry that you do not,” said Lady Sunbury, sternly. 
 “You are nothing to me, and my brother is much. But 1 
 could not see a wrong done to you under your own roof while 
 I could save you from it by a word of warning. It was useless 
 to speak to Guilderoy ; he is self-willed, careless, obdurate, 
 where his fancies are involved. I deemed it best to put you 
 on your guard. If you tell him you refuse to receive the 
 Duchess Soria he will be compelled to acquiesce, and he will 
 not ask your reasons, and he will be saved from the world’s 
 condemnation.” 
 
 Gladys said nothing in answer. She continued to pace 
 alley with agitated, quickened^steps. 
 
GXJILDEEOY, 225 
 
 “ Have you a personal dislike to Mme, Soria ? ” she asked, 
 abruptly. 
 
 “ That is a very unworthy insinuation,” replied her sister 
 in-law, with hauteur. “ This much I will say of her — she is 
 the only woman on earth who ever really influenced my brother. 
 You must be aware that you yourself have no more influence 
 over him than if you were a statue. Of course I do not know 
 whether that is his fault or yours.” 
 
 Each one of the words went to the heart of the hearer as 
 if it had been a stab with a knife. Had it been her fault ? 
 Her father had also seemed to think so. Her sister 
 in-law evidently thought so. What did women do to 
 retain the passion and elicit the confidence of men ? 
 She could not tell. Who could put in her possession the 
 secret of that marvellous talisman ? She turned to her com- 
 panion with composure, though her lips were very pale 
 
 “ I have no doubt you mean well, though you might find 
 it hard w T ork to persuade Lord Guilderoy that you do so. 
 Mme. Soria does not come for three days. In the morning I 
 will go to Christslea and consult my father.” 
 
 u Your father will certainly counsel you to keep the role 
 of Griseldis,” said Lady Sunbury, with ill-repressed rage and 
 violence. 
 
 Gladys’s face flushed painfully. 
 
 “ If I do keep it,” she said with bitterness, u it is certainly 
 the members of your house who should be grateful to me.” 
 Then she walked with quick firm steps away from her 
 sister-in-law, out of the shade of the beech-alley, and towards 
 4he dancers in the sunlight on the lawn. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 John Vernon, having accompanied his visitor to her cats 
 tiage, had walked slowly back to his little house. He had 
 , felt infinitely more emotion than he had shown to her, for 
 although not unexpected, the tidings she brought to him had 
 been none the less cruel. And he felt, as he had said to her, 
 that all intervention would be useless, worse than useless. 
 When two lives are drifting apart, their own regrets or re* 
 
226 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 lentings can yet unite them, but the interference of any other 
 can only send them wider asunder. 
 
 He sat down again in his willow chair, with the sunshine 
 about him and the bees buzzing in the honeysuckles. His 
 left hand was still closed unconsciously on the letter from 
 his dead cousin’s lawyers. The emotions of pleasure and 
 pain had exhausted him ; they were the perils against which 
 he had always been warned. His tranquil life amongst hi* 
 books had alone preserved so long his fragile cord of life. 
 
 As he looked at the gay sunshine with the gnats and the 
 dies dancing in it, the tangle of green boughs through which 
 the blue of the sea was shining, the fragrant sweetbriar and 
 southern-wood where two little blue tomtits were flitting, to 
 him there seemed so much — ah, how much ! — that was un- 
 utterably beautiful in existence. Why would youth and 
 manhood fret themselves away in the fierce and heated fur- 
 nace of passions, which were no sooner attained and enjoyed 
 than they lost all power to charm ? If youth would only be- 
 lieve how much else there is to enjoy ! If age, which does 
 know, had not lost the power to enjoy all ! 
 
 u Sijeunesse savait! sivieillessepouvait ! ” he murmured, 
 in the old trite, true, sad words of human existence which 
 has no sooner time to learn its secret than it has to pass 
 away where there is no more use for its hardly acquired 
 knowledge. What cruelty and mockery there were in this 
 brief saying ! If he could only put his own knowledge, his 
 own patience, his own experience into the heart of his child ! 
 
 He felt tired and sad, and the pleasantness of the little gift 
 of Fortune which had come to him was forgotten in an ach- 
 ing anxiety for the fate of one dearer than himself. 
 
 “ If she be ever be forced to leave him,” he thought, u she 
 will be too proud to keep her dowry and she will have this to 
 live on ; it is well so far.” 
 
 The afternoon was very warm and sultry ; there was no 
 sound but of the buzzing of the bees and the murmur of the 
 sea on the shore. He listened to that sound, which seemed 
 like the beating of the heart of Nature. 
 
 u If we could listen more to that and less to our own, we 
 should be happier while we live, and readier for death,” he 
 thought, as he leaned his head back in the chair and closed 
 his eyes. He felt very weary. He rested there very quietly. 
 
 The hours passed and the sun sank down, and the little 
 
GUILDEROY. 22t 
 
 birds in the sweetbriar and southern-wood began to think of 
 their bedtime, safe under their abode of leaves. 
 
 The dog at his feet looked anxiously up at him from time 
 to time. The reflection from the setting sun shone on his 
 face, which was very white and very calm, and there, when 
 the shadows of the evening came about him, his old servant 
 found him sleeping. He had died in his sleep without a 
 pang. There was the shadow of a smile on his pale lips. 
 
 He had gone in peace to the great majority, whither had 
 gone before him the great souls whom he had loved in life. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 At Ladysrood the long dinner was over by half an hour ; 
 the drawing-rooms were filled with gay groups ; there was 
 the sound of pleasant laughter and of sweet voices, and of the 
 beautiful melody of Wagner’s Spinning Chorus, which was 
 scarcely listened to or heeded by anyone. In the midst of 
 that soft animation and polished mirth, the groom of the 
 chambers, bending low to his master, murmured an almost 
 inaudible word ; Guilderoy grew very pale, and with a hur- 
 ried phrase of apology, left his guests. In the library he 
 found the old gardener of Cliristslea. who had come thitherto 
 tell him that John Vernon was dead. 
 
 “ God forgive me ! ” was his first thought. “ Will heeYQT 
 forgive me if he be gone where he can know all ? ” 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 * My child you and I have lost the best friend we had on 
 earth. Let us endeavor to live together as he would most 
 have wished us to do, r said Guilderoy with sincere emotion f 
 tvhen he had left all that was mortal of John Vernon in thg 
 little graveyard by the sea at Christslea. 
 
m 
 
 6 till DEB or. 
 
 She sighed ; she did not respond. 
 
 The party at Ladysrood had of course been broken up im- 
 mediately, and there was no question for the moment of the 
 arrival of the Duchess Soria. Of the personal impatience 
 which he felt at this disappointment to himself, Guilderoy 
 gave no sign to his wife. He was sincerely sorry for he^ 
 and he forebore from any kind of word or hint which could 
 have added to her sorrow. He was for the first time in his 
 life wholly unselfish. But the consciousness that he was do- 
 ing his duty did not prevent the tedium of those solitary days 
 of mourning from weighing heavily on his spirits, and taxing 
 his patience cruelly. He was wholly unused to either the 
 sensation or the spectacle of pain. 
 
 In the overwhelming shock and grief to her of her father’s 
 death, all other memories and feelings had been for the time 
 forgotten or thrust aside. Guilderoy had shown to her in 
 her suffering a genuine tenderness and sympathy, which had 
 been wholly unaffected, as he himself bitterly regretted the 
 loss of one whom he had regarded with affection, and whose 
 loss was irreparable he knew to her, perhaps to them both. 
 The cottage at Christlsea had been the one temple of peace in 
 which neither of them would ever have been ashamed to con- 
 fess error and seek reconciliation. But John Yernon was 
 dead, and all that remained to them of him were his books 
 and papers — his written and printed thoughts — and the letter 
 which had been found in his dead hand. 
 
 He was moved to greater regret when he read and arranged 
 the innumerable papers which Yernon had left behind him, 
 and felt conscious at every line, of how much nobility of mind 
 and rich maturity of intellect were quenched forever under 
 the wild thyme and moss which covered the little burial-place 
 where he lay. 
 
 Guilderoy did not share that hope which sustained the 
 souls of Socrates and Plato, and which the soul of John 
 Yernom had drunk in from theirs. To him it seemed that 
 quand on est mort dest pour longtemps : a time so long that 
 it stretches on to all which mortals can conceive as forever. 
 And his eyes were often wet with tears as he turned over the 
 manuscripts of his dead friend. 
 
 The sincerity of his own sorrow did not diminish the in- 
 tolerable sense of dreariness with which these late summer 
 weeks at Ladysrood filled him. On the contrary, he became 
 impatient, even of his own regrets : he was so wholly unused 
 
GUILDEROT. ' 229 
 
 to harbor as a guest any thought or emotion which was not 
 pleasurable that he resented his own pain. 
 
 These long silent summer hours in this house of mourning, 
 with £he figure of Gladys in its long black robes always be- 
 fore him, and no other distraction possible, tried almost beyond 
 endurance the good resolutions which he had silently formed 
 as /ie looked on the pale serene countenance of Vernon lying 
 in his last sleep on his narrow bed, with the lattice of his 
 chamber open to the blue sky, the twittering birds, the quiver- 
 ng leaves, the murmurous sea. 
 
 A man of his temperament is quickly touched to fine issues, 
 to honest regrets, to tender resolves ; but there is no power 
 on earth which can secure his adhesion to them. 
 
 He showed her the most sincere sympathy in her grief, and 
 was even perfectly patient with its intensity and long dura- 
 tion. He had felt the truest admiration and attachment on 
 his own part for her father, and had always felt that Vernon 
 would do much to smooth and dissipate any difficulty which 
 might arise between himself and her. The philosophical, in- 
 dulgent, and temperate influence of such a mind had had a 
 sway over himself which he knew to be the most beneficial he 
 had ever felt. It left a painful void even in his own life to 
 feel that that wise and serene friend had forever passed out 
 of sight and hearing. 
 
 Eearlier, ever so little earlier, she would have responded to 
 his efforts, the frost of her heart would have melted under the 
 first sunbeam of a kind word ; but now the remembrance of 
 what his sister had told her was ever dominant. It haunted 
 her night and day ; guided by its cruel indication she real- 
 ized a thousand words and signs which were confirmation 
 true. She recollected that her husband’s abandonment of 
 the colonial adventuress had been contemporary with the 
 arrival of the Duchess Soria in England. His desire that 
 she should be invited to Ladysrood ; his tone in speaking of 
 her ; his preoccupation and visible anxiety for her pleasure 
 and her presence — all these recurred to her memory with 
 overwhelming and indisputable testimony to the truth of 
 Hilda Sunbury’s words. 
 
 Hilda Sunbury herself had felt a pang very kindred to re- 
 morse when she heard, where she stood in the brilliant draw- 
 ing-room of Ladysrood, that Vernon had been found dead 
 after sunset. Perhaps she had hastened his end ; she knew 
 that she had distressed him and there was constantly sound 
 
230 
 
 GU1LDEROY. 
 
 ing in her ear his bidding, “ Be kind to her.” Had it been 
 kind to have said what she had said to her brother’s wife ? 
 Would it not have been well if she hadobeyed the dead man’s 
 caution and counsel ? Her conscience told her that it would ; 
 and she was glad to excuse herself to Guilderoy, and hasten 
 from his house on a plea of urgent matters needing her pres- 
 ence at her own home. 
 
 She was uneasy at what she had herself done ; she was 
 sensible that it had been neither wise nor laudable : that what- 
 ever she knew or thought she knew, should have been kept in 
 her own breast. But she had been unable to help a restless de- 
 sire to have her share of influence in the life at Ladysrood, and 
 though she was not conscious of it, unity between her brother 
 and his wife would have been intolerable to her. She had never 
 been able to pardon the manner in which, from the very first 
 hour, so very young a woman as Gladys had passively avoided 
 her efforts at direction and tacitly rejected her suggestions. 
 From the moment she had presented her at Court she had felt 
 that her brother’s wife would yield to her in nothing. 
 
 “ Then she is all alone in the world henceforward ! ” said 
 Aubrey, when he heard of John Yernon’s death. 
 
 “ Alone ! How can you talk in such a manner ? ” said 
 Lady Sunbury, greatly annoyed. In herself she blamed her 
 brother endlessly and pitilessly ; but she would have resented 
 as the greatest of personal insults a hint from anyone else 
 that he was ever so slightly blamable. 
 
 “I know no one more entirely alone,” said Aubrey, very 
 gravely. 
 
 “ Will you console her solitude ? ” it was on Lady Sun- 
 bury’s lips to ask; but the respect she had for her cousin, 
 both as a man and a statesman, restrained her for once from 
 an unpleasant and imprudent utterance. 
 
 “Her father might possibly have restraineu j.ier from 
 follies ! ” she observed instead. 
 
 “ Is she disposed towards folly ? ” asked Aubrey. “ I have 
 seen few women so young so wise.” 
 
 “You admire all she does ! ” 
 
 “ I confess I think she conducts herself in what are fre- 
 quently very difficult circumstances, with great tact and for- 
 bearance, very unusual in any one of her years. I think she is 
 far from blind to Evelyn’s caprices, but she has the good 
 sense to affect to be so.” 
 
guilderoy. 231 
 
 46 It is the least she can do in return for all he has done 
 for her.” 
 
 “ My dear Hilda, what a vulgar sentiment ! If he had 
 not married her, men quite as good as he would have done 
 
 so.” 
 
 “Would you?” asked Lady Sunbury, with her most un- 
 pleasant expression and accent. 
 
 Aubrey raised his languid eyes and looked her full in the 
 face. 
 
 “If I had happened to meet her — yes,” he replied coldly. 
 
 “ He is in love with her!” thought his cousin, outraged 
 and disgusted ; and she began to meditate how far it was 
 possible to give any hint of it to Guilderoy. 
 
 In a few weeks the solitude grew unendurable to Lim. He 
 was wholly unused not to have the voices of the world around 
 him, and the constant sight of a sorrow which he could do 
 nothing to relieve depressed and distressed him beyond en- 
 durance. A heartless man would have felt it much less ; but 
 Guilderoy was never heartless, though he frequently made 
 the hearts of others ache. 
 
 Even a great passion, if he had been capable of it, would 
 have found him after its first ecstasies easily diverted from it 
 by the attractions of minor emotions and of passing interests. 
 
 Life had been full of pleasant temptations to him, and he 
 had never acquired the habit of avoiding these or of keeping 
 steadfastly to any path. 
 
 He could do nothing to console her. She abandoned her- 
 self to her grief with a forgetfulness of all else which was in 
 its way as selfish as was his desire to get away from the 
 sight of her grief. Her father had been the centre and sup- 
 port of her whole life. She reproached herself passionately 
 with having ever believed that she was unhappy so long as 
 the sweetness and wisdom of his life were with her. 
 
 He grew impatient of seclusion and the sight of sorrow 
 She was too young to be left by herself, and she had no re- 
 latives who could be invited to remain with her. Between 
 his sister and herself he knew that little harmony or sym- 
 pathy existed. 
 
 “If you would come away somewhere it would distract you; 
 chere are many countries you have never seen. I will take 
 you where you choose; a voyage might do much to calm you,” 
 he said to her one morning, in the seventh week after Vernon’s 
 death, But she could not be persuaded to leave Lad/srood, 
 
232 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 and made her daily pilgrimage to the grave at Christslsa, 
 
 “ I cannot go into the world ; do not ask me,” she said 
 again and again to him. “ Go you, if you wish.” 
 
 “ Remember that you are the first to suggest it,” he replied. 
 
 Not pleased at the permission given him, though longing 
 for the liberty which it awarded, he added with hesitation : — . 
 
 “ The world will think it strange if I leave you so soon.” 
 
 “ What does that matter, she said, unconsciously repeating 
 Socrates’ question : — “ Is it worth while to think so much of 
 the opinion of others ? ” 
 
 “I have no wish for my friends to suppose that I am urn 
 kind or that yon are deserted,” said Guilderoy, impatiently. 
 “ You have already, my dear, had a certain manner, a certain 
 air, which have suggested as much to some people. I quite 
 understand how wretched you feel under this irreparable loss, 
 but I have never understood why you always looked so little 
 happy before it. Very few women would quarrel with the 
 life you lead ; and if you have any wishes of which I am un- 
 aware you have only to name them. They shall be gratified.” 
 
 “ You are very good.” 
 
 “ That is not the language which you should use to me. It 
 is language ridiculous in the relations we bear to one another. 
 There is no question of goodness. You are my wife, and it 
 is my pleasure as well as my right to give you whatever it 
 may be in my power to give.” 
 
 “ Is fidelity in your power ? ” 
 
 She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke. She was 
 standing before him in the sunshine ; her black gown fell 
 about her in long, slim, severe folds, her face was pale with 
 long weeping, and there were dark circles under her eyes. 
 There was a look on her face wistful and yet resolute, pa- 
 thetic and yet stern. 
 
 “ Fidelity ! ” repeated Guilderoy. 
 
 It was a strange inquiry, and one which left him at a loss 
 to answer it. “ Who has been talking to her ? ” he won- 
 dered. 
 
 She looked at him with the same unchanging gaze, and 
 her eyes tried to read his very soul. 
 
 “ Have you been faithful to me ? ” she asked. “ I will 
 believe you if you say that you have.” 
 
 “ My dear ! ” he was embarrassed and unnerved. He felt 
 is face grow warm ; a hot flush rose in his cheeks, his eyes 
 avoided hers ; and he hesitated to reply. “Why do you 
 
GUILDER or. 233 
 
 ask such questions ? ” he said with petulance. “ No man 
 ever tells the truth in reply to them.” 
 
 “You have told it to me now,” said Gladys, coldly; and 
 said nothing more. 
 
 She stood quite still, and looked at him, and he avoided 
 her gaze. 
 
 “ And the Duchess Soria ? ” she asked. “ Is it true that 
 you wished me to invite her here, because — ” 
 
 He interrupted her passionately. 
 
 “ Hush ! I forbid you to speak her name to me ? ” 
 
 “Why ? Because you have loved her ? ” 
 
 “ Because she is the only woman I have really loved in all 
 my life. God help me ! ” 
 
 There was that sound of true and passionate feeling in his 
 Toice which she had never heard from him for herself ; such 
 a tone is unmistakable, is irresistible ; it carries its own truth 
 and its own secret with it in overwhelming witness to the 
 most unwilling ear. 
 
 “VbusVavezvoulu!” he said with violence. “It is al- 
 ways so with women. One spares them — would screen them 
 — would keep them in peace — and they will not be content with 
 that. Th^y will ask and suspect, and prate and irritate, un- 
 til they are wounded by the very thing they need have never 
 known, but for their own insatiate curiosity, their own rest- 
 less and unpitying jealousy! It is always so.” 
 
 He was passionately angered ; angered with himself be- 
 cause he had betrayed a secret which did not only concern him- 
 self, and angered with her because she had driven him into 
 one of those positions in whi h a man rn^st dishonor him- 
 self in his own sight, eithe by falsehood or confession. 
 
 “ If you loved her, why did you affect to love me ? ” she 
 asked. 
 
 Her voice and her attitude were unnaturally calm, but 
 her eyes had a look in them which he did not care to meet. 
 
 “ I affected nothing ! ” he answered with entire sincerity. 
 “ I thought I loved you ; I thought at least that I loved you 
 enough to be happy with you. They always say, the hap- 
 piest marriages are passionless. I was entirely honest in 
 all I said to you and in all I said to your father. I never told 
 you I had not loved other women ; I never told you that I 
 should not love others. No man can give those pledges if 
 he is sincere in what he says. 
 
 He spoke with force and warmth and perfect truth j 
 
234 ' GUlLDEnor. 
 
 whether he were wrong or right in what he said he believed 
 in his own words, and he intended neither subterfuge nor 
 apology. He honestly regretted the pain which he inflicted, 
 and he was wholly candid in the expressions of his own 
 emotions. They were things which he had long thought, 
 long felt, but which he would never have said to her um 
 less she had forced ^ him to it by injudicious interroga. 
 tion. He had been willing to keep her in the calm outei 
 courts of courteous intercourse and social conventionalities. 
 If she had forced her way, despite him, into the hidden 
 recesses of his soul, she could not blame him if she found 
 another name the talisman there and not her own. 
 
 “ I have never intentionally spoken an unkind word t<t 
 you,” he went on after a moment’s silence. “ I have been 
 delighted to gratify all fancies and wishes that you ever ex. 
 pressed, or that I could ever divine. You have not had tha{ 
 pliability and amiability which one looked for from one sq 
 young ; but I have never uttered a word to any- living being 
 which could allow them to imagine that I blamed you. 1 
 have given you every outward respect, every possible com 
 sideration ; if you have not known how, or have not cared, U 
 win my affections and my confidence, I think I am justified 
 in saying that it is not more my fault than it is yours. Lov% 
 cannot be stoned, or bullied, or worried into existence ov 
 duration. All women forget that too often.” 
 
 He rose and walked impatientlv to and fro for a fe^ 
 moments. 
 
 She stood quite still in the same attitude. She was very 
 pale, otherwise she betrayed no emotion. 
 
 “I regret that you have forced me to say those things,” he 
 said after a moment’s silence. u They are always painful to 
 the speaker and the hearer alike, and no possible good can 
 ever come from agitating and embittering scenes. Such 
 scenes are the abhorrence of my life. Every man loathes 
 them, and I most of all. In our position no possible good 
 can come from mutual recrimination. Between lovers such 
 disputes may be the resurrection of a buried love. But be- 
 tween people who are bound together merely by honor, in- 
 terest, and society, they can only produce the most fatal 
 estrangement. I have wished honestly that you should be 
 happy, and if you are not so, it is as much my misfortune 
 as it is yours. It may be also my fault. I do not say that 
 it is not. But it is a fault of temperament, and not of will/ 
 
GTJILDEUOY. 
 
 235 
 
 \ 
 
 He waited for some answer from her, but she said nothing. 
 
 She stood with one hand . resting on the marble column, 
 and she might have been made he rself of marble, so still 
 and so cold she seemed. 
 
 He waited a moment more, looked at her in hesitation, 
 then with a bow he passed and left her. He knew that he 
 had said what could not be effaced from her memory, and 
 what must forever be like a barrier of ice between them. 
 Yet if even at that moment she had touched his heart or his 
 conscience in any way, if she had shown anything of the 
 warmth and tenderness which are the very life-blood of a 
 woman’s love, he would have been ready to meet it so far as 
 his feelings could have been controlled to meet it. He would 
 have been ready to say to her, “We are both sacrificed to 
 the mistaken laws of the world ; let us pity each other and 
 bear with each other, and be friends if we can be nothing 
 im e/ r 
 
 But she had said nothing ; and she had kept that attitude 
 of coldness, of disdain, of offence, which had in it neither 
 invitation nor indulgence. She had no compassion because 
 she had no comprehension ; and she had been so wholly ab- 
 sorbed in the intensity of her own pain that she had had no 
 knowledge that it might still have been possible to save 
 something from this wreck of all her hopes. When women 
 see the treasure of their lives founder they drown with it. 
 They do not even try to save what they might. 
 
 G-uilderoy did not seek to explain or to apologize. His con- 
 science was stung, and he was angered with himself for 
 having been betrayed into such embarrassment. What idiots 
 women were ! always seeking to know things which made 
 their misery when known, never letting well alone, never 
 accepting the conventional untruths with which any well- 
 bred man is careful to cover his errors, always breaking with 
 rash steps the thin ice which alone separates them from the 
 bottomless waters of suspicion and jealousy ! 
 
 He paced to and fro the west terrace with anger and a 
 kind of contrition in his thoughts. Why would she ask 
 those home questions ? Why would she try to penetrate 
 his very soul with the gaze of her great, luminous, serious 
 eyes ? Why could she not take all he gave her — his kindliness, 
 his respect, his courtesy, his outward observance, his occa- 
 sional embraces, and not endeavor to probe further into ths 
 
236 
 
 GUILDEROYr. 
 
 secrets of his inner life, and the mysteries of the male 
 passions ? 
 
 Good heavens ! Had she not a life full enough, brilliant 
 enough, envied enough, to occupy her and content her without 
 her requiring his erotic fidelity as though he were some sigh- 
 ing Strephon to her maiden Chloris ? Why would women 
 always make themselves wretched by demanding the impossi- 
 ble, and trying to enter the closed chambers of men’s follies ? 
 
 “And I was really willing to endeavor to be to her what 
 Yernon would have wished,” he thought with a sense of in- 
 justice done to himself. 
 
 Why were women always like that ? Always rejecting the 
 pearls you brought them because you would not, or could 
 not, give them a roc’s egg ? 
 
 “ Marriage is such a totally different thing to what she 
 thinks it,” he said to himself. “ It is a community of in- 
 terests ; a union of externals : a method of continuing the 
 race and of consolidating property ; it is not a life-long wor- 
 ship of Eros, with an eternal song of 6 Evoe Hymen ! ’ ” 
 
 He was incensed, and nursed his fiction of injustice to 
 himself, not to look closer at the injustice to her of which 
 his conscience whispered. 
 
 It was the same season of the year, almost the same day 
 of the month, as that on which he had first spoken to his sister 
 of his intention to marry John Vernon’s daughter. Good 
 heavens ! Why had he given away liberty and peace and 
 independence of action only because a child had had a lovely 
 face, like a picture by Romney, and because he had had 
 vague impressions that he wished his own son to reign after 
 him at Ladysrood ! Into what irrevocable imprisonment had 
 not his senses and his sentimentality hurried him ! 
 
 But who could ever have supposed that a woman so young, 
 and reared in such rural seclusion, would have had so much 
 penetration, so much prescience, so much worldly wisdom, 
 and such an obstinate refusal to be deceived ! 
 
 “ I have always been most careful to show her every out- 
 ward respect,” he thought ; and it seemed to him that she 
 was unreasonable, and he himself harshly treated. He would 
 always have liked her, always have felt affection for her, if 
 she had only been more facile, more pliant, more easily 
 moulded to what he required. 
 
 What could it matter to her if his fancies went elsewhere ? 
 He could not see that it really mattered anything. 
 
GU1LDEB0Y. 
 
 231 
 
 If there were any very great scandal, if he left her openly for 
 anyone, if he insulted her in public by admiration for some 
 actress or some adventuress, then he could have understood 
 that she would have felt wronged, and the world would have 
 been with her. But as it was, as he had always been care- 
 ful to do none of these things, he could not admit to him- 
 self that she had any injury at all. 
 
 He had remained beside her entirely out of sympathy and 
 good feeling, he had honestly desired to regulate their future 
 lives to be in accord and outward harmony, if in no deeper 
 tenderness, and his only reward had been that she had asked 
 him a direct and intolerable question which he had been too 
 honest a gentleman to answer with a lie ! 
 
 He was profoundly angered ; the more profoundly because 
 his inner consciousness was not blameless. If he had loved 
 her, most probably he would have sought her, have thrown 
 himself at her feet, and confessed his infidelities : but it is 
 only men who love very tenderly who are thus repentant, and 
 he had no kind of love for her. The little he had ever had 
 had died out after six months’ possession. 
 
 As it was he went into his library, wrote her a brief note, 
 and giving a few orders to his body-servant to follow him, 
 he had his horse brought round and rode over the moors to 
 the nearest railway. His note merely said : — 
 
 My Dear Gladys, — It will be as well for us not to see 
 one another for a little while. You are mistress of yourself 
 and of Ladysrood. I shall probably go to Aix-fes-Bains. If 
 you will address to me at the Embassy in Paris, I will tell 
 them to forward my letters, as I am not quite sure whither 
 I may turn my steps. I hope to find you in better health on 
 my return. You cannot doubt my profound sympathy in the 
 loss you have sustained. 
 
 “ Ever yours, 
 
 “ Evelyn.” 
 
 The note, when he wrote it, seemed to him a masterpiece 
 of courtesy, kindliness, dignity, and implied rebuke. 
 
 It seemed to her, when she received it, the acme of indif- 
 ference, negligence, heartlessness, and insult. It was in real 
 truth neither the one nor the other, being the mere announce- 
 ment of the fact of his departure, with the other fact of his 
 annoyance and offence conveyed through its conventional 
 worths. 
 
238 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 Two days later, Lady Sunbury arrived at Ladysrood, un- 
 announced, bringing her youngest daughter with her ; a girl 
 not yet in the world. 
 
 “ My dear,” she said affectionately, “ I saw m the papers 
 that my brother has gone out of England; it is unpardonable 
 of him to have left you alone at such a time, as young as you 
 are and the world so unpleasant as it is. I have brought 
 Constance to stay with you, and I will stay myself as long as 
 I can. I suppose Evelyn will not be many weeks away. 
 Where has he gone ? ” 
 
 Gladys answered her with what composure and apparent 
 carelessness she could. 
 
 The presence of her sister-in-law was very painful to her. 
 She could not forget that what Hilda Sunbury had told her 
 in the elm-walk on the day of her father’s death had brought 
 about the scene with Guilderoy which had separated them 
 more hopelessly than they had ever been separated before. 
 
 Lady Sunbury was at this moment moved by the most ex- 
 cellent motives, and actuated by a sense of self-blame which was 
 almost remorse. It would have been remorse in a character 
 less certain of its own perfections than was hers. She knew 
 that she had pained and distressed John Vernon needlessly 
 in the last hours of his life, and she heard often in memory 
 those farewell words of his, ‘ Be kind to her.’ She was con- 
 scious that she had not been kind to her brother’s wife. She 
 knew that she had worried, annoyed and wounded her many 
 a time, and that in what she had revealed to her concerning 
 the Duchess Soria, she had been mainly instrumental in 
 bringing about what her own penetration suspected to be the 
 cause of Guilderoy’s sudden departure from England. 
 
 She was an admirably conscientious woman, though like 
 so many conscientious persons she was wholly ignorant that 
 she was often intensely disagreeable, and even at times very 
 dangerous, from the unwise and irritating things which her 
 conscience impelled her to say and to do. 
 
 In coming to Ladysrood she was sincerely desirous to put 
 the aegis of her own presence there, and that of her young 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 53l> 
 
 daughter, "between Gladys and the evil comments of the 
 world. It had been inconvenient to her to leave her own 
 great house of Illington at that moment, and to sacrifice 
 many important social engagements ; hut she had made the 
 sacrifice with the most admirable intentions, and with that 
 great regard for the reputation of the head of her family 
 which Guilderoy had so often, and so hardly tried. But all 
 the purity and integrity of her intentions could not make her 
 presence otherwise than an intense irritation and oppression 
 to her brother’s wife. 
 
 All wounded animals long to be alone ; and solitude would 
 have been the only possible balm to the wounds of Gladys ; 
 stung to the quick as she was by pain, and missing, as she 
 did every hour of her life, the sense of the near presence of 
 her father’s wise and gentle influence. The constant sound 
 of Lady Sunbury’s voice, reiterating as it did all maxims of 
 worldly wisdom, and shrewd, cold, common sense, became to 
 her a positive torture which intensified all other suffering in 
 her. The presence even of the young girl, who was impa- 
 tient of the dulness of Ladysrood, and full of all those arti- 
 ficial and worldly longings which fill the breasts of debutantes f 
 was an additional trial to her. Sorrow is bad enough at any 
 time to bear; but its bitterness is tenfold when we cannot 
 shut ourselves up with it in peace, but must at every moment 
 listen to a never-ending stream of commonplace remarks, 
 and affect sympathy with commonplace desires and regrets. 
 The curiosity of Lady Sunbury, moreover, was keen; and 
 without descending absolutely to the coarseness of question- 
 ing, she endeavored, by every indirect means in her power, 
 to discover what had passed between Guilderoy and his wife 
 on the subject of Beatrice Soria. 
 
 But Gladys told her nothing ; and the long, quiet days of 
 the fading summer passed in infinite ennui to the guests, and 
 in intolerable weariness of soul to the mistress of Ladysrood. 
 The only peaceful moments which she knew were when she 
 sat alone by the grave of her father on the thyme-grown 
 cliffs above the sea at Christslea. 
 
 She felt so utterly alone. Whilst he had lived she had 
 thought herself wretched indeed ; but now it seemed to her 
 that no hopeless sorrow could ever have touched her so long 
 as his noble intelligence and wise affection had been there 
 to shield her from her own passions, and console her for 
 their disappointment. 
 
240 
 
 GUILDEROT 
 
 She had not answered the letter which Guilderoy had left 
 for her on the evening of his departure. 
 
 At least she had sent no answer. She had written scores 
 of sheets to him, but had burned them all, dissatisfied with 
 their utter inadequacy to describe her own emotions. 
 
 And after all what was there to say ? He had married her 
 * believing that he would care for her ; and he had found him- 
 self unable to do so ; either from his fault or hers, or neither, 
 or both. What matter which ? What words could alter 
 that ? What reproach could change, or what entreaty could 
 regain, his heart ? In truth it had never been hers. 
 
 She suffered all the tortures which wring the inmost soul 
 of a woman who loves what has been hers, and knows that all 
 its charms, its senses, its time, its emotions, are given to 
 others, and can never be recalled to her. Men can so easily 
 console themselves for lost passions ; even where their hearts 
 ache, their physical pleasures can so easily be gratified by those 
 who do not touch their hearts, that they cannot understand 
 the wholly irreparable loss that the desertion of her lover is 
 to a woman who can only receive happiness through one 
 alone. Messalina can vary her caprices at will ; but the 
 woman who loves with all her senses and her soul can never 
 find any means to fill up the blank made in her whole life 
 by abandonment. 
 
 To the mind of Lady Sunbury the lot of her sister-in-law 
 still seemed perfectly enviable ; a great position, unlimited 
 command of money, and the power to do whatever she liked 
 unmolested, constituted a fate which to Hilda Sunbury, as 
 to the world, appeared one with which it was hypercriticism 
 and ingratitude indeed not to be content. Well regulated 
 minds, like Lady Sunbury ’s, cannot conceive why any woman 
 requires more than the tranquil monotony of a blameless life, 
 large houses to rule over, and a purse always filled. 
 
 To these excellent minds the senses are sins, the passions 
 are follies, and the besoin d’ aimer is wholly unmentionable. 
 Such gross things are believed in and alluded to by poets, 
 they know 5 but they think poets mad, and at all events poets 
 are no rule for women who respect themselves. 
 
 This opinion, either insinuated or more fully expressed, 
 was the burden of all Lady Sunbury’s conversation during 
 her stay at Ladysrood, at all such times as her daughter was 
 not in her presence. She believed, and many virtuous 
 women believe with her, that virtue is like a nail j only 
 
GUILDEROY, 241 
 
 hammer at it often enough and long enough and you must 
 end in driving it into any substance whatever. 
 
 She knew the world too well not to know all the tempta- 
 tions and dangers which must surround in it such a woman 
 as Gladys when left alone in the midst of its risks and its 
 seductions ; and on these she dwelt, and on the duties of all 
 women to resist them she was so persistently eloquent, that 
 she raised in the breast of her hearer a passionate longing to 
 fling duty to the winds, and drove her more nearly from pa- 
 tience and self-control than any injury could have done ; 
 made her long as she had never longed for that vengeance of 
 which she had begun of late to dream. While every fibre of 
 her heart was aching, and every pulse of her existence 
 seemed throbbing with pain, she had to endure as best she 
 could the platitudes and the stiff sonorous phrases with which 
 her guest proclaimed the all-sufficing beauties of virtue and 
 self-esteem. 
 
 “If she would but leave me alone !” she thought; but 
 this is just what women of Lady Sunbury’s type never do. 
 
 The days and the weeks passed, and she heard nothing di- 
 rectly from Guilderoy, although he wrote to his steward. 
 His sister came and went, but she left Lady Constance there 
 always, and the discontent of the girl, impatient of her exile 
 from the gay gatherings of the autumn parties at Illington, 
 mingled with her premature worldliness and undisguised 
 selfishness, were almost as trying to Gladys in one way as 
 the companionship of the mother in another. 
 
 The routine of the tedious days became almost unendu- 
 rable to her ; the monotonous repetition of commonplace ob- 
 servations seemed to her like that torture in which a drop of 
 water was let fall on a prisoner’s head every second, until he 
 went mad or died with it. 
 
 Lady Sunbury was of too keen an observation not to be 
 well aware of the torment her presence was, but in the cause 
 of duty she never wavered, and she considered it her duty 
 not to leave so young a woman as her brother’s wife alone ; 
 and she sacrificed herself or her daughter to that conviction 
 with that resolution which made her so trying and so un- 
 sympathetic to those whom she benefited. 
 
 At such times as Gladys could get away from her, she 
 passed her hours at Chris tslea, or shut up in the library 
 writing, and then destroying, hundreds of letters to hef 
 husband, 
 
242 
 
 OrtxLbEBOT. 
 
 Perhaps if, &V o£ them could have been sent to him, and he 
 had had the patience to read them, he would have reached 
 more comprehension of her character than he had ever at- 
 tained. All her aching, wounded, rebellious heart was 
 uttered in them : knowing no other confidant possible, she 
 made a confessor of the reams of paper which she spoiled. 
 But she sent nothing of what she wrote. When read over to 
 Aerself, they all seemed too tender or too violent, to assert 
 too vehemently or to entreat too piteously. 
 
 She had great pride in her, and she could not bring her- 
 *jelf to send to him anything which looked like an appeal of 
 the affections. He did not care whether she loved him or 
 i,ot. Why should she tell him that she did ? 
 
 At times she remembered that he had reproached her with 
 never seeking to win his affections. Was it true that shy- 
 ness in the first months of her life with him, and pride and 
 jealousy afterwards, had frozen in her warmth which might 
 have won his' confidence ? She remembered that her father 
 even had chaiged her with seeming cold. 
 
 She was very young still, and she was utterly solitary, and 
 she passed many hours of misery recalling every incident of 
 the past four years, and torturing herself with those vain 
 and cruel wishes which cry out to the past to come back, 
 that we may undo., and unsay, all that has been done and 
 been said in it. 
 
 At last she wrot*? one which satisfied her in so far as it 
 seemed to her to express her sense of indignity and wrong 
 without descending to appeal. 
 
 It was worded thus : 
 
 “ After what passed between us on the last day that you 
 were here, it is impossible for me to believe, or for you to pre- 
 tend, that I am in any kind of way necessary to, or desired 
 in, your life. You have told me, in the most undisguised 
 terms, that you regret that I ever had any association with 
 your life whatever. You cannot regret it more than I do. 
 As I ventured to remind you once before, the act was yours, 
 not mine. The only way in which the mistake of it can be 
 in any measure rectified, is for me to leave you. The little 
 fortune which was left to my father on the day of his death 
 is mine, and is more than enough for all my wants. I only 
 await your permission, which I cannot believe will be refused, 
 to leave Ladysrood, and seek some solitude, where under my 
 
GUILDEROY , 243 
 
 maiden name I may endeavor to forget that I ever had the 
 misfortune to become your wife.” 
 
 She read this again and again, scanning it carefully and 
 critically, to make sure that it contained no word which could 
 flatter him, or imply in her any infirmity of purpose, or 
 yearning of affection. Her future was wholly obscure to her ; 
 she did not dare to drag consideration of it into the clear light 
 of reason and actuality. All she felt was a violent longing 
 to cease to be his wife in name, since she had never been so 
 in heart, and to eat his bread and rule his house and spend 
 his gold no more. Other women might be content with that 
 purely conventional position ; she was not : he had made life 
 intolerable to her; let the world know that he had done so. 
 
 She was no mere meek blind puppet, to gratify him by ap- 
 pearing at his side at Court, and bearing children to his 
 name, whilst all the joys and interests and passions of his 
 life were found elsewhere. Ho doubt he would prefer that 
 she would be one of those patient, passionless, sightless 
 women who would go through all the ceremonies of society 
 beside him, and leave him free, without the world’s censure, to 
 find pleasure and sentiment in the arms of others. But she 
 was not one of those — and all that even her father had asked 
 of her was to forbear from avenging desertion by dishonor. 
 
 She read the letter again and again, and could find no flaw 
 in it. It asserted only what it was her perfect right to claim. 
 
 He could not compel her to stay on in his houses only that 
 by her presence there he might have more facility for invit- 
 ing under his roof all those on whom his caprice fastened for 
 the hour. 
 
 She signed it “ Gladys Vernon” and sealed the envelope 
 of it with her father’s arms. 
 
 Then a remembrance came to her of such humiliation that 
 her white cheeks grew red with the shame of it, where she 
 sat in solitude. She did not know where to address him; 
 she would have to inquire of his land-agent where he was. 
 
 As she paused, looking at the undirected envelope, medi- 
 tating whether, to avoid such confession of ignorance, she 
 should address it to the English Embassy in Paris, and let 
 it take its chance, the groom of the chambers entered the 
 library. 
 
 “ Lord Aubrey has arrived, my lady,” said the man, “ and 
 asks if you will receive him.” 
 
244 
 
 GUILD EE Or. 
 
 CHAPTEB XXXVIII. 
 
 “ My dear Gladys, I had no time to let you know,” said 
 Aubrey a moment after, “ for I was uncertain myself until 
 last night that I should be able to accept the invitation of 
 your county to their banquet. I have only two hours to 
 spend with you; but that is better than nothing. You look 
 ill, dear. But that is natural. So irreparable a calamity as 
 yours cannot be borne without suffering, which is in itself 
 an illness.” 
 
 She was glad to 'see him ; the frank warm sympathy of his 
 words, the grasp of his hands, the sense of his kindly and 
 staunch sincerity were always precious to her. After the 
 platitudes of Hilda Sunbury, they seemed like a fresh sea- 
 wind after the dull close air of some shut chamber. Yet a 
 certain uneasiness which she had never felt before made her 
 constrained and troubled under the searching and earnest 
 gaze of his eyes. She knew that she had done what he 
 would blame ; she knew that she had written what he would 
 blame still more. 
 
 “ It must be a consolation to you to be absorbed in public 
 life ? ” she said wistfully. 
 
 “ It takes one out of oneself,” he replied. “All work does 
 so ; but national work most of all.” 
 
 “ You have so much to think of,” she said evasively, “you 
 could not be unhappy.” 
 
 Aubrey was silent. 
 
 “ I have nothing to think of,” she added, “ except my 
 father.” 
 
 “ Ah, dear ! Why did I tell you ? There is no irremedf 
 able sorrow except death.” 
 
 They were alone in the gardens into which they had 
 strolled. Lady Sunbury was away for a few days, the girl 
 had gone out riding on the moors ; there had been rain in 
 the morning, but the early afternoon was fine though sun- 
 less. There was the warm glow of autumnal flowers every- 
 where. 
 
 “ Why is Evelyn away ? ” he asked. “ Have you done 
 that which I besought you not to do ? I hoped to find you 
 
GTJILDEROr. 245 
 
 drawn nearer to him. He was sincerely afflicted at the loss 
 you sustained.” 
 
 u Yes. He was fond of my father.” 
 
 Her voice trembled ; the tears rose to her eyes. 
 
 “ Well, surely that common sorrow should have united 
 you” 
 
 “ He does not even write to me ! ” she said with indigna- 
 tion. “ He only writes to Ward and Brunton.” 
 
 They were his land-agent and his house-steward, 
 
 “ He probably does not know wdiat to say to you,” replied 
 Aubrey. “ When men are in false positions they generally 
 avoid writing. We are all moral cowards, I assure you. He 
 is not more so than the rest of us. We dislike to give pain, 
 and our dislike to doing so usually brings about more pain 
 in the end than if we had frankly grasped the truth at the 
 first.” 
 
 “ He is your cousin ; it is natural that you should take his 
 part.” 
 
 “ I have not deserved that rebuke from you, Gladys.” 
 There was the scent of wet grass and fallen leaves, and the 
 sound of the fountains came through the perfect silence, 
 monotonous and melodious. 
 
 “ Did you ever lose any one you loved greatly ? ” she 
 asked him. 
 
 u Yes,” he replied. u I lost one whom I loved immensely; 
 yet for whose loss I was thankful, since her life would have 
 been a greater torture to me than her death was.” 
 
 “ That must have been terrible ! ” 
 
 “ There is nothing so terrible.” 
 
 She did not ask more. She was absorbed in that selfish- 
 ness which is begotten in the most generous natures by the 
 suffering of the affections. She could not rouse herself from 
 it to enter into the life of another. Aubrey saw that her 
 thoughts were not with him, and the impulse of confidence 
 which had momentarily moved him was checked. 
 
 (( Did you know that he loved the Duchess Soria?” she 
 asked abruptly. The question troubled and embarrassed her 
 companion ; he answered with hesitation : 
 
 “ Who could be infamous enough to tell you that ? It 
 was before his marriage.” 
 
 “ It might be before. But he loves her still, now ; he ha$ 
 never really loved any other woman ; he has told me so.” 
 
246 
 
 GUILLEBOY . 
 
 “ A boutade ,” said Aubrey angrily. One of bis innumfriv 
 able boutades . He is like Horace’s wayward child : 
 
 ‘ Porrigis irato puero quum pomam, recusat : 
 
 Sume, catelle ; negat. Si non des, optat. 
 
 That is why he adores her; she is withdrawn from him.” 
 
 “ I have never found the fruit that he would court, given 
 or withdrawn,” said Gladys bitterly. 
 
 She was thinking of her husband’s easy acquiescence in 
 her own withdrawal from him. 
 
 “Pardon me, dear,” said Aubrey tenderly; “but I think 
 you have never endeavored to understand his character enough 
 to soothe or influence him. You have loved him no doubt; 
 but you have given to your love that apre and exacting com- 
 plexion which alienates any man, and, most of all, a man as 
 self-indulgent and as universally caressed as he. Forgive me 
 if I seem to blame you. I know he has made life difficult 
 for you.” 
 
 “Will you read what I have written to him ?” 
 
 She took a letter from her pocket, and held it out to him. 
 
 “ I have written many others and destroyed them. They 
 seemed too insolent. Read this !” 
 
 It was the letter which she had written that morning. 
 Aubrey sat down on a bench under one of the cedars, and 
 read it. She could tell nothing from the expression of his 
 countenance. He folded it up, and gave it back to her. 
 
 “ If your father were living, he would not let you send it.” 
 She colored ; she knew that already. 
 
 “ To send it will be to sever your life forever from Guilde- 
 roy’s. Anger is a bad counsellor. You will live on the ex- 
 citation of anger for a few months ; it is like a drug; it sup- 
 plies all the natural forces of life for a time, only to leave 
 them utterly prostrate when its effects have passed. You 
 are just nowin that state of intense pain and violent indigna- 
 tion in which a woman has before now murdered the man 
 who loved and wronged her. But when the heat and wrath 
 of this hour pass, as they will pass, you will regret it to the 
 last day of your life if, of j r our own will and accord, you 
 break the bonds of your affections, and make it utterly im- 
 possible for them ever to be re-united.” 
 
 She was silent. She was seated beside him on the bench. 
 Her head was turned away, but he could see her emotion 
 in the strong throbbing of the veins of her throat. 
 
GTTILDEROr. 
 
 247 
 
 ‘'You write and you speak,” continued Aubrey, “as if he 
 had left your forever ; he has intimated no intention whatever 
 of doing so; he has gone away for a few weeks, as he has 
 often done before and you have then thought nothing of 
 it. When he returns, receive him as usual. Be sure that he 
 will appreciate your forbearance and your kindness. Men 
 often seem ungrateful, but I do not think they are often so 
 for real tenderness.” 
 
 “Receive him when he comes from her ! ” 
 
 “ From ‘ her ? or any other c her/ Why do you take for 
 granted that he is now the lover of the Duchess Soria ? 
 Myself, I do not believe that he is. She is a very proud 
 woman, and his rupture with her was public and sudden — the 
 kind of offence which a proud woman never forgives ; for she 
 had done nothing to bring it about or to merit it.” 
 
 “ And I am to be grateful if she now refuses his homage ! ” 
 
 “ Aou are perverse, my dear,” said Aubrey sadly. “ I 
 do not tell you to be grateful: I tell you to be generous. 
 They are very different things. And at the risk of 
 wounding you, Gladys, I must confess that what you 
 feel now is much more irritated self-love, than it is love at 
 all.” 
 
 She rose impetuously, and walked with quick, uneven steps 
 to and fro upon the grass ; her sombre dress enhanced the 
 fairness of her face, the golden glow of her hair, the darkness 
 of her eyes, and lashes, as the full light poured down on her 
 through the branches of the trees. She did not look a woman 
 to share the fate of Ariadne. Aubrey looked at her, and his 
 vision was troubled and his calm wisdom and unselfishness 
 were disturbed in their balance. Did his cousin deserve that 
 he should plead thus for him ? Did the wanderer, who shunned 
 no Ogygia wherein white arms beckoned to him, merit so 
 much fidelity, so much forbearance ? 
 
 And yet she loved him. What hope was there for her ex- 
 cept in such patience and such pardon as might in time bring 
 her reward ? 
 
 “ May I tear the letter up ? ” he asked her. 
 
 “ If you wish,” she said, reluctantly. 
 
 “ And will you promise me not to write any other like 
 it?” 
 
 “ I cannot promise that.” 
 
 “ And yetj dear, I ask the promise more for your sake 
 than his. If you leave him you can wound his pride cer« 
 
m 
 
 GUILBEUOT. 
 
 tainly, and humble him before the world; but that will be 
 all, for he will seek and find consolation. But if you, of your 
 own act, sever the tie which unites you, you will be forever 
 miserable, for you will never forgive yourself.” 
 
 She was silent ; her eyes watched the shadows of the leaves 
 swaying upon the grass ; she was unconvinced, angered, 
 mortified, almost sullen. It seemed to her that her wrongs 
 were wide as the universe, and no one pitied them. 
 
 At that moment Lady Constanee ran down the terrace 
 steps coming from her ride ; she was calling uproariously to 
 the dogs who had been with her ; she brought a boisterous 
 rush of youthful energy and spirits ; Gladys felt very old 
 beside her. 
 
 They were no more alone, and in half-an-hour he had to take 
 leave of her, for his presence was expected that evening at a 
 political banquet in the county town some fifty miles away. 
 
 u Promise me, for your father’s sake,” he murmured as he 
 bade her adieu. 
 
 She sighed, and her mouth trembled, but she did not prom- 
 ise. She looked at the fragments of the torn letter lying 
 on the ground: she knew every phrase of it by heart; she 
 could write it again in ten minutes. 
 
 After he had left her she walked to and fro restlessly and 
 wearily in the gray, soft, autumnal afternoon. The silence 
 was unbroken, except now and then by the caw of a rook ; 
 the great facade of the house stretched before her, stately 
 and noble, with the greatness on it of a. perished time ; the 
 solemn stillness of the woods and moors enveloped it ; there 
 was that in its very beauty and majesty which hurt her more 
 than any unloveliness would have done. She remembered 
 the day when she had come thither first, with all a child’s 
 eager curiosity, a child’s ardent imagination. It was not so 
 very long ago in years; and yet how old she felt ! 
 
 What was he doing now ? 
 
 That was the thought which tortured her every hour of 
 the day and night. In absence and uncertainty, distance 
 seems to grow up like the wall of a great prison between us, 
 and the one whose face we cannot see, whose voice we can- 
 not hear, and whose time and whose thoughts are given we 
 know not where, only are not, we do know, given to us. 
 
 She was jealous of other women — of any woman, of all 
 women — with a passionate physical jealousy which was in- 
 tolerable pain and as intolerable a humiliation. He had 
 
GUILD EROY, 
 
 249 
 
 thought her cold because tlie first few weeks of his early love 
 for her had left with her such ineffable, such undying re- 
 membrance, that the mere caresses of habit were unendu- 
 rable to her after them. She knew all that ecstasy, ardor, 
 and the might of a master passion could give ; and she had 
 been utterly unable to resign herself to the mere occasional 
 formality of a joyless embrace. With all the intensity of life 
 in her which youth, and strength and perfect health could 
 give to her, she had been utterly unable to endure that pas- 
 sionless position of the mere possible mother of his children, 
 to wdiich he had relegated her. It was because such warmth 
 and force of passion were in her that she had seemed pas- 
 sionless to him, because she had refused to take from habit 
 what love denied to her. And now all that passion in her 
 felt was the most cruel, the most torturing, of all pain; the 
 pain of a totally impotent jealousy; a jealousy which hides 
 itself from public eyes through pride, but makes wretched 
 every single thought of the brain and impulse of the heart, 
 robs night of sleep, and renders daylight hateful. 
 
 Men are intolerant of the jealousy of women, but they 
 might be more indulgent to it than they are if they remem- 
 bered its excuse. Stendalil has justly said that the pain of 
 jealousy is so intolerable to a woman because it is so wholly 
 impossible for her to follow in absence the life of the man she 
 loves ; so wholly impossible for her to measure his sincerity, 
 or to be sure of his truth in any way. The man can watch 
 the woman, can test her in a thousand ways, can haunt her 
 steps and prove her fidelity ; but she can do nothing of this 
 in return. If he choose to lie to her she must be deceived ; 
 and the more loyal, the more delicate, the more generous her 
 nature, the more are all means of learning the truth of his 
 words and the facts of his actions forbidden to her. 
 
 “ Toujours les delicats souffrent ! ” And this is as true of 
 l#ve as of life. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXIX. 
 
 The afternoon was growing dark, and the low red sue was 
 glowing behind dark clouds as she turned to ascend the ter- 
 race steps. 
 
 The young Constance was sitting disconsolately all alone 
 with the dogs about her. 
 
250 
 
 QU1LDEROY. 
 
 “ I am afraid you are very dull here/’ said Gladys, as she 
 saw the girl’s attitude. 
 
 “ It is as dull as death ! ” said the girl pettishly. 
 
 Gladys’s face changed, and the look of momentary sym- 
 pathy passed out of it. 
 
 “1 will beg your mother to let you go home,” she answered. 
 “ It is very painful to me to feel you are here against your 
 will, and I shall do perfectly well alone.” 
 
 “ Why do you not go abroad?” asked the girl. “You 
 might enjoy yourself endlessly. Oh, I know you are in 
 mourning just now ; but it was just the same when you were 
 not. You never enjoyed anything.” 
 
 “ Perhaps not,” said Gladys, thinking of the days when 
 she had enjoyed every hour of her existence, on the moors 
 and by the sea ; when to feel her boat bound with the tide, 
 and hear the lark sing above the gaze, and watch a nest of 
 young chaffinches in the orchard boughs, or the play of young 
 rabbits on the moorland turf, had been happiness enough for 
 her — such simple, natural, country born happiness as the girl 
 had never known. 
 
 “He is enjoying himself ; why should not you ? Nobody 
 wears deep mourning long now, and nobody makes any dif- 
 ference for it while they do,” said Lady Constance, holding 
 up one of the newspapers which lay in her lap, and pointing 
 with her finger to a paragraph in one of them. 
 
 Gladys looked involuntarily where she pointed. It was a 
 description of an autumnal party then assembled at one of 
 the great chateaux of Prance ; and amongst the names of the 
 guests were printed those of Guildcroy and the Duchess 
 Soria, 
 
 “Always those journals!” said Gladys, as she motioned 
 it aside in disgust. 
 
 “ They are very indiscreet, sometimes,” said the girl 
 cruelly, with a malicious smile. 
 
 Gladys said nothing, but passed by her tormentor and 
 went indoors. 
 
 “ What a fool she is to care ! ” thought Lady Constance. 
 
 In the morning, very early, a mounted messenger brought 
 a letter from Aubrey, which he had written over night be- 
 fore leaving the town. 
 
 “ It is impossible for me to see you yet again, my dear 
 Gladys,” he wrote, “ though I will endeavor to do so next 
 month. Meanwhile I once more entreat you to do nothing 
 
OUILDEEOT. 
 
 251 
 
 rashly. The only possible consolation for us in sorrow ig 
 when we are able to feel that we ha^e done nothing to de- 
 serve or hasten it. Perfect patience with those we love gives 
 us this solace if it gives us no other. Very likely your 
 wrongs are less grave than you think ; but even if they are 
 more so, still do nothing rashty. 
 
 “You have a high sense of honor, and having this, you 
 must feel that as you accepted the charge of your husband’s 
 good name, you must, in honor, do nothing to imperil it. 
 And forgive me, dear, if I add that in all your expressions, 
 whether written or spoken, I found much more of the evi- 
 dence of a sense of injury than I found of the unselfishness 
 which is the highest note of love. 
 
 “ I am a man, as you know, in whose harassed and busied 
 life neither poetry nor love have any place, but I remember 
 reading, I forget where or how, some lines which have 
 haunted my memory ever since. They are these 
 
 Though you forget, 
 
 No word of mine shall mar your pleasure. 
 
 Though you forget 
 
 You fill’d my barren life with treasure, 
 
 You may withdraw the gift you gave, 
 
 You still are queen, I still am slave, 
 
 Though you forget. 
 
 “Now it is the heart which says as much as this, even 
 when forsaken, which to my thinking loves ; ar\d no heart which 
 says less than this does love. It may throb with rage, fret 
 with jealousy, smart with pain, but it does not love. What, 
 after all, dear, is any human life, that it should exact as its 
 right remembrance and devotion from another ? 
 
 “Whether we have that right or not, we are only either 
 wise or tender when we waive it wholly and are content to 
 give ourselves without seeking or asking for any recompense 
 whatever. If you give such as this to Evelyn now, some day 
 or other be sure that you will have your reward. 
 
 “ Whether he deserves it or not is wholly beside the ques- 
 tion. It is our own life, our own character, which should 
 determine the measure and standard of what we give — not 
 those of the person to whom we give it. 
 
 “Pardon me this homily, dear, which I write when I am 
 very fatigued, at long after midnight. I endeavor to say to 
 you what I believe your father would say to you if he were 
 now living. Who knows that he may not stand behind me 
 
252 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 as I write this, though my gross senses cannot perceive his 
 presence ? We know little of life, nothing whatever of 
 death. All things are possible. The only thing -which 
 always seems to me utterly impossible is that a great man 
 can ever die 
 
 “ I am affectionately yours, 
 
 “ Francis.” 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 A few days ater he was alone for a few instants with the 
 Duchess Soria in one of the wooded paths of Aix. 
 
 He had spent his utmost ingenuity in the effort to obtain 
 an unwitnessed interview with her, and had failed, utterly 
 failed, as he had done in England. The place was filled with 
 her acquaintances, men who were as assiduous as he in de- 
 votion to her constantly surrounded her, and she never re- 
 ceived him at her ' own apartments when she had not her 
 friends about her. She desired to give, and she succeeded 
 in giving him, the sense that it were easier to uproot the 
 rocks and hills around than to recover any one of the priv- 
 ileges which he had of his act and will forfeited. His as- 
 siduity in attendance on her gave rise to many comments 
 amongst the lingering idlers of the autumn season, which he 
 would have resented had he dreamed of them. But he did 
 not even spare a thought to the observation of which he was 
 the subject, and his whole mind was centered in the en- 
 deavor to break through the barrier of friendly, but never 
 intimate, association with her ; a barrier much more difficult 
 to break through than any estrangement or coldness would 
 have created. Those would have afforded permission for re- 
 monstrance or entreaty ; the serene courtesy with which she 
 invariably received him relegated him without appeal to' the 
 position of a mere acquaintance. It was well nigh impos- 
 sible to reproach a woman whom he had forsaken for being 
 sufficiently forgiving and kind to condone such an offence, 
 and yet he would have been less discouraged by the most 
 marked resentment than he was by this placid courtesy. It 
 was not like her disposition as he remembered it ; it was not 
 in accordance with anything of her character as he had 
 known it. 
 
 Rumor attributed to her the intentiou of allying hewelf 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 253 
 
 anew with a Russian of exalted rank, who had followed her 
 to Aix, and who made no secret to the world of his homage ; 
 and Guilderoy suffered all the tortures of that impotent 
 jealousy which he had once so carelessly inflicted on her, and 
 had pitied so little in her. 
 
 In the perplexity and perturbation of his various emotions, 
 his thoughts seldom went to Ladysrood : when they did so 
 they were mingled with as much of displeasure as of self-re- 
 proach. The waywardness of his pride made him consider 
 that his wife owed apology to him and must be the first to 
 approach him. Meanwhile he was glad of that cessation of 
 correspondence, which to her seemed so tragic and so terrible, 
 but to him appeared but of slight moment. His whole intel- 
 ligence and volition were for the moment absorbed in the ef- 
 fort to compel some revelation of her real thoughts from the 
 Duchess Soria. He was well used to meet on terms of polite 
 indifference women in whose book of life he had written the 
 tenderest pages ; to greet with pleasant cordiality those who 
 had parted from him in anguish and tears, or in fury and 
 reproach. But her indifference became to him an hourly 
 increasing torture. 
 
 “ Why will you always avoid me ? ” he said to her at last 
 in desperation, finding his opportunity after many days. 
 
 “ I am not aware that I avoid you,” she answered. “ I 
 received you constantly in London, and I would have come 
 to your house of Ladysrood had not your party been broken 
 up by death. You are unreasonable, my friend.” 
 
 “For God’s sake do not banish me to that name ! ” 
 
 “ Are you not my friend ? Surely you are not my enemy ? 
 Though perhaps I should be justified if I were yours.” 
 
 Guilderoy grew white with anger. 
 
 “ Do not let us fence in this useless fashion. You must 
 know, you must have seen, that I feel to you now wholly as 
 of old. Hay, I feel more — ten thousand times more ! ” 
 
 “ What sheer caprice ! ” 
 
 “ Hot anyway caprice. It is the entire truth. You, who 
 are so fully aware of your power over men, should be the last 
 to be astonished at it.” 
 
 “ I am astonished at no human inconsistencies ; but I con- 
 fess that, said by you to me, these things seem rather like 
 insult than like homage.” 
 
 “ Why ? ” 
 
 u How can you ask me why ? You broke off your relations 
 
254 
 
 &UILDEROT. 
 
 with me with scarcely more consideration than if you had 
 been a rapin (P atelier and I a sewing girl ; and because re- 
 grets assail you now, for the results of your own action, you 
 expect me to be touched by your expression of them ! ” 
 
 “ I did not know my own heart.” 
 
 “ Nay, I think you knew it well enough ; you only obeyed 
 all its most frivolous and faithless instincts. Or, rather, the 
 heart said but very little ; it was the passions which were in 
 question.” 
 
 “ You are wholly unjust.” 
 
 She gave a gesture of impatience. 
 
 “ Men always consider us unjust to them when we fail to 
 defy their weaknesses.” 
 
 “ You are unjust when you doubt that my feeling for you 
 was, and is, the strongest of my life.” 
 
 “ The strongest of your life, in which nothing is strong, 
 perhaps,” she said with restrained scorn. u Why make to me 
 these vain and useless protestations ? You took your own 
 way. It is not my fault if it has led you into paths not 
 pleasant to you.” 
 
 “ If you would only believe in my sincerity and my re- 
 morse ! ” 
 
 “ Why should I believe in either ? You do not seem to 
 me to know what sincerity or any other deep emotion means. 
 You make love to me and you marry another woman. You 
 tire of that other woman and you imagine that you only love 
 me. It is impossible for any woman to attach much impor 
 tance to your sentiments, or to believe that they can be of 
 any steadfastness or duration.” 
 
 He was silent, embarrassed by the consciousness of the 
 truth contained in her accusation, and impressed by his 
 impotency to convince her that nevertheless she did him 
 injustice. 
 
 “ You have had the only great love of my life,” he said, 
 with emotion. “ In a moment of ingratitude and blindness 
 I was false to you. I imagined that I could live without 
 you. I have repented my mistake ever since. 1 have been, 
 punished more than you can know or would believe.” 
 
 She interrupted him with impatience. 
 
 “ Pray do not put any blame on your wife ; I admire her 
 exceedingly. You place her in most painful and difficult 
 positions, and for so young a woman she conducts herself in 
 them with great tact and composure. She is essentially high 
 
GUlLftEROY. 
 
 255 
 
 Dred, and I believe that she deserves a better fate than to go 
 unloved through life ; possibly she will not go unloved ! " 
 
 “ For Heaven's sake do not speak of her ! " 
 
 “ Why should I not ? She has behaved admirably to me : 
 and, as far as I can judge, admirably to you also. I pity her 
 very sincerely. You are incapable of making any woman 
 nappy because you are incapable of being true to any." 
 
 “ I am true to you ! I have always been true to you, ex- 
 cept in one mad, ungrateful moment, which I have repented 
 ftvery year of my life ever since ! " 
 
 She smiled coldly. 
 
 “ The truth has had many variations. Do you suppose I 
 have been ignorant of all your distractions ? Your wife may 
 have, perhaps, but not I." 
 
 He colored as she spoke. 
 
 “ They have been mere caprices, mere follies ; none have 
 ever touched my heart. That I swear before Heaven ? " 
 
 “ How truly a man's excuse ! A man always considers it 
 apology enough for inconstancy if he can declare that his in- 
 fidelity has been a mere soulless drunkenness of the senses, 
 for which he ought to blush ! Other women may see excuse 
 in such a plea ; I do not." 
 
 u I thought you more lenient — more omniscient." 
 
 “ You thought me more credulous. You forget that you 
 taught me a lesson which the most credulous of women could 
 not forget if she would. I made the immense, the irrevoca- 
 ble mistake of putting my heart into my relations with you. 
 The one who does so is always the one who suffers in any 
 relation of that sort. The mistake is rarely mutual." 
 
 He felt a sense of powerlessness which was the acutest pain 
 his life had ever known ; how, in the face of his abandon- 
 ment, could he ever persuade her to believe that he had loved, 
 and did now love, her more than any other woman he had 
 ever known ? 
 
 ^ We were so happy once ! " he said, with a timidity al- 
 most boyish. 
 
 It seemed to her an insult to recall to her memory joys 
 which had been insufficient to sustain and retain his fidelity. 
 
 A profound indignation flushed in the depths of her lumi- 
 nous eyes 
 
 “ Spare me that at least ! " she said, with scorn and 
 passion. 
 
256 
 
 GUILBEBOY . 
 
 She rose from her seat and moved onward. But he 
 stopped her. 
 
 “ Tell me one thing,” he said, with breathless agitation. 
 “ Is it true what they say, that you will accept the hand of 
 the Grand Duke ? ” 
 
 “ You have not the smallest figment of title to ask me such 
 a question,” she replied with some anger. “You have 
 nothing to do with my life in any way. I do not, however, 
 mind telling you that my experience of marriage has not 
 been such as to make me inclined to risk another. What 
 could any man give to me that I have not ? And I wholly 
 agree with Balzac that marriage is la plus grande sottise 
 a laquelle Vliumanitt est sacrifice. I accepted your mar- 
 riage without reproach. I received and visited your wife. 
 I know nothing more that you could possibly expect from me. 
 You have certainly lost all possible title to interrogate me. 
 on any subject. You have never seemed to understand that 
 you passed on me the deepest affront that any man can 
 pass on any woman.” 
 
 “ But if you forgave that ? ” 
 
 “ Who said that I forgave ? Not I. It is your own as- 
 sumption. I neither chastised nor rebuked it, because to do 
 either would have been beneath me. We leave theatrical 
 scenes to women of the theatres. But between silence and 
 pardon there are leagues to traverse ; I have never passed 
 them. Probably I never shall.” 
 
 With that she left him and approached a group of acquaint- 
 ances who were playing a round game of cards in the mid- 
 day sunshine under one of the great pines. 
 
 CHAPTEK XLI. 
 
 The essay on Friendship which Aubrey had read one year 
 before, chanced to catch his eye where it lay on one of the 
 library tables at Balfrons, a few days after he had left 
 Ladysrood ; and the sight of it suggested to him a course 
 which would have its drawbacks and its dangers, but which 
 offered to him some chance of being of service to a life which 
 was constantly growing more dear to him, but which as it 
 did so awakened all that self-denial which was the strongest 
 quality in his nature e 
 
GUILDEROY . 25T 
 
 " If I love tliee what is that to thee ? 15 he mused. a 0* 
 to anyone ? ’’ 
 
 It would be forever a secret locked in his own breast, 
 for his self-control was a force which had never yet failed 
 
 him. 
 
 T t was difficult for him to leave England at that moment, 
 for he was in office, and the drudgery of high place seldom 
 relaxes much even in the months of comparative liberty. 
 But it was possible to get away for a 1 few days without awak- 
 ing too much comment in that Argus-eyed public which is 
 forever seeing what does not e^ist, and the week after he had 
 been at Ladysrood found him in Paris. There he learned 
 that his cousin had ended his visits to the Erench chateaux 
 and had gone to his own palace in Venice. Although as a 
 rule he condemned all interference of the kind, and did not 
 even now expect much from it, it still seemed to him that 
 someone should endeavor to recall Guilderoy to his duties, 
 and he saw no one who could do so with any possibility of 
 success unless it were himself. After long and anxious 
 reflection he decided to attempt it. 
 
 When he reached Venice the November day was full of 
 warm and limpid sunshine, sparkling on green water, shining 
 marbles and muddy canvas. It was towards evening, and 
 Guilderoy was at home. He received his cousin with cor- 
 diality, which was more apparent than real, for he felt an un- 
 easy consciousness that Aubrey had not come thither with- 
 out some especial reason, and some apprehension of its nature 
 moved him. 
 
 Aubrey stated, indeed, that he was only there for a few 
 hours and was going to Vienna by way of Udine. 
 
 a I am leaving myself very soon/’ said Guilderoy. “ I am 
 going southward or I would accompany you/ 5 
 
 “ Southward ? 55 said Aubrey, and looked him full in the 
 face. 
 
 “ Yes, 55 replied the other in the tone of a man who is pre- 
 pared to resent any comment on his statement, and resist 
 any interrogation. 
 
 “ Not homeward ? 55 asked Aubrey. 
 
 “ Not at present. 55 
 
 Aubrey made no further remarks and they dined together, 
 conversing on the political situation in England, and other 
 topics of the hour. After dinner they sat on the balcony 
 which overhung the water above the Rialto, The night 
 
 17 
 
258 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 was cold but the skies were brilliant with innumerable stars, 
 and a full moon, golden and glorious, shone down on Venice. 
 
 “ What is life ? ” thought Aubrey. “ To dream here 
 under the stars in all this amorous stillness, or to have every 
 hour of the day filled as mine is with the pressure of public 
 business and the conflict of men’s tongues ? ” 
 
 But he did not say this ; he said instead 
 “ You have never asked me if I have seen your wife.” 
 
 “I am sure that you have, without asking,” said Guilds- 
 roy, almost insolently, for he was extremely angered at what 
 he foresaw that he was about to hear. Aubrey passed over 
 the tone and the words. 
 
 “ I was reading again your essay on Friendship, at Bal- 
 frons, the other day,” he said instead. “ It is very clever 
 and entirely true. But one thing seemed to me very odd as I 
 read it.” 
 
 “ That I should have written it at all I should think,” said 
 Guilderoy. 
 
 “ No ; but that all your admirable remarks lead to so little 
 observance of your own rules in your own relationships. One 
 
 cannot but see that with your wife ” 
 
 “ What of my wife ? ” said Guilderoy very angrily. “ She 
 is perpetually making me scenes of upbraiding. I cannot 
 live in them.” 
 
 “ But you do not even write to her ? ” 
 
 “ I do not write because she offended me very gravely.” 
 
 “ Did she offend you without warrant ? ” 
 u I do not say that, but she began reproaches which would 
 be interminable if one stayed to hear them. She must have 
 complained of me to you, or what would you know ? ” 
 
 “ Be thankful if she complain to no one but me, my dear 
 Evelyn. And complaint is not the correct word. I asked 
 about you, of course, and she confessed that you had left her 
 in anger and that you did not write to her — and that she 
 could only hear where you were through Brunton or Ward.” 
 Guilderoy was silent. 
 
 “Well,” said Aubrey, with some hesitation, “do you con- 
 sider that you render her happy ? ” 
 
 “ I do not admit that any person has the right to ask me 
 such a question,” he said with increasing anger. 
 
 “ I told you I had left my good manners outside the door, 
 as one leaves one’s slippers in Persia,” said Aubrey. “ As I 
 have intruded so far without them, I will come a step farther. 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 259 
 
 I am conscious of my rashness, but we were children to- 
 gether, and I will risk offending you. Do you consider that 
 you have done what you could have done to keep the prom- 
 ises you made to John Vernon ? ” 
 
 Guilderoy moved impatiently. 
 
 “ What did Vernon ever tell you ?” 
 
 “ He never told me anything. But I am quite sure that 
 you must have promised him infinite consideration for his 
 daughter, or he would never have given her to you. He was 
 not a man to care for rank and fortune.” 
 
 “ And what would you imply ? ” asked Guilderoy with 
 great hauteur. 
 
 “ It is not my habit to imply,” said Aubrey coldly. “ I 
 always say what I mean, and say it as clearly as I can. I 
 mean and I say now, that Vernon would never have given 
 you his daughter if he had foreseen that you would be as in- 
 constant to her as you are.” 
 
 “ I do not consider,” said Guilderoy, with great difficulty 
 controlling his anger, “that even our relationship warrants 
 you in such intrusion on my private affairs.” 
 
 “ Oh, I have said I have left good manners outside the door 
 for the moment,” said Aubrey indifferently. “ There come 
 times in life when one must choose between being discourt- 
 eous or being cowardly, and in that dilemma I always choose 
 the former as the lesser fault. I must venture to remind you, 
 if you have forgotten it, that to leave so young a woman as 
 Gladys all alone is to expose her to a thousand perils.” 
 
 Guilderoy reddened slightly, partly with anger, partly with 
 the consciousness that his cousin was right. 
 
 “ She is very cold, and she is very proud,” he said impa- 
 tiently. “ Such women are their own protectors.” 
 
 “ A convenient theory, but not a true one. Nil Helen 
 peccat may be fairly said of any women who is left alone.” 
 
 “ Are you inclined to act the part of Paris ? ” said Guilde- 
 roy, with considerable scorn and insolence, which his cousin 
 forced himself not to resent. 
 
 “ I am as much like Paris as you are like Menelaus,” he 
 said with admirable good temper. “But you must be aware, 
 whether you choose to admit it or not, that you invite mis- 
 fortune when you virtually abandon so young and so lovely 
 a woman as your wife.” 
 
 “ I do not abandon her in any sense of the word,” said 
 Guilderoy. “ She has everything that my positron, my 
 
260 
 
 GUIZDETtOY. 
 
 respect, my fortune can bestow on her. I shall never ceas$ 
 to testify to her every possible outward regard. I detest the 
 very smallest exhibition to the world of disunion.” 
 
 “But you see nothing injurious in the actual existence of 
 it ? My dear Guilderoy, can you seriously think that a mere 
 girl like Gladys, always at heart in love with you and not 
 cold (though you imagine her so because you are yourself 
 cold to her), can be expected to be content with nothing 
 more than the conventional pretence of union ? Surely with 
 your vast experience with the sex, you must know them 
 better than that.” 
 
 “ I cannot help it ! She is not sympathetic to me ; it is a 
 calamity, not a crime ! ” 
 
 “No woman whom you had married would have been 
 sympathetic to you for more than three months,” thought 
 Aubrey, but he did not say so aloud. 
 
 “Have you come here to read me a homily ?” continued 
 Guilderoy, with impatience and hauteur. 
 
 Aubrey looked at him steadfastly. 
 
 “ That is beyond my pretensions. I am not your keeper. 
 But I frankly admit that I came here to tell you one thing. 
 I was at Ladysrood for two hours. I found your wife in that 
 state of irritation, suffering and offence, in which a woman 
 may easily fall at a bound from perfect virtue to utter ruin 
 and self-abandonment. She is young ; she does not inherit 
 her father’s philosophy. She is profoundly unhappy, and I 
 thought that it was only right that you should be made aware 
 of it, for you seem to think that a woman is like one of your 
 Lelys or Reynoldses which hang immovable in your family 
 portrait gallery, though you may only glance at them once 
 in twenty years. My dear Evelyn, you have been the lover 
 of innumerable women ; recall all your experiences of the 
 wives of other men ; does not all your knowledge tell you 
 that your own wife is now in a position of the greatest peril 
 which a sense of utter loneliness, and the besom a? aimer un- 
 gratified, can create for any one at her dangerous age ? ” 
 
 Guilderoy did not reply ; he rose and walked up and down 
 the long balcony with impatience and uneasiness. His in- 
 telligence and his conscience both made it impossible for him 
 to deny the force of his cousin’s suggestions ; and his mind, 
 which was always open to reason even when his passions 
 obscured it, could not but acknowledge the truth of them 
 A sudden suspicion also flashed across his thoughts. 
 
guildehoy. - 26 i 
 
 a You do not mean — ” he said abruptly. u You do not 
 
 mean that there is any one ” 
 
 “ There is no one yet, certainly/’ replied Aubrey. u But 
 how long it may be before that supreme temptation comes to 
 her — who can say ? When it does come you cannot blame 
 her, She can with justice say to you, vous Vavez voulu, I 
 remind you again : Nil Helen peccat. v 
 Guilderoy was silent. 
 
 “ I cannot help it/’ he said at last, uneasily. u I do not 
 care for her. One cannot feign that feeling/’ 
 
 u But why, in Heaven’s name, did you marry her ? ” 
 
 “ I thought I cared. I did care a little while. How can 
 one account for these emotions ? My dear Francis, what- 
 ever faults I may have, I am never consciously insincere. 
 If I seem to deceive women it is because I deceive myself.” 
 “ That I entirely believe. But it is the more hopeless for 
 them. Nor can I sjmipathize with you in any way. You 
 might have made of her anything you chose if you had taken 
 the trouble.” 
 
 Guilderoy was silent. 
 
 He was thinking of the days when in the cottage porch at 
 Christslea he had quoted to John Yernon the etpuer est et 
 nudus Amor, And how wholly it had been with him as the 
 dead man had predicted ! 
 
 “ He knew me better than I knew myself,” he thought. 
 “ And yet I was quite honest in what I said then and in 
 what I urged.” 
 
 “ Yes,” said Aubrey/divining the course of his reflections ; 
 “ I believe you are always entirely sincere, though very few 
 people would believe it. But the effect of your changes of 
 feeling is quite as disastrous to others as if you were not. I 
 think your estimate of Gladys is wholly incorrect. I think 
 she would even interest you and attract you if you deigned 
 to occupy yourself with her character. I think she is a 
 woman who would be capable even of making you passion- 
 ately in love with her, if she had not the irreparable fault of 
 belonging to you. But I have said all that I can possibly 
 claim the right to say — perhaps even more than I ought to 
 have said. I hope, however, that you will pardon me, and 
 think over what I have suggested. I believe that you would 
 never forgive yourself if, through your neglect, any dishonor 
 came upon your home, or even any great wrong were don© to 
 the memory of a dead man who trusted you.” 
 
262 QUXLbfinoY. 
 
 Then Aubrey rose, bade him good night, and quitted 
 him. 
 
 “ Will it have done any good ? ” thought Aubrey, doubt- 
 fully. u At all events, I have done what little I could do for 
 her.” 
 
 His own heart was heavy, for his self-imposed mission had 
 not been accomplished without much pain to himself. Far 
 more willingly, had it been possible to do so, would he have 
 struck the man who could be faithless to her ; far more will- 
 ingly would he have espoused her quarrel with the old rude 
 weapons of violence. But to him they were forbidden by his 
 sense of dignity and duty, of position and of patriotism; and 
 even if they had not been so, they would have been of no 
 earthly service to her. He had little hope that anything 
 would be of service. In endeavoring to influence his cousin 
 he felt like a man who tries to make a solid dyke out of the 
 shifting sand. Sometimes the dyke is made, but the sea is 
 always there. 
 
 He left his cousin the tormented prey of many conflicting 
 emotions, of which the dominant one was self-reproach, 
 although almost as strong a one was anger. 
 
 Amidst his self-reproach there was a strong sense of anger 
 against Aubrey, who had presumed to interfere with him, 
 and there was also a vague jealousy. What title had his 
 cousin to espouse the cause of Gladys ? What right had he 
 to make himself the confidant of her sorrows, or the cham- 
 pion of her wrongs ? Her father might have said all this, 
 and would have had the right to say it ; but he did not con- 
 cede to Aubrey any more right to do so than he would have 
 allowed to any one of the gondoliers then idling at his water- 
 gate. 
 
 A great irritation rose up in him at the thought of an- 
 other man being the consoler and adviser of his wife ; and 
 he remembered how constantly Aubrey had found time to 
 visit at Ladysrood in spring or in autumn, and to sit with 
 Gladys in her boudoir in the London house, even in the pres- 
 sure and hurry of a crowded London season. He had been 
 glad of it at the time ; he had even constantly thanked his 
 cousin for so much devotion to her interests ; but now this 
 intimacy wore to his eyes a less agreeable and innocent as- 
 pect. Not that he suspected for a moment Aubrey of any 
 disloyal intent. Aubrey’s visit to himself proved his loyalty, 
 and testified to his candor ; but the idea of his influence on 
 
GUILDEROY. 263 
 
 Gladys, and of his defence of her was, to him, exceedingly 
 distasteful. 
 
 “ If he were married, should I ever presume to take him 
 to task about his wife? ” he thought with strong displeasure. 
 The substance of what Aubrey had said might be correct 
 enough : it was the fact that he did say it at all which con- 
 stituted the offence. 
 
 Nevertheless the counsels, neither of his friend nor of his 
 conscience, were of weight enough to turn his steps north- 
 wards. He left Venice within a few days and passed on to 
 Naples. 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 Gladys did not send the letter she had written, but neither 
 did she comprehend the greatness of the love which Aubrey 
 called on her to give. It was such love as her father had 
 counselled her to attain and striven to inspire in her; love 
 which rises above all memories of self, and pardons all of- 
 fences against it, as God, in the dreams of mortals, pardons 
 theirs. But her years were too few, her heart was too sore, 
 her jealousy was too intense, her passions had been too early 
 excited only to be left in solitude and oblivion, for her to be 
 able to reach even in mere comprehension the height to 
 which Aubrey pointed. 
 
 The days and the weeks passed on, and winter came earlier 
 to Ladysrood than it came to the land where Guilderoy still 
 found the earth green and the skies and the seas smiling. 
 Always beautiful in all seasons, yet the great house was 
 austere and melancholy towards the close of the year, in the 
 short dark days and in the long silent nights. Its immense 
 woods were leafless, its gardens were cold and swept by bit- 
 ter winds blowing from the high moors beyond, on still days 
 or nights, when the sea was stormy, the sound of its break- 
 ers roaring on the rocks three miles away was audible and 
 dreary as the very groan of nature herself. 
 
 The young Lady Constance grew indignant and rebellious 
 beyond her power to conceal. 
 
 u If you would only go to Illington or Balfrons?” she 
 said fifty times a week ; and one day she added insolently, 
 “ Why should I stay here to please you and my mother? 
 What are either of you afraid of ? This place is like a nun* 
 
264 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 nery — like a prison. It is charming enough in summer or 
 in autumn when it is full of people, but now it would drive 
 a saint to madness. Have you any lover that they are afraid 
 should come to you ? Trust me if you have and I will help 
 you. If you tell me nothing I will elope with one of the 
 grooms. It will be life at any rate, and it will make my 
 mother sorry she ever sent me here ! ” 
 
 Gladys did not reply, but a few hours after she said to the 
 girl, “ I am going to London to-morrow. I will take you to 
 Illington as I pass through your county.” \ 
 
 The girl embraced her, and was beside herself with joy. 
 But she could not resist a covert impertinence. 
 
 “ Aubrey is in London ! ” she said with a rude smile. 
 
 “ I suppose he is, since there is to be a winter session,” 
 plied her hostess. “ I shall not stay in London. I am g^ing 
 straight to Paris.” 
 
 66 1 wish you would take me with you,” said Lady Con- 
 stance, repenting that she had not made herself more agree- 
 able, and hastily computing the toilettes, etrennes , and pretty 
 things in general which she might have ie got out” of the 
 mistress of Ladysrood if she had concealed her own ennui and 
 acquired influence. 
 
 “ I am very sorry, but I cannot do that for you,’* said 
 Gladys. “ I will take you home, where you have so much 
 desired to be. That is all I can do.” 
 
 She was in that mood in which a woman will rush on to 
 her own torture or her own destruction, and would not stay 
 though a host of angels and archangels stood in her way to 
 turn her back from her self-chosen path. 
 
 She drove rapidly through London from one station to an- 
 other ; at the latter she was met on the platform by Aubrey. 
 He had received a telegram from Illington announcing her 
 departure, and Lady Sunbury had had only time to add: — - 
 “ Prevent her leaving England at all hazards ! ” 
 
 The express was on the point of departure; he had no time 
 to say a word ; he entered the carriage with her. 
 
 “ I must speak to you,” he said hurriedly. “ I can get 
 back to the House by eleven o’clock.” 
 
 She did not reply ; she was annoyed and offended. She 
 resented this treatment of her as of some imprudent child 
 whom all his family considered they had a right to control. 
 Aubrey looked tired and unwell. 
 
 Times in England were troubled, and political life stormy 
 
0U1LDER0Y. 
 
 265 
 
 and thankless. He did not relax his energies ; hut a weary 
 sense grew on him more strongly every year that the combat 
 was useless, and that, although still veiled under Parliament- 
 ary formulas and constitutional fictions, the country was prac- 
 tically abandoned to mob-rule. 
 
 And he looked at the woman whom he admitted to his own 
 thoughts that he loved, and he felt that he was powerless 
 either to touch her heart or to save her from misery. 
 
 She was very pale ; even her lips were pale, and her blue 
 eyes looked almost black ; but the dark furs of her travelling 
 hood and of her long cloak enhanced the whiteness of her 
 complexion and the brightness of her hair. She sat opposite 
 to him in silence ; she was deeply resentful of his presence 
 there, and she did not aid him by a single sentence. 
 
 u You are going to join Guilderoy ?” he asked abruptly at 
 length. 
 
 “ Have I no right to do so ? ” she asked coldly. 
 
 Aubrey gave a gesture of impatience. 
 
 “When women speak of their rights their joys are gone,” 
 he thought, and answered aloud : — “ Ho one could dispute 
 your right, my dear. But it is not always wise to use our 
 right. That I have said to you often before now.” 
 
 She was still silent. 
 
 “ You had my letter the day I left you at Ladysrood ? ” he 
 asked. 
 
 “ Yes.” 
 
 “ And it made no impression on you ?” 
 
 “ It was very noble, no doubt. But you are not in my 
 place. You cannot judge.” 
 
 “ Can you judge clearly, do you think ? How much do 
 you see that is true, and how much distorted ? How much 
 that is wise, and how much unwise ? Feeling is a dangerous 
 guide. It leads us into fatal errors.” - 
 
 “I have resisted mine long enough.” 
 
 “ And you are tired of resistance. That I can understand. 
 But if you are wise, my dear, and unselfish, you will continue 
 to resist. What good can it do for you to see him in your 
 present state of violent irritation ? ” 
 
 “I wish to know the truth. 
 
 “ I would rather,” she added more passionately, “ know 
 any truth — the worst truth — than live like a child, like an 
 animal, like a plant — -told nothing, hearing nothing, uncon- 
 sidered and disregarded, as month after month goes on. If 
 
266 
 
 guild e& or. 
 
 I am not dear to him, I am a burden to him: there can be no 
 medium between the two. Let him say so to me honestly, 
 and I will trouble him no more.” 
 
 6 ' What would you do ? ” 
 
 u I can live very well on what my father left me.” 
 u You mean that you will separate yourself from Guilde- 
 roy ? ” 
 
 u Will you tell me why I should not ? ” 
 u There are a thousand reasons. Chief of all there is the 
 supreme reason that you belong to him, and that you care 
 immensely for him, though you now only listen to your 
 anger.” 
 
 Her face flushed. 
 
 u It is an insult to say that to me.” 
 
 “ My dear child, I do not insult anyone. It is not my 
 habit. It is the highest honor to her that a woman should 
 remain faithful quand mime. You seem to me to be ashamed of 
 what is really the finest quality in your character. Youth 
 has often that sort of mauvaise honte before its best emo* 
 tions.” 
 
 u You admire Griseldis, as my father did !” 
 
 “ I do not ask you to be Griseldis. You are not beaten, 
 outraged, or robbed of your children ; that which you have 
 to complain of you would probably have been spared if you 
 had endeavored to be more indulgent and to pass oyer what 
 would never have been thrust on you if you had not looked 
 for it.” 
 
 The train rushed on through the heavy gray darkness ; 
 the lamp swung above their heads, and its yellow light shone 
 on her face, on which a great anger gathered. 
 
 “ I know you only care for his reputation because he is a 
 branch of your own great house,” she said coldly. “ It is no 
 doubt natural you should feel so. It is perhaps as natural 
 that I should feel otherwise.” 
 
 “ That is untrue and unjust,” said Aubrey, with the only 
 sternness she had ever heard from him. u I have been al- 
 ways your friend, often at great cost to myself, and I have 
 more than once run all risks of rupture with my cousin for 
 your sake in the endeavor to persuade him to give you 
 greater happiness and greater consideration. I say nothing 
 more to you than your own father said, who of course cared* 
 alone for you and nothing for my cousin. I endeavor to dis-* 
 suade you from your journey now, because I know that to 
 
&UILDEBOY. 
 
 267 
 
 follow Guilderoy will only appear to him espionage, surveil- 
 lance, interference, curiosity — everything which is most irri- 
 tating to the pride and to the liberty of man. He left you 
 in irritation ; when his irritation is passed he will return to 
 you, if you do not of your own accord raise some insur- 
 mountable obstacle.” 
 
 She did not reply ; her eyes gazed sombrely through the 
 glass at the darkness of the night and the reflections of the 
 lamp. 
 
 “ I entreat you,” he continued, u not to leave England. 
 In England you are with all of us ; you are safe in reputa- 
 tion and in circumstance. Ladysrood is too lonely for so 
 young a woman as you are, but my sister will be beyond ex- 
 pression glad if you will stay with her indefinitely, wherever 
 she be. She said so to me only this morning.” 
 
 “She is very good, but I shall not trouble her.” 
 
 “ This is the sheer madness of obstinacy. What will you 
 accomplish by following my cousin ? He will not pardon it 
 if you follow and arraign him. What good can it possibly 
 do ? What use is the mere momentary indulgence of anger 
 when it must inevitably be followed by a lifetime of regret. 
 The greatest evil of all such upbraidings as you will make to 
 him, if you see him in your present state of irritated pain, is 
 that in them everyone says so much more than they wish or 
 mean ; wild and bitter words are exchanged which can never 
 be forgotten, even if they are ever pardoned, and that which 
 might have been a mere passing sorrow, a temporary estrange- 
 ment, is deepened and widened into a life-long enmity. I 
 have said to you, before, ail that it is possible to say. I only 
 entreat you now to be guided by it, and remain in England.” 
 
 Her heart was hardened against her best friend. Like 
 almost every woman, she was only capable of believing that 
 those alone loved her who wholly agreed with her and, 
 without reserve, sympathized in all her emotions. She had 
 even doubted her father’s affection for her, because it had 
 been critical and temperate in judgment. Her heart now 
 was sore, hurt, apprehensive, full of anger and yet unbear- 
 able indignation ; she would have liked her companion to 
 give her limitless, unquestioning consolation and indignation 
 likewise. She longed to weep her heart out on the breast of 
 a friend ; to cry out against fate, and love, and earth and 
 heaven, and all the cruel treacheries of human life, and hear 
 gome voice full of compassion echo all he? own cries. Bu$ 
 
268 
 
 GU1LDER0T. 
 
 Aubrey seemed to her only to rebuke her, only to palliate 
 all she suffered from, only to study the interests of his family 
 and the conventionalities of the world. 
 
 It closed her heart te him. She was too full of pain and 
 anger both to penetrate his motives or even for an instant 
 to dream of his self-denial. 
 
 He was powerless to persuade or to control her, All the 
 influence which he had possessed upon her before was lost in 
 the flood of blind and passionate impulses let loose in her by 
 the pain of jealousy. She knew well enough that he was 
 right ; but she would not open her ears to his counsels or 
 her heart to his kindness. 
 
 If he had been less loyal to his cousin he might have been 
 more successful in his persuasions. If he had conjured her 
 by his own affection he might have prevailed upon her to 
 return. But no syllable which could have been even influ- 
 enced by personal desires escaped him. John Vernon risen 
 from his grave could not have spoken with more absolute 
 self-denial than he did. And he gained no influence, he 
 made no impression ; jealousy and indignation, and the Bit- 
 ter sense of ignorance and wrong, were all hardening her 
 heart, and driving her on in strong self-will, regardless of 
 the issue of the fate which she provoked. 
 
 Every argument which he could use, every inducement, 
 conjuration, and even prayer which he could call to his aid 
 he exhausted in vain. She knew that her husband and the 
 woman whom he had told her he loved more than any other 
 creature upon earth, were somewhere in Italy together. Eng- 
 land in its dark and early wunter seemed to her only like 
 that ice-prison which holds the bodies of the damned in the 
 verse of Dante. 
 
 Wearied, pained and mortified, Aubrey at last desisted from 
 his endeavors and remained silent as the train flew through 
 the country silences onwards towards Dover. 
 
 “ I am not my cousin’s keeper,” he thought bitterly. “ And 
 very likely if he knew what I am doing now he would only 
 misconstrue my reasons, and rebuke me for meddlesome in- 
 terference ! ” 
 
 There was no sound but that of the oscillation of the traim 
 swinging at headlong speed over its iron sleepers. 
 
 Neither spoke again till the journey was almost done. 
 
 66 You will not warn him that I am going away ! ” she 
 .said suddenly once. 
 
GTJILDEBOY. 
 
 209 
 
 U 1 am not an informer, as I told you once before,” he 
 answered coldly. “But his sister will no doubt find some 
 way to let him know that you have left England.” 
 
 “ It does not matter,” she replied as coldly, and, she 
 thought, wretchedly. “ He never changes or pauses in his 
 wishes for me ! ” 
 
 The silence remained unbroken until the slackening of the 
 speed of the train told them that they were near the docks 
 of Dover. Then Aubrey, stooped a little forward, and, 
 resting his gray eyes upon her sadty, said with great gentle- 
 ness, yet with a coldness which she had never heard from 
 him : — 
 
 “ If you have any true confidence in my judgment and in 
 my affection for you, listen to me now. Return here and 
 wait till Guilderoy comes to you of his own accord. If you 
 have patience that time will not be long.” 
 
 She heard the wise words with the impatience of a woman 
 who knows beforehand what advice she is about to receive, 
 and has beforehand decided to follow none of it. Aubrey 
 seemed to her cold, unsympathetic, conventional ; she wanted 
 his grief and indignation as her support ; she was almost 
 unjust enough to say herself that the clannish feeling of 
 family dignity made him think more of preserving his 
 cousin’s name from public comment than of her own per- 
 sonal pain. She was in that state when every form of con- 
 solation or counsel seems an irritant or a mockery ; when, 
 as Horace has it, anger being unbridled becomes the violent 
 tyrant of the soul. 
 
 “ I have a right to know. I have a right to know,” she 
 repeated to herself. They all seemed to deny her that right ; 
 they all seemed to think that she should submit to stay in 
 tutelage and acquiescence, asking nothing and arranging 
 nothing until her husband should at his good will and pleas- 
 ure deign to recall once more the fact that she existed. 
 
 Their names were great, no doubt, and their lives were 
 before the world ; hut if he chose to sully them and give 
 them to idle calumny it was no fault of hers. 
 
 There was a brief and tempestuous winter session then on, 
 from which it was impossible for Aubrey to absent himself 
 even a day. Even if he could have done so, he might have 
 been the cause of more harm than good, he thought, if he 
 forced his presence upon her in the journey on which her 
 heart was set. Even his cousin himself, uncertain of temper 
 
270 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 and capricious in his judgments, might look on such an in« 
 terference with wrong interpretation of it. He saw nothing 
 that he could do, for the time being, except to leare her to 
 her own choice of action. Things might, perchance, become 
 better than he feared they would do. 
 
 He knew that it is of little use to try to be the providence 
 for other lives. The unforeseen is sure to intervene, and ac- 
 cident at every moment overturns the schemes and the wishes 
 of man with a fractiousness which no one can prevent. 
 
 “ You must take your own way, my dear,” he said, with a 
 sigh. “I hope you will never regret it!” 
 
 Then he accompanied her on to the vessel and bade her 
 farewell. 
 
 The night was cold but clear ; a strong sparkling frosty 
 sky and a scarcely ruffled sea. He held her hand a moment 
 in his as he parted from her on the deck. 
 
 “ I am sorry I cannot come with you to Paris,” he said, 
 with a great coldness despite himself, still in his tone. “ But 
 I must be in the House to-night by eleven at latest. God 
 bless you, dear; since you will go, be prudent and be unself- 
 ish. Women suffer much at times no doubt from the selfish- 
 ness of men, but sometimes I think they repent their own 
 more bitterly when they give way to it. And how often 
 mere selfishness is called love.” 
 
 Then he let her hand go, and left her standing on the deck 
 of the steamship under the clear cold skies. 
 
 His heart was heavy, as a special train carried him back- 
 ward in his solitude to Westminster as fast as steam could 
 bear him through the night. 
 
 “ You filled my barren life with treasure ; 
 
 You may withdraw the gifts you gave 
 
 he thought, in the words of the unknown writer to which he 
 had taken a causeless fancy. “Nay, she has given me no 
 treasure at all, and she takes away nothing because she gave 
 nothing. The gift was given to a life not barren, but already 
 over full, and I have no part or share in either her pleasures 
 or her joys. Why should I have ? She has used me like a 
 good big dog which could swim through some rough currents 
 to save her ; but she is now in the deep sea, and if she can 
 be saved it cannot be by me.” 
 
 And that tempter which dwells in the heart of man, and 
 which he had once said at Ladysrood made it almost possible 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 271 
 
 to believe in the old-world myths of devilish agencies, 
 whispered to him now, if he had been less loyal, if he had 
 done as other men would have done, if he had used his many 
 opportunities and his power of influence over her to turn her 
 heart away from his cousin, and win it in its revulsion and 
 reaction to himself, he would have done no more than what 
 nearly every man would have done in his place, and in the 
 issue she might have been consoled, and he at the least been 
 happy. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 The steamer meantime passed on its little voyage through 
 the still frosty air, and over the liquid darkness of the sea. 
 Gladys, enwrapped in her black sables, stayed on deck in- 
 sensible to cold. She was only conscious of the febrile 
 excitement within her, and of that momentary solace which 
 is always found in any physical movement which relieves 
 or distracts great anxiety. 
 
 She went straight to Paris, and descended at an hotel in- 
 stead of at the house which Guilderoy rented in the Avenue 
 de Bois de Boulogne, and which was then shut up and left in 
 charge of the Suisse. She did not wish her movements 
 to be known to anyone. She inquired at the English Em- 
 bassy where Lord Guilderoy was. With some surprise, and, 
 she thought, with some embarrassment, his friends there told 
 her that they believed he was in Venice still ; they had heard 
 no change of address from him. She left them to think or 
 conclude what they chose, and went to Venice, as Aubrey 
 had done before her. At his palace, where they received her 
 with obsequious deference, she heard that he had left there 
 three weeks before, but where he was they could not say ; he 
 had left no address. She perceived that it was an excuse, a 
 falsehood, but they were at least loyal to the instructions 
 they had received ; she did not try to bribe them into dis- 
 obedience, which could easily have been done. She paused 
 for a few days at the house, which was always kept in perfect 
 readiness for his arrival. She thought it probable that he 
 might return. 
 
 It was cold in Venice, but it did not seem so .to her after 
 the north winds which had been sweeping over the woods 
 and moors of Ladysrood when she had left it. The sun was 
 
272 
 
 GtllLLEBOT. 
 
 radiant ; the green canals still basked in light, the silvery 
 lagoons bore the little islands on their breasts, the .Jstrian 
 brigs were unloading their loads of wood in the (?iudecca, 
 the Greek traders were landing their varied cargoes at the 
 Custom-house, the many-colored fleet of little fishing vessels 
 anchored off the Canareggio and the Botanic gardens ; the 
 scene was always charming, various, gay — a panorama of 
 moving, noiseless, delicately-tinted life. 
 
 She acknowledged its charm; but it made her heart al- 
 most heavier than it had been under the wintry shadows and 
 dusky mists of Ladysrood. As she let the gondoliers take 
 her over the water and thread their way with unerring ac- 
 curacy through the crowded craft of the Canale d’Orfano, she 
 lived over again every moment of the first weeks she had 
 spent in Venice. All that passion spent on them seemed to 
 her like a dream — some remembered poem that could have 
 nothing in common with her own life. Woman can never 
 habituate herself to the early and abrupt cessation of all 
 love’s instincts and caresses, which to the man seems so 
 natural and so inevitable. With her that fairy story should 
 be told with the same ardor every recurrent year ; to him 
 it is as dead as last year’s leaves. 
 
 At times, as she drifted through the silvery wintry air, she 
 blamed herself, recalling every word of counsel which her 
 father and Aubrey had addressed to her. 
 
 She had been unwise, she knew, to speak as she had last 
 spoken to her husband. She had been unwise to reject his 
 proposal to travel with her into distant lands ; she had done 
 wrong to repulse so coldly that share in her sorrow which he 
 had offered her with sincere and delicate sympathy. All this 
 she knew. But the vision of his other passions had stood 
 between him and herself, and there was now forever sound- 
 511 g in her ear the avowal of his love for Beatrice Soria. 
 
 That one bitter and restless remembrance haunted her, 
 md would not let her stay in peace amongst the gliding 
 haters and soothing stillness of Venice. She did not know 
 where he might be. She could not write to inquire of mere 
 strangers. She had the whole of Italian journals which were 
 sold at the news-stalls bought and brought to her. He was 
 so well known in Italy that she thought his movements 
 would be observed and chronicled, however much he might 
 try to guard against it. 
 
 For several days she saw nothing; on the ninth day sho 
 
GVILDEROT. 
 
 ' ' 273 
 
 read in one of the sheets a little line announcing that he was 
 still in Naples. She knew from the Venetians that he had 
 left them some twenty days before. It seemed to her clear 
 as the golden moon rising above the Euagnean mountains 
 that he was with her rival. 
 
 The voice of her father seemed to say to her from his 
 grave, “ Do not go thither; do not try to compel Fate.” 
 
 She had done all that she could do to keep off the inquisitive- 
 ness of society ; she had done more than many would have 
 done to offer a serene and harmonious surface-existence to 
 the stare of curiosity and malignity. But, beneath all that, 
 the aching heart of her youth was angered and seething like 
 a sea in storm ; under all her apparent and enforced compos- 
 ure the blindest and maddest of all the passions — jealousy, 
 was tearing her soul asunder. 
 
 “ I have a right at least to know,” she told herself a thou- 
 sand times, lying awake in what had been her nuptial cham- 
 ber ; listening to the lapping of the water, on the marble 
 stairs below, all the long night through until the sound of 
 the cannon fired at sunrise in the Giudecca told her that 
 another dreary, empty, anxious, desolate day had come. 
 
 “ I have a right to know,” she thought, and, allowing 
 Aubrey’s letter to be unanswered, she left the Venetian sea- 
 mists and water-ways, and went, also, southward through the 
 amber sunrays and the roseate lights of a luminous winter’s 
 day spreading with noontide- golden and glorious over the 
 lagoons and the meadows of the Brenta. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 It was now the close of November. Beatrice Soria was at 
 the great palace of the Soria, fronting the sea, where she 
 still ruled supreme by virtue of her young children, over 
 whose lives she was left sole and complete guardian. This 
 palace was one of the marvels of the south, built by Angelo 
 Fiori, with ceilings by Domenichino, and frescoes by Simone 
 Papa. Its fagade dominated the sea ; to its rear stretched 
 large and beautiful gardens. It was here that Guilderoy 
 bad first succumbed to her charms in one soft, gay, Neapolitan 
 
 18 
 
274 
 
 BUILDEROT. 
 
 / 
 
 winter, which ever remained on the memories sm 
 
 as the one perfect page in their book of life. 
 
 It was years ago now ; but every detail and hotir of it 
 seemed to comeback to him as on a magic glass, as he saw the 
 
 and terraces, and mole of marble. Every delicious and en- 
 chanted moment passed there revived in his remembrance ; 
 all that their intimacy had had of ntorm, of dispute, of doubt, 
 of jealousy, of too arrogant dominion, had all faded from his 
 mind as though they had never been. His memories re- 
 tained only the glow and glory of its noontide light. He 
 utterly forgot the thunder clouds which had often broken 
 over the golden beauty of those days of love. 
 
 When at length he roused himself from the memories with 
 which he stood on the strip of shore below and gazed at the 
 mass of sculpture towering above him, and mounted the 
 great stairway from the sea and asked of the guardian of its 
 gates if the Duchess Soria would receive him, he was met by 
 an inflexible denial. Her Excellency received no one except 
 from four to six o’clock every Saturday afternoon, and again 
 on Monday evenings from ten. It was then Tuesday. 
 
 “ With the crowd ! — never,” he said to himself ; and turned 
 away, with feverish impatience and an aching heart. 
 
 He passed the day wandering beside the sea or in the 
 streets. 
 
 At night he wrote to her; the first letter he had addressed 
 to her since that in which he had announced his marriage. 
 His declarations were as ardent and as comprehensive in it 
 as those of Tibullus to Cerinthe in the thirteenth carmen of 
 the fourth book. He received no answer; and he was as 
 wretched as Cerinthe’s lover. 
 
 On tli third day after he had sent it, his heart beat 
 breathlessly at sight of a large envelope, with the two gold 
 crowns on it, directed in the handwriting which he had once 
 known so well, and which had sent him letters which at one 
 time lie had worn in his breast and which at another time he 
 had held to a lighted match and burnt. 
 
 He opened the envelope with intense anxiety and sus- 
 pense. But it was only a card printed in gold which 
 announced that the Duchess Soria might be visited in “ prima 
 sera” on Monday evenings. There was no written word 
 with it ; only his name filling up the blank space left for that 
 purpose on the card. 
 
 long white majesty of the great house tower above its stairs 
 
GTJILDEROY. 
 
 275 
 
 u Can any woman forget so utterly ! 99 he thought in 
 passion and pain, oblivious that if she had learned the 
 lesson of forgetting, he had been the first to teach it to her. 
 
 His pride told him to leave Naples at once without seeing 
 her; he felt that there was neither dignity nor courage in 
 remaining a suppliant at the gates of one who once had been 
 wholly his. 
 
 The remonstrances of Aubrey haunted him with persistent 
 reproach, and for the first time in his life he saw his own 
 conduct in its true light. But the ascendancy which Beatrice 
 Soria possessed over him was stronger even than the impulses 
 of pride. He could not bring himself to leave the scene of 
 their former joys, the place where soonest, if ever, her heart 
 would return to him on tlie impulse of memory. 
 
 Moreover, others who admired or adored her, others freer 
 than he to prove their homage, had followed her thither also, 
 and an intense jealousy of all that was possible in her future 
 held him. There as of old, in those smiling seas, the syrens 
 had held too reckless mortals in their power, and so hers 
 held him now upon these shores. He remained as though 
 he were a boy of twenty, spending his hours beneath the 
 sea-walls of her palace, and trusting to some favoring hazard 
 to afford him that unwitnessed interview with her which he 
 sought. He did not accept her permission to approach her 
 with the crowd at her receptions. He felt that he could not 
 trust himself to see her first again before a throng, of which 
 many would be strangers and all would be odious to him. 
 Every day at sunset she drove, like other great ladies of the 
 city ; and every day at sunset he was standing or riding near 
 when her great bronze gates unclosed. She gave him a 
 salutation and a smile, but never checked her horses. He 
 saw, or imagined that he saw, in the smile a triumphant 
 mockery of himself. He was mistaken ; it was merely the 
 slight smile of courtesy which any well-bred woman gives to 
 an acquaintance. 
 
 There was no movement of society at that time in the 
 city. The great world of Naples never bestirs itself until 
 Carnival comes. The populace were wild and mirthful in the 
 streets as usual, but none of the great houses were opened 
 except hers. She had all the customs of a wider world than 
 that of the Neapolitans, and had never been bound by their 
 observances. 
 
 The empty and fruitless days succeeded gne another and 
 
276 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 brought him nothing that he wished. At last he remem 
 bered that golden key which the classic lovers of this soil rec- 
 ommend to those who would see unclose a door too cruelly 
 shut against them. All things are saleable still in the land 
 of Ovid and Tibullus, and the honesty of no guardian of the 
 lares is more proof now than then against a bribe. He saw, 
 and looked at enviously, in the high wall of the garden, the 
 iron grating of the postern gate, by which he had used to 
 have the right of entrance at his pleasure. The same creep- 
 ing plants hung over it as in other years; the same black- 
 birds plucked at the black berries of its flowering ivy ; the 
 same great magnolia trees shrouded it in deepest shade ; the 
 same sound of falling water came from the fountains behind 
 it, and the same cripple lay on the road fronting it, stretch- 
 ing out his brown and filthy hand for alms. Nothing was 
 changed except himself, nothing gone except his privileges. 
 He even heard the very voice of the same dog as, aroused by 
 the sound of his footsteps, it ran barking along the wall 
 within. 
 
 In time, and with some difficulty — for the dependents of 
 the Soria palace valued their place and feared to lose it — the 
 potent talisman of gain succeeded in drawing back the rusted 
 bolts of the little iron door, and the underling, who had be- 
 trayed his mistress for a handful of paper money, held back 
 the dog as Guilderoy passed into the evergreen shades of the 
 familiar garden paths. But the dog, escaping from the 
 gardener’s hold, ran to him and leaped joyfully on him. 
 
 “Poor Pyrrho, do you remember me? You are more 
 merciful than your mistress ! ” he murmured, as he caressed 
 the dog, profoundly touched by its affectionate welcome. He 
 walked on under the deep aisles of bay and laurel. 
 
 It was dark here in the gardens, though only the first stars 
 had risen over the sea. He had chosen the hour at which 
 she would be sure to have returned from her drive ; her din- 
 ner hour was not until nine, he knew, and when she came 
 in it was her habit to sit alone awhile in a small room hung 
 entirely with allegorical paintings by Albani, and having 
 great windows looking towards the sea. It served her as a 
 boudoir and a library in one. Here again and again, hun- 
 dreds of times he had found her of old reading some new 
 German or French book of philosophy, or the verses of some 
 Latin poet. 
 
 He entered the house by the garden loggia and the apart- 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 277 
 
 ments wliich were called the garden-rooms. The servants 
 were then closing the shutters for the night ; but they knew 
 him and were not surprised to see him there, and one of 
 them ushered him without question through the house to the 
 little chamber which was called the Salotto di Albani. 
 
 She was seated with her back to the door, reading, or 
 seeming to read. The light from the lamp fell on the dark 
 gold of her hair, which was the hair of Palma Vecehio’s Bar- 
 bara. He could only see the crown of her head and one fold 
 of her velvet gown, the hue of the dark side of an olive leaf ; 
 all else was hidden by the carved back of her large chair. 
 
 He saw her thus through the parting of the velvet cur- 
 tains hanging before the door. Two lamps were burning low, 
 and shed a roseate light on the room ; the windows, still un- 
 shuttered, showed the serene night, in which a flush of day 
 still lingered. 
 
 He motioned the servant backward, and the man, who had 
 known him well in other days and had then always let him 
 enter unannounced, allowed him to do so now, and closed the 
 door noiselessly. 
 
 In a moment, before the Duchess Soria had even looked up 
 from the volume she was reading, Guilderoy had crossed the 
 room and was at her feet. 
 
 She withdrew her gown from the eager clasp of his hands, 
 and a flush of anger rose over her face. 
 
 “ You have bribed my servants ! ” she said with unutter- 
 able scorn. 
 
 “ You left me no other way. You would not answer me. 
 You would not see me alone.” 
 
 “ Why should I see you alone ? As for answer I already 
 answered enough — more than enough — at Aix.” 
 
 “It is an answer which I will not take.” 
 
 “You must take it, since it is my will to give it.” 
 
 She withdrew her hands from his hold with something of 
 the violence which he had once known in her. 
 
 He kissed the folds of her skirts. 
 
 “ I will not take it ; I do not believe in it. All can never 
 be over between us. Here, in this sacred room, which heard 
 my earliest vows to you, I swear that you are the only woman 
 whom I have ever loved in my whole life.” 
 
 “ To how many women have you said so ? And how dare 
 you recall vows which were only uttered, to be forsworn ? n 
 
278 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 “ I have said so to no other woman. No other — -living or 
 dead.” 
 
 “ You have said so at least to your wife ? 99 
 
 “ Never. I never loved her.” 
 
 “ Then why did you marry her ? No woman can have 
 either compassion or respect for any man who knows what he 
 wishes so little as that.” 
 
 He colored with offended pride and irritated pain. 
 
 “I am human,” he said angrily. “Men have never, that 
 I know of, in any part of the world’s history, been conspicu- 
 ous for consistency where their passions were involved.” 
 
 “ Do you not understand what an insult to all passion such 
 inconsistency is ? ” 
 
 “ No ; passion is, in its very essence, wayward and shifting 
 as the winds. You reproach me with my mutability. But 
 you only do so because you will not endeavor to understand. 
 It is only comprehension that is ever pitiful.” 
 
 She looked at him with a long gaze, under which his own 
 eyes fell. 
 
 “ I think I understand you perfectly,” she said in her low, 
 sweet, dreamy voice. “You study your own pleasure. You 
 do not consider anything beyond it. I loved you immensely. 
 It is no flattery to you to say so, since for nearly seven years 
 I never disguised it from you, and the grave of your child is 
 there in attestation of it. You knew that you were my 
 world ; yet the moment that anew caprice attracted you, you 
 dismissed me with scarcely more consideration than you 
 would have shown to a femme entretemie . I said nothing; 
 I could not avenge it, and women of my character do not 
 complain or appeal. Now, because you see me sought 
 by other men, or because, perhaps, your feeling for me 
 was of a deeper kind than you knew, you are as ready 
 to throw aside your allegiance to others as you were ready 
 then to throw aside yours to me for them. Why should I 
 give you either pity or credence ? Why should I believe in 
 the strength of feelings which have never been more stable 
 than a marsh-light which flits hither and thither ? You do 
 not know what love is. You have too much self-love to 
 know it.” 
 
 He sighed as he heard her ; his conscience told him that 
 there was truth in the charge. Yet he knew that his love 
 for her was very great; what proof could he give her which 
 would persuade her of its strength ? 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 279 
 
 “You are unmerciful like all women/’ he said at last, 
 H May I, without offence, tell you a truth also ? I did love 
 you greatly — as much as it is in me to love at all. But you 
 tried me often. You were too exacting, too imperious, too 
 passionate. We always revolt when we feel the curb. It 
 was a momentary impatience, not of you, but of the domin- 
 ion you sought to have over me, which made me fancy that 
 in marriage’ I might perhaps find greater tranquillity and 
 paore genuine peace.” 
 
 “ Beside which, Lady Guilderoy was very lovely, and you 
 wished for her, and you had never denied yourself any whim or 
 any desire ! It is very possible that I was unwise and ex- 
 acting. Few women are otherwise j , and I have one preten- 
 sion I confess, one which you knew of old : I reign alone, or 
 I reign not at all.” 
 
 Guilderoy smiled wearily. 
 
 “ Is that worthy, of your knowledge of our weaknesses ? ” 
 
 “ Perhaps not. I make no claim to consistency. But 
 what I claim I give. The world considers me a coquette 
 because I have power over men. But I have never been 
 a coquette in the sense of dividing my affections. I will 
 admit, even though it flatters you, that I have always been 
 true to you though you were false to me.” 
 
 He bowed his head and kissed her hands. His eyes were 
 dim with tears. 
 
 “Did you doubt it ?” she said with a little disdain. “How 
 little our lovers know of us ! Our hearts beat against theirs, 
 and our lives mingle with theirs, and yet they go from us 
 knowing no more of our real natures than if they had em- 
 braced things of wood or of wax ! Is it stupidity or indif- 
 ference ? I suppose it is the immense blindness of self-love. 
 And you are all of you so blunt in your perceptions, and so 
 coarse,” she pursued. “ If a woman has hazarded her posi- 
 tion for^ you, though you know she is all yours, and is as 
 faithful as Dido, as tender as Hero, yet in your rude and 
 clumsy classifications you will, in your own thoughts, bracket 
 her with Lydia and Lais. ” 
 
 She put his hands off hers almost roughly for a woman of 
 such slow and languid grace of movement. 
 
 “ Hot I,” he murmured, gazing at her wfith eyes in w T hich 
 she might read more than the worship of old. 
 
 “ Oh, yes ! you — you more, perhaps, than most men. 
 When you wrote me your letter of farewell you ended it in 
 
280 
 
 GUILLEROr. 
 
 delicate phrases because you are a gentleman, but the truth 
 which pierced through them was that you left me as you 
 would have left any bought companion of your pleasures.” 
 “No; ten thousand times no!” he said vehemently. 
 “You imagined what was not there. You exaggerated 
 the offence to you. Women always will. I might be 
 ungrateful, unworthy, failing in appreciation and penetration 
 as you say, but I never for a moment failed to render you 
 the honor that you merit.” 
 
 She smiled faintly. 
 
 “Since you left me how can you expect me to believe it ? 
 If you leave your wife to-morrow will she believe that you 
 honor her ? ” 
 
 “ Why will you speak of her ? ” 
 
 “We must speak of her. She exists.” 
 
 “ Let me forget that she does so ! ” 
 
 The same faint dreamy smile came on her mouth ; he could 
 not tell whether she believed or disbelieved him, whether she 
 esteemed him true or false, whether she loved him still or had 
 put him wholly from her inner life. 
 
 “ You must be aware that your offence to me is one which 
 no woman who has any pride can pardon. You love me, you 
 do not love me, you think you love me again, you vacillate, 
 you doubt, you forsake, you adore ; and you expect me to 
 humbly await you while your heart oscillates to and fro, now 
 close to mine, now leagues away from mine.” 
 
 “ I expect nothing,” he said bitterly. “ I have lost the 
 right to expect, if I were ever happy enough to possess it. Only, 
 if you will tell me any test by which I can prove you my 
 sincerity, tell me what it is, and then you will learn whether 
 I now speak on mere caprice or not.” 
 
 She was silent, while all the light of her deep and lustrous 
 eyes seemed to plunge into his and through them search his 
 inmost soul. She was silent *ome moments, and she oomld 
 hear the loud fast beating of his heart. 
 
 “ There is only one test possible for me to accept or to be- 
 lieve in,” she said at last. 
 
 “ Tell me what it is ; or, indeed, I will consent to it un- 
 told.” 
 
 “ Do not be too rash,” she said, with a cold and momen- 
 tary smile. “You must, however, know very well what it is. 
 Leave your wife forever and I shall believe in your love fo| 
 me.” 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 281 
 
 He turned away pale and was mute. 
 
 “ You hesitate ? ” she said with interrogation and disdain. 
 
 He sighed heavily. 
 
 “ It is a demand which does not affect myself alone.” 
 
 “Did your demand of the past affect yourself alone ? 
 What demand of love, or of life, can ever concern oneself 
 alone ? ” 
 
 “You mean to leave her publicly ? ” 
 
 “Yes; nothing less than that. I will accept no divided 
 allegiance. It was for her that you insulted me. It must 
 now be her whom you surrender for me.” 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 “My honor,” he said at last, but he hesitated, and she 
 filled up the sentence. 
 
 “ Your honor ! You mean your conventional deference to 
 the world’s opinion. You are weary of your wife, you shun, 
 dislike, and avoid her, but you consider your honor saved, if 
 you affect with her, for society, a union which has wholly 
 ceased to exist either in fact or feeling, I tell you you know 
 nothing of genuine passion or vital pain. You are honest 
 neither to myself or her.” 
 
 He was silent ; he breathed heavily ; his heart was torn 
 between conflicting emotions. 
 
 “ Remember, said Beatrice Soria coldly, “ I do not ask this 
 of you ; I do not even wish it ; much less do I counsel it. I 
 only say, as I have a right to say, that such alone is the proof 
 of your sincerity which I can accept or credit. You already 
 seek from me patience, forgiveness, and oblivion of no com- 
 mon sort ; I have a right to answer that I can only give you 
 these on certain conditions. You can fulfil them or reject 
 them as you please. There was a time, I confess, when I 
 could have died of the pain of your abandonment. But that 
 time is past. You have taught me to live without you. I 
 can do so now and in the future. It is a lesson which no 
 man who is wise teaches to any woman.” 
 
 He sighed as he heard : the words were the same in 
 meaning as those which Aubrey had spoken to him of his 
 wife. 
 
 “ What are your conditions ? ” he asked in a low voice. 
 “ Tell me more clearly. What is it you exact ? Your right 
 I admit. I have never denied it.” 
 
 “ What I have said. That you should leave your wife, 
 gmd make it known to her that you leave her forever. You 
 
282 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 will write a letter of farewell to her, which I shall read and 
 send. It was for her that you insulted and forsook me. It 
 is her now whom you must sacrifice — if you are in earnest.” 
 
 He was silent a moment; then he walked to the table 
 near on which were paper and pens and ink, and a litter of 
 opened letters. “Tell me what to write,” he said with the 
 same sound in his voice, which was half sullen and half im- 
 ploring. He plunged one of the quills in the ink, and 
 turned to her and waited. 
 
 “Ho. Hot in that haste,” she said; and she rose and 
 closed her writing-table. “ You shall not say or think in 
 the future that I hurried you into an agitated and unmedi- 
 tated act. Years ago we were much like that, but such 
 madness is over. Your choice must be deliberate and wholly 
 voluntary. It will last out your life and mine. So now, if 
 you choose you can return to this room at this hour to-mor- 
 row. If not, leave Naples, and do not attempt ever again to 
 see me or to speak to me, either alone or in the world.” 
 
 Before he could reply or remonstrate she had touched a 
 hand-bell which stood near her ; one of the men of the ante- 
 chamber answered. 
 
 “Show my lord to his carriage,” she said to the servant. 
 
 Guilderoy could not resist such dismissal. He kissed her 
 hand with the slight salutation of an acquaintance and left 
 her presence. The servant ushered him with ceremony 
 through the house and out by the great gates of the sea 
 front. He was scarcely conscious of what he did or where 
 he went : and he found himself standing on the beach be- 
 neath the marble wall, with the placid sea before him shin- 
 ing under the stars, a few boats rocking in the silver of its 
 surf. 
 
 CHAPTER XLY. 
 
 1 Unnerved, beset with a thousand conflicting emotions, 
 divided between intense desire and that honor which his 
 education and his instincts made a second nature to him, 
 Guilderoy left the hall and went home across the gardens to 
 the palace which he had occupied half a mile away. The night 
 was very brilliant ; the stars seemed strewn thickly as dia- 
 mond dust ; all the ear-piercing and countless noises of the 
 Neapolitan streets had ceased. It was an hour before dawn j 
 
guilderoy . 
 
 283 
 
 there was no sound but that of the murmur of the sea. He 
 walked through the white intense moonlight and the dim 
 shadows, now passing some recumbent figure lying stretched 
 in sleep upon the stones, some basket of malits whose tired 
 seller had fallen asleep beside it on a marble stair, some 
 Madonna’s lamp burning within a sculptured shrine. He 
 looked at nothing, neither outward to the sea nor upward to 
 the stars, nor downward at the slumbering beggars. His 
 eyes only saw, as it were, painted on the radiant night, the 
 face of Beatrice Soria. 
 
 What she had demanded of him was a greater price than 
 if she had asked of him the sacrifice of existence itself. 
 
 He was a man to whom the curiosity and comment of the 
 world were intolerable ; to whom the honor of his name had 
 been always sacred and kept intact through all his follies 
 and excesses; his attachment to John Vernon, lying dead in 
 his grave at Christslea, was sincere, and his sense of the 
 duty owing to his memory was strong. 
 
 The hours passed uncounted ; he had no sense either of 
 hunger or thirst ; he was wholly possessed by the agitation 
 of his senses and emotions, and the struggle, which was vio- 
 lent, between his desires and his consciousness of what 
 honor a^ked of him. 
 
 The memory of her as he had seen her first on the moors in 
 the pale autumn morning came over him with a pang of wistful 
 repentance and regret. The recollection of her in the first 
 days of her marriage to him smote him with the sense of 
 having sacrificed some innocent and trustful animal on the 
 altars of his own brief and destroying desires. 
 
 lie knew that to both the woman whom he had married 
 and the woman whom he had loved he had behaved with the 
 unkindness which is the inseparable offspring of a purely 
 selfish and physical passion. He saw himself for the moment 
 as others saw him ; and he condemned himself as they con- 
 demned him in these solitary and bitter hours of self- 
 examination. 
 
 What Aubrey had justly defined in him as a feeling not 
 of affection but of egotism towards his wife, made it terrible 
 to him to appear to other men as wanting in respect or in re- 
 gard for her. He was sensitive to the insolence of public 
 comment ; and he abhorred the thought that through him the 
 world would talk of her. He remembered her father with 
 contrition and self-condemnation ; he remembered his own 
 
284 
 
 QUXLDEBOY. 
 
 violent self-will in insisting on the caprice of his momentary 
 desires, and all the wisdom with which John Vernon had en- 
 deavored to dissuade him from his folly. He could not pos- 
 sibly blame anyone except himself. He could lay at no one 
 else’s door the difficulty and temptation in which he was now 
 placed. He had blamed her indeed for want of sympathy 
 * and affection, but he knew that he had had little right to 
 do so. 
 
 He passed the night hours pacing to and fro beside the 
 sea. Once he bade a boatman row him out on to the moonlit 
 water, and he watched from it the receding shores. 
 
 The boat drifted on under the stars on the open sea, the 
 rower, half asleep, steering mechanically with his foot, and 
 ever and anon idly dipping his oars into the waves. He was 
 stretched at full length, his head resting on the bench, his 
 eyes watching afar off the stately pile of the Soria Palace 
 towering against the moon-bathed clouds, whilst the fragrance 
 of its orange gardens came to him over the waves. After 
 all, it seemed to him, his first duty was to the one who dwelt 
 there. 
 
 His marriage had been a supreme wrong done to her. If 
 she could find reparation or consolation in his love now, he 
 thought that he was bound in honor to afford them to her; 
 at least his wishes led him to try and believe so. And he 
 loved her more than he had ever loved any woman ; her touch, 
 her voice, her regard, stirred the very depths of his soul as 
 no other’s had ever done. Years of separation had given to 
 his desires the freshness of a new passion, and the keen jeal- 
 ousy with which he had watched the homage of others had 
 intensified it tenfold. He was in that mood in which a man 
 feels that all other things may perish if his love is left to 
 him ; the cry of Faust, “I give my soul forever so that this 
 woman may be mine ! ” 
 
 It seemed to him that he never really lived save when he 
 was with her. His senses were stimulated, his intelligence 
 was aroused, his wandering fancies were captured and con- 
 centrated by her as they were by no other woman. The very 
 indignity which he had inflicted on her, and which she had 
 pardoned, endeared her to him ; she had not clung to him in 
 slavish humility, but she had loved him and forgiven him 
 with a greatness which ennobled her in his sight. Such 
 madness might be passed with her; in him it was as living 
 still as when, years before, he had first watched the stars rise 
 
&UILLEKOY. 
 
 285 
 
 over these waves and the moon shine on the pale sculptures 
 of her palace. She believed that he was incapable of suffer- 
 ing ; but he felt that he drank its fullest cup to the lees. She 
 was the only woman on earth to him ; the world seemed to 
 hold no other. But a remorse, which was in its way as 
 strong as the desire of his soul, was also at work within him. 
 He knew that he would act vilely and with surpassing dis- 
 loyalty if he deserted so young a woman as his wife, and one 
 so wholly blameless. 
 
 She had been unable to content him indeed ; she had failed 
 to correspond to some fanciful ideal which he had formed and 
 imagined for a few months to be incorporated in her. She 
 was not what he had wished or what he had cared for; but 
 that was no fault of hers. She had promised him nothing 
 which she had not fulfilled, and she had borne his name 
 blamelessly through all trials. 
 
 In what she had said to him on the day that he had left 
 Ladysrood she had been wholly justified by facts ; and though 
 he had so violently resented her words, his conscience told 
 him that they were wdiolly deserved ; that they had indeed 
 been more forbearing than many a woman in her position 
 would have made them. 
 
 As ludicrous and commonplace thoughts intrude themselves 
 sometimes on the deepest and most tragic emotions, there 
 recurred to his mind his conversation with his sister on the 
 evening when he had announced to her his intended mar- 
 riage ; and of how he had replied to her prophecies of woe 
 with the jest that no one ever abandoned his wife in these 
 latter days, unless it were a workman who went off with the 
 household savings to the United States. It had always 
 seemed to him so easy to live so that the world need know 
 nothing of private disunion or dissension : so easy to conduct 
 existence on the smooth lines of outward courtesy and appar- 
 ent regard ; so easy to shut the door politely in the face of a 
 staring world in such a manner that it should imagine that 
 there was perfect felicity behind it. He had always been 
 disdainfully censorious of those who had not the tact or the 
 good taste requisite to preserve these externals of harmonious 
 agreement, which are all that the world demands. And now 
 he himself was on the brink of affording to the world that 
 spectacle of disordered passion and of public severance which 
 had always seemed to him so coarse and so unwise ! 
 
 Amidst all the heat and confusion of his thoughts there 
 
286 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 came over him the memory of John Vernon’s pale calm feat- 
 ures in the mask of death, as he had seen them, with the 
 summer sunlight falling soft and warm upon them, while the 
 little birds had sung outside the casement underneath the 
 leaves. The pang of an immense remorse, the throb of a 
 great shame stirred in his heart. Egotist though he was, 
 given over to pleasure and indifferent to rebuke, he felt 
 ashamed and guilty before the mute reproach of the dead 
 man’s memory. 
 
 “ I gave you all I had,” the voice of the dead seemed to 
 say to him. “ I gave it against my will, and I warned you 
 that you would use it ill. What have you done with it ? 
 What will you say to me on that day when you, too, come 
 before the tribunal of the grave? ” 
 
 He shuddered as he lay under the golden December moon, 
 shining cold as steel down on the steel-blue seas. What 
 had become of his honor ? Where was his good faith to the 
 dead ? To a living man he might have been untrue, had he 
 chosen ; but to be false to one who could never arraign him, 
 never offend him, never rebuke him ! — he seemed to grow a 
 coward and a liar in his own sight. All better things, all 
 higher truths that he had ever believed in, awoke in his soul, 
 and bade him suffer what he would, lose all he might, but be 
 faithful to his word to one who was no more numbered with 
 the living. He gazed at the faint white shore gleaming afar 
 off under the moonlit skies. 
 
 “ My love, my love ! ” he murmured, “ I cannot be dishon- 
 ored even for you. He trusted me — — ” 
 
 The tears filled his eyes, and the shining seas and the 
 starry skies grew dim to his sight. 
 
 “ Put me ashore,” he said to the boatman. His resolve 
 was taken. 
 
 CHAPTER XL VI. 
 
 When* he at last reached his own residence and crossed the 
 court to enter his own apartments, it was nearly but not quite 
 dawn. Large lamps swinging from the ceiling dimly lighted 
 the two ante-chambers. In the second of them his body- 
 servant was lying, fully dressed, face downwards, on one of 
 the couches, tired out with his long vigil. Guilderoy, sunk 
 in his own thoughts, did not even see the man, and passed 
 
' " GUILDEEOY , 287 
 
 on to the three large rooms which divided the vestibule from 
 his bed-chamber. 
 
 It was an old palace ; lofty, spacious, magnificent, faded 
 and dull. Busts of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes 
 stretching out gaunt arms into the darkness, ivories brown 
 with age, worn brocades with goldthreads gleaming in them, 
 and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of dead gods, 
 were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight. As 
 he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale 
 as the Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless 
 like the statue of the Wounded Love, came before his sight 
 »out of the shadows. It was that of Gladys. 
 
 He paused, doubting his senses. With her long black 
 .robes and her pale features she looked rather a creature of 
 the grave than of the earth, in the faint and fluctuating light 
 which fell on her from the swinging lamps above. 
 
 Bor some moments neither of them spoke. 
 
 “What has happened?” he said at last instinctively. 
 ■“ Why are you here ? ” 
 
 He expected to hear of some calamity ; of Ladysrood burnt 
 down, or his kindred dead. She was silent. She was deadly 
 pale ; there seemed nothing alive in her except her intensely 
 searching eyes, which gazed at him. 
 
 “For the love of God do not look at me like that!” he 
 cried involuntarily. “What has brought you from England? 
 Why do you wait for me at such an hour ?” 
 
 “It is the hour at which you have left the Duchess Soria,” 
 she said, in a voice which was low but harsh. 
 
 His worn face flushed. 
 
 “ That is absolutely untrue ! I left her house at eight this 
 evening.” 
 
 She gave an impatient movement which said without 
 words. ‘ Why lie to me ? ? 
 
 “ I tell you that I left her house at eight,” he repeated. 
 “ You shall not insult her in my hearing.” 
 
 “But you may insult me in hers ?” 
 
 “ I never insult you. I speak of you always w T ith the 
 most unfeigned respect. But if you begin to track me, to lie 
 in wait for me, to spy on me, to catechise me, I tell you 
 honestly that I shall respect you no more, nor will I patiently 
 endure such espionage.” 
 
 All the gentler and more remorseful emotions towards her 
 With which his breast had been filled as he paced the solitary 
 
288 
 
 GTJILBEnOY. 
 
 shores and the deserted streets had been destroyed in an in- 
 stant by the mention of the one name dearest to him. 
 
 “ Who has a right to be near you if not I ?” she asked 
 with a haughty anger which scorched up the tears that 
 mounted to her sight. 
 
 “No one disputes your right,” he answered with great im- 
 
 f >atience. “ But between right and welcome there are many 
 eagues; and the title to come to me unbidden I would never 
 award to any woman were she ten thousand times over my 
 wife.” 
 
 “ I am come to solicit nothing from you,” she said coldly. 
 
 “ Oh no ! Only to watch for me, to trace out my actions, 
 
 to question me, to fetter me, to haunt me, to offend me ! ” 
 
 “ Is it so strange that I wished to see you, to know some- 
 thing of you ? For three months you have not written to 
 me, only to your servant. I heard that you were here ; here 
 with her — the only woman whom you have ever loved — so 
 you told me ! ” 
 
 Her words were broken, and her voice had a great emo- 
 tion in it ; but that which would have touched him in his 
 mistress only angered him the more intensely in his wife. 
 
 “ I forbid you to bring her name into this discussion ! ” 
 he said with more passion. “You choose to follow me, and 
 to make me reproaches ; it is the way of women ; they only 
 lose all by it, but they are never deterred. I came away 
 from you because you asked me intolerable questions and 
 wearied me with useless scenes. If I have not loved you it 
 has not been my fault. Love is not to be whipped into 
 obedience like a straying child.” 
 
 “ Why marry me ? ” 
 
 “ What is the use of saying that again and again ? You 
 said it in London ; you said it at Ladysrood. I deceived 
 myself, and so I deceived you — with no thought or desire of 
 deceit. When a man tells a woman candidly that he mistook 
 his love for her, what more is there to say ? He should ask 
 her pardon, perhaps, for the wrong he has unintentionally 
 done her. In that sense I ask yours.” 
 
 She did not reply. 
 
 “It is better you should know,” he continued rapidly. 
 “You will not care perhaps. If not, so best. I was about 
 to write to you. I am true to an allegiance promised before 
 1 promised mine to you. I am aware the world does not rec- 
 ognize such unwitnessed vows, but they are all love cares 
 
GTJILDEROY. 
 
 289 
 
 for ; they are all that ever really hold love, let men say what 
 they will. I must tell you, since you are here, the entire 
 truth. I can give you no more of my life ; I can live no longer 
 in a feigned harmony which has wholly ceased to exist, if 
 ever it did exist — I do not think it ever did — between us ; 
 you may hate me, and the world may execrate me ; but so it 
 must be henceforth.” 
 
 He paused in strong emotion ; he was neither heartless 
 nor ungenerous, and he knew that his words must of ne- 
 cessity sound both. He hated to give pain to any living 
 creature ; and though she seemed so cold and still that he 
 doubted, as he had always doubted, her feeling greatly, yet 
 he knew that any woman must suffer so addressed, even if 
 she only suffered in her pride. 
 
 He waited for her to reply ; but she said nothing. She 
 stood motionless with perfect tranquillity. 
 
 The words were honest and truthful, but to their hearer 
 they seemed cruelty and brutality incarnate. Had not her 
 pride restrained her, she could have cried aloud like some 
 animal in torture. But she was very proud, and whatever 
 agony she might suffer afterwards, she had force to hold 
 back any expression of it now. Moreover, a consuming 
 jealousy was upon her, giving her temporary strength ; and 
 yet her whole existence seemed racing and whirling from 
 her, as a great river courses in its haste and storm towards 
 the bottomless sea. She looked at him where he stood under 
 the falling light from the lamp, pale, agitated, angered, and 
 she could have thrown herself upon his breast and cried to 
 him, U I love you ! I love you ! Give me some place — the 
 least, the lowest — but some place in your heart ! ” 
 
 But pride kept back that yearning impulse ; she stood, 
 erect and cold, in her black clothes, with the sombre light of 
 an unutterable reproach burning like a flame in her dark 
 blue eyes. 
 
 u You are the lover of the Duchess Soria,” she said dog- 
 gedly. 
 
 It was the most fatal thing she could have said, but she 
 was not wise enough to know that. Guilderoy’s face flushed 
 hotly ; he felt all the impotent fury of a man forced to say 
 what it seemed infamous to say, no matter how he might 
 reply. 
 
 “ If to adore her be to be her lover, then I am so,” ha 
 said with violence. u In no other sense — now* — as yet” 
 
<>90 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 She heard the first declaration ; she gave no credence te 
 he second ; she thought it the mere conventional declara- 
 tion with which a man deems it necessary in honor to deny 
 his relations with a woman. 
 
 “ I came to hear this from your own lips,” she said with 
 perfect coldness. u I have heard it. There can be no longei 
 any doubt, I will go now.” 
 
 u Go where ? ” he asked in vague uneasiness. 
 
 “ That cannot matter to you. Farewell.” 
 
 His anxiety deepened, despite his anger and his preoc- 
 cupation. Her manner seemed to him unnatural. Its ser- 
 enity was not in keeping with the burning pain and rebuke 
 spoken in her eyes. 
 
 “ Why will you make me these scenes ? ” he said wearily. 
 “ I was thinking of you kindly when you lay in wait for me 
 thus. I cannot endure surveillance, interference, espionage ; 
 and when you speak of the woman I love more than all others 
 on earth you madden me.” 
 
 She smiled bitterly. 
 
 u I will leave you to that other woman. Surely you can ask 
 no more. Believe me I shall make neither complaint nor scan- 
 dal. I remember what my father wished. Your name and 
 his are safe with me.” 
 
 “ I will write to you,” he said hurriedly, embarrassed and 
 distressed. “All possible arrangements or consideration 
 shall be made — all that I have is yours. I am deeply sen- 
 sible of the injury I have done to you in making you my 
 wife when you were too young to know my character or your 
 own, or measure the feelings of either of us ; but if your 
 father sees now, as some say the dead can see the souls of 
 the living, he will know that I was entirely honest in all 
 that I promised then, both to him and to yourself.” 
 
 His eyes were dim and his voice was uncertain as he spoke ; 
 a great emotion moved him, and it seemed to him that sha 
 felt nothing whatever — nothing but some indignant scorn, 
 perhaps at most some outraged pride. 
 
 “ She does not really care ; she knows nothing of love,” 
 he thought. It seemed to him that any woman who had 
 loved him would have either poured out to him all the furies 
 of a disappointed and deserted passion, or have fallen at his 
 feet weeping in agonized supplication. 
 
 But she gave no sign either of violence or of wretched- 
 ness, 
 
0U1LDEROY. 
 
 291 
 
 At her father’s name her mouth trembled, and he thought 
 for a moment that her composure would desert her ; but she 
 soon recovered it. Whatever she felt she betrayed none 
 of it. 
 
 “ Be good enough to let me pass,” she said, coldly ; and 
 mortified, humbled, yet angered with a sense of injustice 
 done to him, as though he were the offended, not the of- 
 fender, he drew back and let her go, as she desired. 
 
 “ Where are you going ? ” he said with hesitation. “You 
 cannot go like this, all alone, in a strange city.” 
 
 “My servants are waiting. I will return to England. 
 Why do you even ask me ? It cannot matter to you ! ;; 
 
 “ It must matter.” 
 
 He was confused, agitated, passionately angered, and yet 
 all the while conscious of a vague fear that, in her strange 
 stillness and repose she would do something rash and irre- 
 vocable, something which would haunt him all his life long 
 with remorse. 
 
 “ Let me pass,” she said, with her forced serenity un- 
 broken. “ I have told you I leave you* free. What more 
 can I say ? You need fear nothing for any tragedy 
 which might embroil you with your world. I shall go 
 home.” 
 
 But as she went out before him through the bare dim rooms, 
 her step unfaltering and her head erect, he realized how im- 
 possible it was to let her leave him thus unprotected — a 
 woman who was his wife, who was as young as she and as 
 fair to look upon, alone in the streets of such a city as 
 Naples was at such an hour.” 
 
 “ I must accompany you at least,” he said as he overtook 
 her. “You cannot go out in these streets alone. I will take 
 you wherever you will.” 
 
 Then, and then alone, her self-control forsook her ; she 
 turned upon him with the rapid and violent action of some 
 animal wounded and tormented beyond its power to bear. 
 
 “ When my whole life is destroyed by you, can you insult 
 me by offering me mere formal external courtesies ? Can 
 you think that it would matter to me if any beggar of these 
 lanes stabbed me and dragged my bodj^ to the sea ? What 
 do you know of love, of grief, of pain, or sacrifice ? Nothing 
 — nothing — nothing — no more than those marble gods that 
 stare there in the dusk. Let me go ! You shall not stir one 
 step with me. I have told you that my servants wait below. 
 
292 
 
 GUlLbEROY. 
 
 There shall he no tragedy such as you fear should hurt your 
 reputation as a man of honor with the world.” 
 
 Then with the swiftness of that step with which she had 
 once gone careless and light-hearted through the moorland 
 gorse, she went through the shadowy chambers, past the still 
 sleeping servant, under the great brazen lamp burning in 
 the entrance, and down the marble stairway of the silent 
 house. 
 
 He did not follow her. 
 
 All the gentleness and self-reproach with which he had 
 thought of her in the night just passed died utterly out of 
 him under* the sting of her disdainful and cutting words. 
 Though she, like the woman whom he loved, charged him 
 with insincerity and heartlessness, he knew himself that he 
 had neither ; he knew that, whatever he appeared to both of 
 them, he suffered with genuine emotion, and with true self- 
 reproach. He had said no word to her which had not cost 
 him more to utter than it cost her to hear. He had ideals 
 and dreams of what could never now be realized, and he had 
 the instinctive honor of a nature both proud and sensitive, 
 even though he had no feeling for her of affection, she might 
 still have kept him by tenderness ; but her words which had 
 struck him to the quick, had hardened against her all the 
 feelings of his soul. Beatrice Soria might rebuke and might 
 condemn him, but she at the least loved him with a passion 
 which forgave all, if it in turn exacted all. 
 
 Through the iron gratings of the large unshuttered win- 
 dows of his rooms the first white light of day came faintly 
 through the duskier lamplight, falling on the pale figures 
 of the tapestried hangings and the yellowed marbles of the 
 Caesars and the gods. 
 
 He threw open the casements and let the sharp, clear, 
 cold air of earliest day pour past him into the shadows of the 
 rooms. When the sun rose he sent three lines to the Soria 
 Palace — 
 
 “ I found her here. I told her the truth. We are parted 
 forever. When may I come to you ? ” 
 
 They brought him in answer three words only 
 “ When you will*? 
 
GU1LDER0Y . 
 
 293 
 
 CHAPTEE XLYII. 
 
 A few evenings later Lady Sunbury was in her own house 
 
 Illington in the midst of a large circle of guests. It was 
 two hours after midnight, her drawing-rooms and ball-room 
 were full ; everyone was amused and amusing ; she was go- 
 ing from one to another with bland smiles and suitable 
 phrases, her harassed thoughts all the while with her elder 
 daughter, who was encouraging the wrong suitor, and her 
 second son, who was lying dangerously wounded in India. 
 
 In the midst of her occupations and pre-occupations, at 
 the moment when the cotillon was at its height, one of her 
 servants called her away and presented to her a letter which 
 had been brought by a messenger from Italy. She recog- 
 nized in the superscription the handwriting of her brother’s 
 wife, and on the seal the coat-of-arms of the Vernons. 
 
 “ How exactly like her absurd extravagance ! ” she thought 
 with contempt. “ How exactly like her to send a servant all 
 the way by express with a letter, just as if we were in the 
 days of the Stuarts or Tudors ! What does she suppose that 
 the postal service and the electric wires exist for, I wonder ? 
 
 Innovations in trifles always annoyed her more than any- 
 thing else, and she was so extremely irritated at this folly of 
 her sister-in-law in sending a man-servant to carry a letter 
 by hand from the Continent to England, that in her annoy- 
 ance at the trivial eccentricity she almost forgot her curiosity 
 and apprehension as to the possible contents of the packet. 
 
 She took it, however, to her boudoir, and there, being alone, 
 opened and read it. The letter was written by Gladys from 
 Eome, and began without prefix or preliminary. 
 
 “Ho not blame your brother for anything that you may 
 hear of him. The fault is altogether mine. I am not a 
 woman who could possibly make him happy as his wife. I 
 am cold, hard, and unforgiving. My father even told me so 
 more than once before he died. Therefore blame me en- 
 tirely, and not Lord Guilderoy, for our ensuing separation. 
 There need be no publicity or scandal of any kind. I am 
 sensible of the many gifts I have received from him, and I 
 shall not return them with ingratitude. But neither will I 
 see him. nor speak with him, nor live under the roof of any of 
 
294 
 
 GUILTjEROYo 
 
 his houses. Except that he cannot marry again whilst I live, 
 he will be as free as he was before we unhappily met, that 
 autumn day upon the moors. I hope that you will tell him 
 so from me. I shall take none of my jewels, nor shall I touch 
 a farthing of my income from my settlements. What I have 
 inherited from my father is quite enough for me to live upon. 
 I have no children living, so there need be no question whah 
 ever of the interference of lawyers. I shall reside at the 
 cottage at Christslea, so that you can all judge for yourselves 
 that my manner of life is worthy of my father’s memory. 
 But I beg that you will none of you seek for a moment to 
 attempt to change the resolution which I have taken, for it 
 is unalterable ; and interrogation and expostulation would 
 be only unbearably painful to me. You will, I entreat, lay 
 all blame which may be incurred, upon me. The world has 
 always considered me ill-suited to him. It will not be aston- 
 ished that a union so inharmonious should be ended by that 
 want of sympathy and temper which it has always attributed 
 to me. You have often reproached me with doing nothing 
 to save your brother’s honor. I now at least do what I can. 
 You repeatedly condemned me for poor-spirited silence. Be 
 sufficiently just not to condemn me now for acting as you 
 have frequently more than hinted to me that I should do.” 
 
 The signature was Gladys Vernon. 
 
 When Hilda Sunbury had read the letter through to the 
 end, her first impulse was to start at once for the south ; the 
 next moment she remembered that it was impossible and 
 would be useless to do so ; she could not leave Illington for 
 any length of time with her house full without her absence 
 being known ; and what had been already done in Naples 
 was hopeless and irrevocable. After an instant’s meditation 
 she sent for her eldest daughter. 
 
 “ I have had news which must take me to Balfrons to- 
 night,” she said to her daughter. “ You know my uncle is 
 lying very ill there. I do not wish anyone to know that I 
 am absent. I shall return the day after to-morrow. You 
 can say I am indisposed from cold and have to keep my 
 room. Make no fuss. Amuse everyone. Be discreet, and 
 do as you would do if I were here. I shall be back in thirty^ 
 six hours. Say nothing to your father. It is not worth 
 while. He would only ask innumerable questions.” 
 
 Then with the utmost speed and quietness she left the 
 house, drove seven miles to take the morning train to the 
 
GUILDEEOT. 
 
 295 
 
 north, succeeded in reaching it on the eve of its departure, and 
 hastened as fast as steam could bear her across the length of 
 England to where the mighty keep of Balfronsrose above its 
 oak woods and faced the Cheviots. She knew that Aubrey 
 was there. 
 
 With the open letter in her hand, she passed unannounced 
 into the library, where he was seated alone. He was at 
 Balfrons for two days only. His father was ill, and was at 
 that age when any slight illness may easily pass into the 
 last ill of all. No one was staying at the Castle except the 
 Duchess of Longleat and her tw^o younger children. 
 
 He rose in amazement and alarm as his cousin entered, 
 for it was nearly midnight. 
 
 “ Gladys ? ” he said instinctively, thrown off his guard. 
 
 Lady Sunbury cast down the letter on the table before 
 him. 
 
 She was pale with passion, which she had nursed in all its 
 heat and strength during the lonely hours in which she had 
 sped through the cold dark winter country from Bucking- 
 hamshire to Berwick. 
 
 “ What did I say ? ” she cried, her voice hoarse with 
 fatigue and indignation. “Did I not always tell you that 
 you would encourage her in her sentimental, headstrong, 
 insensate follies until she would bring disgrace upon us all ? ” 
 
 Aubrey took up the letter, having in that moment’s pause 
 recovered his self-possession. 
 
 “ ‘Disgrace’ is a very large word, and not a common one 
 in our families,” he said slowly. “ Let me see what she has 
 said to warrant its use.” 
 
 He read the letter slowly, so slowly that Lady Sunbury’s 
 impatience became well-nigh ungovernable. She did not 
 know that every word of it went to the innermost heart of 
 the reader with that deepest of all sorrows — that which is 
 powerless to aid the life beloved. 
 
 He held it in his hand when he had finished its perusal. 
 
 “ What is it you blame so much ? ” he asked. His cousin, 
 seated opposite to him at the great table at which he had 
 been writing when she had entered, grew red with indigna- 
 tion and suppressed feeling. 
 
 u What ? what ? ” she repeated. “ Everything, surely 
 everything, shows the most wanton disregard for us, the 
 most theatrical resolution to obtain publicity, the most 
 intolerable selfishness, the most obvious intent to ruin my 
 
296 
 
 GUILDER OY. 
 
 brother in the world’s esteem ! And to write it to me — to me! 
 You are her confidant and confessor ; you have always been 
 so ; why could she not send such a declaration of her pro- 
 jects to you, if sent it must be at all ? ” 
 
 “ It is natural that she should address you — a woman, and 
 her sister-in-law,” said Aubrey, coldly. “ But, pardon me, do 
 you suppose such a deliberate resolution as this can be ar- 
 rived at by anyone so young without some very great pro- 
 vocation to it ? She does not say what it is ; but I imagine 
 that both you and I can guess.” 
 
 Lady Sunbury’s conscience stung her, remembering the 
 scene which she had made to Gladys in the King’s Alley at 
 Ladysrood. But she was not a woman to acknowledge 
 error. 
 
 “ Very possibly she may have had things which pain her,” 
 she said, slightingly. “ But other women have as much and 
 more to pain them; and their sense of duty and of dignity 
 serves to keep them silent.” 
 
 Yes, they keep “silent” by leading a life of eternal dis- 
 union, bickering, and upbraiding, as you do, thought Aubrey, 
 as he answered aloud : 
 
 “ I think you forget her youth ; in youth these wrongs 
 seem to fill heaven and earth ; as women grow older they 
 grow used to them, no doubt, as the camel grows to his bur- 
 den. The letter seems to me irreproachable. She asks noth- 
 ing ; she demands nothing ; she injures nothing ; she sacri- 
 fices everything ; and she allows you to place all the blame 
 on her to the world. What can anyone do more generous 
 than this ? I fail to understand.” 
 
 “ You mean to say that there is nothing to be done ! ” she 
 exclaimed. 
 
 “ What should be done ? ” said Aubrey, with the only im- 
 patience which had escaped him. “ If a woman decides to 
 leave her husband, and he decides to live so that she has no 
 choice but to leave him, who is to reverse that position ? 
 They can reverse it themselves, as long as there is no legal 
 separation.” 
 
 “ And she is to be allowed to live in this insane manner in 
 solitude in her father’s cottage ? ” 
 
 u No one can prevent her doing so but Guilderoy, and it 
 seems to me that he has lost all possible title to command her 
 even if he wishes to do so, while it is most probable that he 
 does not. There is no disgrace in her limiting herself to 
 
OZTTLDEROr. 297 
 
 her own resources ; there is even a certain dignity in it, as I 
 consider ! ” 
 
 “ Because you are bewitched and infatuated about her ! ” 
 said his cousin, with rude contempt. 
 
 Aubrey kept his temper marvellously. 
 
 “ I believe I am neither one nor the other. I regretted 
 her departure from England. At your request I endeavored 
 to dissuade her from it. I did not succeed. She was un- 
 happy, and when a woman is so she is never very wise. I 
 conclude from this letter that on her arrival in Italy she 
 learned what did not make her happier. The steps she takes 
 are extreme — that I grant — but they only injure herself, and 
 there is no one except her husband who can have any possi- 
 ble power to try and turn her from them.” 
 
 “He will not stoop to solicit a woman who leaves him.” 
 
 “ Stoop ! You speak as though he were faultless and she 
 liad committed some crime against him ! You must know 
 as well as I do that something much graver than his usual 
 caprices must have moved her to write such a letter and take 
 such a resolve. Do you suppose that a woman as young as 
 she is voluntarily severs herself from all the pleasures, graces, 
 and interests of life, unless life, as it is, has become wholly 
 intolerable to her ? ” 
 
 “ And her duties,” asked Hilda Sunbury, with violence, 
 “ do they count for nothing ? Is she to be allowed to play 
 at tennis, with the honor of my brother’s family as her 
 racquet ? ” 
 
 “My dear Hilda,” replied Aubrey wearily, “you have 
 always considered that all creation exists only for the honor of 
 your family. To others creation may still seem to have 
 some additional, though no doubt minor, objects in view. 
 However, even from that point, I scarcely concede that 
 you can violently censure Lady Guilderoy. She offers you 
 all possible occasion for examination into her life ; she 
 simply announces her intention of not living with your 
 brother or in any of his houses- If he cares, he will seek to 
 change her decision ; if he does not care, he will necessarily 
 be glad of it. Anyhow there need be no immediate scandal ; 
 at any rate unless you are pleased to make it.” 
 
 “I!” exclaimed his cousin, disbelieving her senses. 
 “ What do I most abhor if not to have a single breath of the 
 world breathed on me ? What have I not endured that 
 society should r*ever suspect what I have suffered ? What 
 
GUHDEftOt. 
 
 m 
 
 women have I not compelled myself to receive in my own 
 homes in order that the outrages inflicted on me should not 
 form food for social calumnies and ridicule ? Who in the 
 whole width of English society has been so constant and so 
 resigned a martyr as myself to all the indignities which a 
 man who does not respect himself does not hesitate to inflict 
 on those whom he should respect ? And then you presume 
 to say that I — I ! — I shall bring about scandal concerning 
 my brother’s wife ! It is herself who brings it. How can a 
 woman do what she is doing without bringing about her ears 
 a thousand hornets’ nests of curiosity and misconstruction ? 
 How ? Will you tell me that ? ” 
 
 “ The hornets’ nests will come, no doubt. They are 
 everywhere,” said Aubrey, with a sigh of impatience. “ My 
 dear Hilda, forgive me if I speak plainly. Your own life 
 has been a painful one ; you have spent it in acrimony, re- 
 proaches, futile efforts to make black white, and endless 
 quarrels which have never furthered your purpose one hair’s 
 breadth. Your brother’s wife, being unhappy, chooses a 
 more drastic but a more dignified vengeance. There would 
 be a third way open to any woman who had the strength, 
 the patience, and the unselfishness for it, and I wish that 
 she had taken it. I endeavored to persuade her to take it ; 
 but she is young, and in youth and in pain the feelings are 
 treacherous counsellors. What more is there to be said ? It 
 is to your brother that you must go. It is useless to come 
 to me. I am not the guardian of Lady Guilderoy, nor 
 am I my cousin’s keeper. I have no more whatsoever to do 
 with this sad letter than my dog Hubert yonder. It is a 
 mistake on her side ; an error, and a grave one ; but lie* has 
 brought it about by a much darker fault on his own, and he 
 cannot complain. Neither you nor I can possibly interfere. 
 We have no title to do so. If your brother acquiesce, all 
 his relatives must acquiesce also. Of that no reasonable doubt 
 can be urged for one moment.” 
 
 The great dog, hearing his name spoken, rose and ap- 
 proached, and laid his head upon Aubrey’s knee ; his master 
 stroked him with a sigh. 
 
 Passionate and injurious words rose to Lady Sunbury’s 
 lips, but she repressed them unuttered ; she was pale with 
 rage and offence, but she had strength not to insult a man 
 whom the nation respected. 
 
 * You cannot altogether disclaim responsibility for her 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 299 
 
 actions/* slie said with unkind and insolent meaning. u You 
 have guided them for a long time. You must pardon me if 
 I do not credit that this letter and the resolutions contained 
 in it are altogether so unfamiliar to you as they assume to 
 be. You were the last person who saw Lady Guilderoy in 
 England, and everyone is aware that you have been for a long 
 time her most cherished and trusted friend.** 
 
 Aubrey rose to the full height of his great stature, and 
 stood at the end of the great library-table as he had often 
 stood at the table of the House of Commons. 
 
 “ You are a woman and my cousin/* he said slowly. “ Both 
 persons are privileged in you. But be so good as to remem- 
 ber that I do not allow even a lady to cast a doubt on what I 
 have said is a fact ; and you will kindly take care not to hint 
 the insult which you have just hinted outside the walls of 
 Balfrons.** 
 
 She was imperious, courageous, and full of dark and insol- 
 ent suspicion, but, bold though her temper was, and uncon- 
 trolled, she did not dare to affront or offend him farther, and 
 she was silent. 
 
 “ It is late/* said Aubrey. “ Allow me to accompany you 
 to your rooms. You will see Ermyntrude in the morning. 
 She retired very early, for she was fatigued with watching 
 my father. To-night he is quieter and asleep.** 
 
 Then with all courtesy and ceremony he waited on her 
 across the halls and corridors and galleries of the great castle, 
 and only bade her good-niglit at the entrance of that suite of 
 rooms in the tapestried wing which were always set aside as 
 hers, and which were warmed and illuminated for her now as 
 though she had been expected there since noonday. He was 
 not conscious that he had kept that letter from Gladys in his 
 hand, and she had been too enraged and mortified to ask him 
 for it. 
 
 He walked slowly backward to the library in the midnight 
 stillness; everything was hushed into greater quiet than 
 usual that the rest of the old Marquis might not be disturbed. 
 The lamps burned white between the armored figures, the 
 drooping banners, the trophies of arms, the massive and lam 
 tastic carvings of the oak-panelled walls ; his own steps sank 
 soundless on the thick carpeting. Hubert followed him with 
 noiseless velvet feet. 
 
 He paused before one of the great unshuttered casements, 
 with their iron gratings, which had been there in the Wars 
 
800 
 
 GUILBEBOT . 
 
 of the Roses, with the blazonries of the House of Balfro is 
 stained upon their glass. The night without was frosty and 
 moonlit. There was snow on the ground, and snow lay on 
 the roof, the turrets, the corbels, the battlements of the 
 mighty Border castle. The keep, round, massive, terrible- 
 looking, like a fortress for giants in the starry night, towered 
 up in front of him upon the other side of the quadrangle. 
 
 He had a deep and filial love for Balfrons, and if public 
 life had not called on him for absence, he would seldom have 
 left its treasure-house of books, and its great forests filled 
 with wild cattle and red deer, and all water-birds and moor- 
 birds which ever haunt the reedy meres of the old romantic 
 Border lands. 
 
 He sat down in the embrasure of the window and read her 
 letter over again, word for word, by the light of the lamp 
 hanging above his head. There was not a sound ni the house. 
 The clouds swept past the casement in great, moonlit, hurry- 
 ing armies. The deep bell of the clock-tower tolled midnight. 
 
 Every word of the letter sank into his heart like a knife. 
 Every word thrilled with the violence, the misery, the despair 
 of a great love which was writhing under abandonment, out- 
 rage and misconception. The step she had taken was unwise ; 
 it had a child’s rashness, a woman’s obstinacy, and a forsaken 
 woman’s recklessness; but there was self-negatien and an 
 austerity in it which were in their error very noble, and 
 touched chords in his own nature which responded to them. 
 
 “ I think she would have been happy with me,” he thought ; 
 and he sighed as he looked out at the cold and luminous 
 night and the great keep towering of the skies. 
 
 But now, though he would have laid down his life to save 
 her, he could not give her one hour of peace. A furious 
 longing came over the calm, grave temper of Aubrey to cast 
 all other considerations, public and private, to the winds, 
 and avenge her wrongs upon his cousin with the rude, frank 
 championship of another age and country than their own. 
 But reflection told him that such an act could do her only 
 harm: could only give her name more completely to the 
 world’s tongues, and could only possibly awaken in her hus- 
 band’s mind doubts which would dishonor her, and give him, 
 in his own eyes, a palliative for his own offence against her. 
 
 “ I have no title to interfere,” he thought, sadly. “ I am 
 not her lover. Scarcely even did she at last accept me as her 
 friend” 
 
GUILDEROY • 
 
 301 
 
 A thrill of what was to him degrading and criminal, be- 
 cause a selfish pleasure, passed through him at the memory 
 of the utter loneliness to which she had condemned herself; 
 the dangers, the barrenness of the future which she had 
 shaped for herself. But he hated the cruel egotism of the 
 thought ; he spurned and checked it as it rose in him. 
 
 “ How vile we are at heart ! ” he mused, with disgust and 
 shame for the momentary selfish hope which had intruded 
 itself on him in his own despite. “ How odiously vile ! — ■ 
 and yet God knows if I could by any personal sacrifice pur- 
 chase her happiness, there is none at which I would hesitate.” 
 But what sacrifice could avail any thing ? Her happiness 
 and her wretchedness lay in other hands than his. 
 
 CHAPTER XL VIII. 
 
 It was a winter’s day when the woman whom he loved 
 reached the little cottage at Christslea, having travelled with- 
 out ceasing, pausing only for one night in Rome, the night 
 in which she had written the letter to her sister-in-law. 
 
 The bay was shrouded in the white fogs of a damp De- 
 cember ; the waves were rolling heavily with a deep roar 
 upon the beach ; the winds were sighing amongst the leaf- 
 less orchards and over the bare scarps of the cliffs. 
 
 She went into the little study, still crowded with her 
 father’s books and papers, and bolted the door, and sat down 
 before the fire on the lonely hearth. All was still, gray, in- 
 expressibly solitary. The little place was gay and fragrant 
 and pleasant in summer time, when the hedges were full of 
 the songs of birds, and the air full of the scent of wallflowers 
 and stocks blossoming in the homely garden ways ; but it 
 was intensely melancholy in the winter season, with the 
 silence of mist and cold brooding over its solitudes. 
 
 She shuddered as she looked at the narrow casements, 
 where the glass was wet wi h the vapors of the morning, and 
 the gray veiled landscape was dull and blotted like a draw- 
 ing soaked in rain. It seemed an emblem of her future ex- 
 istence. She for the first time realized the choice which she 
 had made, the thing which she had done. 
 
 Prom the time she had left the palace in Naples until sh© 
 
302 
 
 GUILLEROY. 
 
 arrived here she had had no distinct sense of what had hap* 
 pened to her. She had been sustained by the violence and 
 the fever of an intense passion, by the iron in her soul of an 
 immense wrong ; she had gathered a fictitious strength from 
 the magnanimity and the dignity of her choice, and the calm- 
 ness with which she had spoken to her husband had lasted 
 throughout her journey homeward until this moment, when, 
 having dismissed the servants who had accompanied her in 
 London, she had come wholly alone to the little house where 
 her father’s memory was her sole companion, and would be 
 her sole consolation in the future. Then, when, not heeding 
 or replying to the startled and agitated questions of the two 
 old people left in charge there, she ca'me into this chamber 
 where her father’s presence seemed a living and near thing, 
 the sense of all she had given up, of all she had accepted, 
 came to her for the first time in all its nakedness and horror. 
 
 She did not regret what she had done : she would have 
 done it again had she been called on to ratify her choice : it 
 seemed to her the only thing which was left for her to do in 
 common honor and in common courage ; yet the pale and 
 ghastly terror of it faced her on the threshold of this cham- 
 ber like some ghastly shape. The want of the one familiar 
 voice so often heard there, the one unfailing tenderness so 
 often proved there, overcame her with the sickliness of irre- 
 vocable loss. The pale gray walls, the pallid vellum volumes, 
 the white discolored manuscripts, the dull misty windows, 
 the cold hearth, seemed to her like so many mourners mourn- 
 ing with her. 
 
 “ Father, father ! ” she cried piteously to the blankness 
 which was around her ; the silence alone echoed the cry. 
 
 With a gesture of agonized supplication, of heart-breaking 
 prayer, she stretched her arms out, seeking some shelter, 
 some embrace, some kindly hand. The narrow walls of the 
 little book-room went round and round giddily before her 
 sight ; the casements narrowed into a single point of light. 
 She fell face forward senseless upon the floor, and a great 
 darkness like night closed in on her. 
 
 When she recovered consciousness she was lying on the 
 little bed which had been hers in childhood, and she saw the 
 withered brown face of the old woman who had kept house 
 there from her earliest memories stooping above her in anxiety 
 and wonder. She did not speak, she did not move : she lay 
 still and gazed at the whitewashed halls, the sloping ceiling 
 
QUILBEROY. 
 
 303 
 
 {the narrow lattice ; and she remembered to what a future she 
 (had condemned herself. She saw always before her the face 
 of her husband as she had seen it in the light and shadow of 
 the Italian moonlight — cold, pale, angry, handsome — his eyes 
 resting on her without a ray of tenderness in them, his lips 
 speaking passionate declarations of his loyalty to her rival. 
 
 The long swoon, which had frightened the people of the 
 house, had been due to cold, fatigue, long fasting and great 
 emotion. It left no evil result after it, and with a new and 
 strange weakness making her limbs tremble and her brain 
 turn, she went down the narrow stair in the morning light 
 to take up that life which was henceforth to be her portion. 
 
 There was a fire burning on the study hearth, and the old 
 folks had set some homely winter flowers in the gray Flemish 
 jugs on the centre table. The pale sunshine of a fine wintry 
 day was falling on the black and white lines of her father’s 
 drawings on the walls. She shrank into his large writing- 
 chair before the table, on which his last written sheet, with 
 the pen on it, lay as he had left it on his last day of life, and 
 she tried to realize this catastrophe which had befallen her, 
 this earthquake which had shaken into ruins all her summer 
 world. 
 
 The violent agitations which had followed on her arrival 
 in Naples, the hurried and scarcely conscious journey home- 
 ward, the suddenness and irrevocableness of her own actions, 
 had given her a stunned and bewildered feeling, like that of 
 a sleeper roused from his dreams to hear of some misfortune 
 rudely told. 
 
 She had written her letter to her sister-in-law with clear- 
 ness, force and calmness, but with that effort her nerves had 
 given way ; a burning fever, a painful sense of exhaustion, 
 had followed on it, and though she had controlled all out- 
 ward sign of them until her arrival at Christslea, they left 
 her enfeebled and unnerved. She was terrified by the 
 violence of the passions which she felt, and which had been 
 intensified by the control over them which she had main- 
 tained whilst in her husband’s presence. 
 
 66 Am I no better than this ? ” she thought, ashamed and 
 appalled at the furies which raged in her breast. She leaned 
 over the fire, shivering and hot by turns as if with ague. 
 She did not regret her choice ; she had no other which would 
 have seemed to her endurable ; but the horror of her future 
 was very ghastly to her, and as she sat alone in the little 
 
304 
 
 GUILDER Or. 
 
 dull room, with the rime frost white on the panes of the 
 window and the noise of the waves coming up through the 
 silence, the memory of the gay Southern sunshine in which 
 she had left him, the perfumed air, the sparkling seas — the 
 Seas of the Syrens — was ceaselessly before her, and life 
 seemed to her a burden too intolerable to be borne. 
 
 The slow dark day wore on ; the clock ticked off its tedious 
 hours ; the fire burned bright or burned dull ; there was no 
 other change. The old dog, who had been at her father’s 
 feet in his last moments, lay beside her, lifting every now 
 and then drowsy and tender eyes to her face. They brought 
 her food, but she could not take it. She drank a cup of 
 milk : that was all. She took up her father’s Yirgil, and 
 tried to read the passages in which she had been used to 
 take most delight, but she could make no sense of the familiar 
 lines ; the letters swam before her sight, and she laid the 
 book down with a sick despair. 
 
 Would all her life be like this ? — with every interest of 
 heart and intellect, every innocent pleasure of nature, every 
 harmless charm of existence, made void and useless to her ? 
 
 u Ah, how little my dear father knew ! ” she thought, see- 
 ing the red embers of the hearth through blinding tears. 
 He had bade her make her love so great that no other woman 
 could give its equal. What use were that ? What avail to 
 pour out gold at the feet of him who only sees in it mere 
 dross ? — to offer the universe to one who is only impatient 
 of the gift ? 
 
 There was nothing in her that her husband cared for ; 
 what mattered it to him that she was altogether his, body 
 and soul ? He would in all likelihood be more grateful to 
 her for an infidelity which should set him wholly free. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 As she sat thus, till the sombre day grew to the third hour 
 after noon, she heard the latch of the garden lifted and a 
 man’s footsteps crushed the wet shingle of the pathway to 
 the porch. 
 
 She rose, breathless, her heart beating to desperation with 
 the wildness of a sudden hope. 
 
 She thought it possible that Guilderoy might have followed 
 
GtTlLLEROr. SOS 
 
 her there, might Have repented of his choice might have come 
 to offer her his atonement and regret. 
 
 A terrible disappointment blanched her white face whiter 
 still as the door opened and she saw in the shadow of the pas- 
 sage-way beyond the lofty ^stature of Aubrey. 
 
 He was the best friend that she had on earth, but had he 
 been her cruellest enemy the sight of him could not have 
 hurt her more than it did then. 
 
 Aubrey came up to her and took her hands in his with 
 unutterable tenderness and compassion. 
 
 “ My poor child — my poor darling — how I grieve for you,” 
 he said with broken voice. 
 
 Then she knew that he must have read the letter which 
 she had written in Rome. 
 
 “ Yes, Hilda showed me your letter,” he said, answering 
 the interrogation of her regard. “It shocked me. I would 
 have given my right hand that you had.not written it, still 
 more that you had not been caused to write it. For it is a 
 fatal error, Gladys.” 
 
 “I could do no less,” she said coldly. The reaction of the 
 intense hope which had for a moment leaped up in her made 
 her feel sick and faint ; she disengaged her hands from his 
 and seated herself by the hearth, in the great chair, her back 
 almost turned to him. 
 
 “You could have done nothing at all. It would have been 
 wiser,” he said with infinite pity. “ My dear,” he added re- 
 proachfully, “only think what it is that you have done. 
 What will you have made of your life ? Could you not have 
 had a little faith in my warnings ? ” 
 
 She hardened her heart against her truest friend ; she 
 gathered her pride about her coldly and stiffly ; she saw in 
 him only the messenger and mouthpiece of her husband’s 
 family. 
 
 “I have done nothing that any of Lord Guilderoy’s friends 
 can blame,” she answered. “ I have said nothing to any one 
 of all my acquaintances, and I shall say nothing to any of 
 them. I only ask to be left alone. I am sure that I am 
 living as my father would have wished me to live, and I shall 
 spend nothing but that which he has left me.” 
 
 She spoke in a measured and constrained voice, as to a 
 stranger. She could not forgive Aubrey what she thought 
 his preference of his cousin’s cause and desertion of her own. 
 
 “ You have done most unwisely,” he said, with a sigh. “ I 
 
 20 
 
306 
 
 (WILDEROr. 
 
 am not defending my cousin, God forbid ! He is beyond all 
 defence, all excuse, and I should be ashamed to attempt to 
 give him either; but you would have had fuller sympathy 
 from the world at large and greater comfort, I think, in youi 
 own thoughts, if you had taken no active part in the destruc- 
 tion of your ties to him.” 
 
 “ I did nothing more than was my right,” she said coldly. 
 
 “ That I do not dispute. But, as I told you, a woman’s 
 rights are her rashest counsellors. After all, dear, what has. 
 one human being of real c right ’ over any other’s life ? To 
 claim affection is idle. If it be no longer ours we must break 
 our hearts as we will. We cannot bridle the winds. We 
 must wait in patience till they blow again whither we would 
 have them.” 
 
 “Then no woman must ever listen to the words of any 
 man ! ” 
 
 “I did not mean that. I meant that when we have the 
 calamity to be loved no more we must revile neither man nor 
 woman, we must look within. Maybe we shall there see the 
 cause of our woe.” 
 
 She flushed hotly with anger. 
 
 “ How have I been to blame ? It is not my fault that his 
 caprice only lived a day.” 
 
 Aubrey was silent. She understood that his silence was 
 blame. 
 
 “ You are unjust like all his family,” she said passionately. 
 “ I have made no scandal, no exposure, no publicity. I shall 
 make none. What more can his friends demand ? He is left 
 in peace with the only woman whom he loves ! ” 
 
 “ My dearest Gladys,” said Aubrey wearily, “ I am not 
 defending him. It has gone hard with me not to revenge 
 you with old-fashioned violence which would have made him 
 pay for your tears with his body. You may believe that not 
 to do so has been the greatest effort of my life.” 
 
 Her eyes softened and grew dim. 
 
 “ Is that really true ? ” 
 
 “ I do not say what is not true, dear.” 
 
 She stretched her hand out to him. “ I thank you very 
 much,” she said in a broken voice. 
 
 Aubrey kissed her hands with reverence, and an emotion 
 which he endeavored to subdue. 
 
 “ I am no lover or knight, my dear,” he said sadly, “ and 
 the publicity of my life makes indulgence in romance im* 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 307 
 
 possible to it ; but I should be less than a man if I did not 
 feel for you the deepest, the most indignant sympathy. That 
 your wound should have been dealt you by one of my kin- 
 dred makes me feel it like a personal dishonor ” 
 
 He paused, and with a strong effort controlled, unuttered, 
 words of greater tenderness and fuller confession. 
 
 “ But I will tell you honestly/’ he added, after a pause, 
 “ that I regret and blame your actions. They will cost you 
 dear, and you. have not measured the price of them. There 
 is much that is fine and even heroic in them, but can you 
 honestly say, dear, that you believe your father, were he 
 standing here now, would tell you that you had done well or 
 wisely ? ” 
 
 She was silent. She was too truthful to assert a belief 
 which she could not entirely feel. 
 
 “ You cannot; for he was a wise and good man. He knew 
 that women are always their own enemies when they follow 
 the dictates of pride, and of pique, and of jealousy. Pardon 
 me if these words seem unfeeling ; they are inadequate to 
 express the great wrong that you suffer from, but after all 
 they are the only ones which can describe the impulses which 
 you have acted on now.” 
 
 “ May there not be such things as outraged decency and 
 delicacy, and indignant honor ?” 
 
 u Yes, no doubt; who could deny them? But feeling 
 alone is the most dangerous of guides. It drowns us in deep 
 waters while we think ourselves safe on d land. You 
 imagined you were sparing Guildaroy the comment of the 
 world ; on the contrarjq the world blames him and blames 
 you equally, and through you, where it would only have seen 
 a mere passing difference, it will now see a scandalous and 
 unalterable offence.” 
 
 “ I cannot help it if his passions are so made that they do 
 not last a year ; if it is what he has not which always seems 
 so much better than what he lias. It is not my fault if he 
 married me as he would buy a cocotte , and tired of me as he 
 would tire of her. I have released him as far as I can pos- 
 sibly release him until death takes me. I will not eat of his 
 bread, or live under his roof. I will not wear a gown he 
 paid for, nor a ring he purchased ; even my marriage ring 1 
 threw down before him — he did not even see it — what did he 
 care ? He was only thinking of her ; sighing for her be- 
 cause she had the wit to assume indifference to him ! ” 
 
308 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 She spoke with violence and with vehement scorn; he had 
 never seen her so strongly moved before, often as he had had 
 to soothe her indignation and persuade her into peace. 
 
 All that she had endured in silence since she had left 
 Naples broke out in these, the first words which she had been 
 able to pour into the ear of any listener. 
 
 He stroked her hair tenderly as he might have touched the 
 hair of a suffering child. 
 
 “ Calm yourself, my dear,” he said gently. ' x Many women 
 suffer what you suffer now. Only believe me, the remedy 
 you have chosen is one which will harass and deepen your 
 wound and never heal it. You have called the world in as 
 your physician. It is one which kills and does not cure.” 
 
 “ Perhaps it would be best that I should kill myself ; I 
 have thought of it often. But I always remember that my 
 father thought suicide a cowardice. Sometimes I am inclined 
 to do it ; it would set him free. Perhaps he would think of 
 me with kindliness if I were dead.** 
 
 “ And are there none who would regret you more than 
 that ? ” said Aubrey with a rebuke in his voice which he 
 could not restrain. 
 
 “No; why should they? If I am nothing to him I am 
 nothing to anyone.” 
 
 She spoke wearily, listlessly, thinking only of herself. 
 Aubrey’s heart beat quickly ; he said nothing, and she did 
 not look at his face. 
 
 There was long silence between them, filled only by the 
 lulling noises of the sea. 
 
 “It is impossible that you can remain here!” he said 
 abruptly at last. “ You are too young, twenty years too young. 
 You wish to st&y the tongues of the world ; what can set 
 them in full cry like such an act as this ? ” 
 
 “ They will say I am cold and odd. They have said 9# 
 very often before. That is the worst they can say— I hare 
 never heeded it.” 
 
 “ It is not the worst ! They will attribute motives to you 
 of which you do not dream.” 
 
 “ What motives ? ” 
 
 “ My dear, when a woman does not live with her husband, 
 society is always sure that she lives with someone else. You 
 force me to be brutally sincere.” 
 
 Her cheeks flushed ; she raised her head with hauteur. 
 
 *‘My life is free to all his family to observe. Ti^ire is no 
 
GUILDEliOY. 309 
 
 concealment in it. It is as plain to be seen as the white face 
 of that cliff.” 
 
 “ That is the sublime madness of innocence ! The more 
 open, simple, and harmless it actually is, the more will the 
 world be certain that it conceals a secret and an intrigue.” 
 
 “That must be as it may. My own conscience is enough 
 for me. And surely you forget ; the world knows — it cannot 
 choose but know — that Lord Guilderoy finds his happiness 
 elsewhere.” 
 
 “ And the world, which is always ready to excuse the man 
 and accuse the woman, will very possibly say that it is par- 
 donable he should do so, because — who knows what devilry 
 the^i will not say ? Only of this you may be very sure : that 
 they will never believe that a woman of your years voluntarily 
 shuts herself in such solitude as this without consolation.” 
 
 “ They can believe what they please. If they place the 
 blame on me, not on him, I shall have done what my father 
 always bade me do — bear his faults for him. I shall receive 
 no one. It is impossible that calumny can invent anything, 
 unless they find sin in the gulls of the air and suspicion in 
 the rabbits of the moors.” 
 
 “ They will find it even in these, doubt not, rather than find 
 it nowhere.” 
 
 “ They must do so then.” 
 
 “ You are cruel and perverse.” 
 
 “ I do not mean to be either. But I will not reside in any 
 one of your cousin’s houses, nor will I touch a shilling of my 
 dower from him. I am nothing to him. He is nothing to 
 me. 1 only still keep his name because I cannot be relieved 
 of it without publicity, nor even with publicity, I believe, as 
 the laws of marriage stand.” 
 
 “ Ho, you could not. And you would not free yourself if 
 you could.” 
 
 “ Why do you say so ?” 
 
 “Because you will always care for him. Some day you 
 will pardon him, some day he will ask you to do so, and such 
 forgiveness will be the renewal of affection.” 
 
 “ Never.” 
 
 “Oh, my child ! how long does a woman’s 1 never’ last ? 
 So long as the man whom she loves does not kneel at her 
 feet, and no longer.” 
 
 The color deepened in her face. 
 
 “What you say to mo is an insult. I have no feeling for 
 
310 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the lover of the Duchess Soria ; or, if I have, 1 pray Gh4 
 night and day to tear it from my heart, for it is dishonor — * 
 abasement — ignominy ! When I forget it or lorgive it, you 
 may tear my heart out of my body and throw it to the hounds 
 of Balfrons ! ” 
 
 iC Do not make rash vows, my dear,” s^id Aubrey gently. 
 " Women forgive everything when they really love.” 
 
 “ No — no — not that ! ” 
 
 “ Oh, yee, and far worse than tha( What use is love if it 
 be not one long pardon ? ” 
 
 u Then it is one long weakness ! V) 
 
 (i Or one long and inexhaustible pity — one long and infinite 
 strength.” 
 
 There was a tone in his voice *diich soothed the passionate 
 unrest and indignation of her soul. It seemed to her as 
 though she heard her father’s voice speaking by Aubrey’s 
 lips. 
 
 “ You are good,” she said wistfully. “I wish you had 
 loved me and I you.” 
 
 The words were as innocent as though a child had spoken 
 them, but they tried tho forbearance of the hearer of them 
 with a cruel martyrdom. 
 
 He rose hastily, glanced at the dusky shadows of the de- 
 clining day, and bade her a hurried farewell. 
 
 u You will come and see me often ? 99 she asked him, as she 
 held his hand in hers. He looked away from her. 
 
 “ As often as I can, dear. You know I have so little time 
 for my own affairs. You shall always know where I am, so 
 that you may send to me in a moment if you need. Adieu. 
 Believe me your firmest friend, even though I am no flatterer 
 and do not pretend to approve you in what you now do. I 
 will write often to you, and you will write to me. I hope 
 that you will soon write to tell me that you renounce this 
 cruel choice A life.” 
 
 The calm and unimpassioned words cost him much in their 
 utterance. He longed to offer her his life, his soul, his end- 
 less devotion, to put away all national needs and duties from 
 him and cleave only to her, if he could comfort her or atone to 
 her in any way ; but he resisted the temptation and left 
 her with a kind and tranquil farewell. He knew that her 
 heart v as not his, he believed that it would never be his ; he 
 scorned to try to persuade her that indignation and revenge 
 and loneliness and gratitude mingled together could ever make 
 
&U1LDEB0Y. 
 
 311 
 
 fair counterfeit of love. The lesson might be taught perhaps 
 with time. A bruised heart is often like a wounded bird ; it 
 falls to the first hand which closes on it ; but he knew that 
 such affection would never be love in any sense, in any shape; 
 he believed that all of love which would ever stir in her breast 
 was now and would be ever given to the man who had aban- 
 doned her. 
 
 Other men, more easily contented and of less susceptible 
 honor than he, might have endeavored to supply the lost pas- 
 sion, to replace the perished joys ; to persuade her that all 
 she felt of bitterness and wrong could be most deeply and 
 surely, and most thoroughly in kind, avenged by the accept- 
 ance of other sympathies and other affections than those 
 which were denied her. 
 
 But Aubrey’s were not the lips to utter these persuasions 
 or these sophisms : nor would he, well as he loved her, have 
 cared ever to accept the mere fruits of a tortured jealousy 
 and humiliation, which in their sufferings might have imag- 
 ined themselves love. 
 
 As he left Christslea he looked across the misty wintry 
 wold, across to the horizon, where the brown woods, the shin- 
 ing roofs, and the many spires and towers of Ladysrood were 
 faintly visible on the gray clouded edge of the far moors. 
 
 Its master had left his fairest treasure unguarded and un- 
 remembered, thought Aubrey ; if any bore it away from kirn* 
 who could he blame but himself ? 
 
 CHAPTER lu 
 
 The days and weeks and months drifted on ; the chilly 
 spring, the uncertain summer, the stormy autumn of an 
 English year succeeded one another, and the dawn broke and 
 the night fell over the lonely shore of Christslea, bringing no 
 change in the monotony of her existence. 
 
 Guilderoy remained out of England. The world, with its 
 usual discrimination, pitied him and blamed Aubrey. 
 
 u Vox femincB vox Dei ” and women without exception 
 took part against Gladys whenever they now remembered 
 her at all, which was but seldom. They were all of them 
 certain that she could have been entirely happy with her 
 husband had she chosen, since he was always so charming; 
 
312 
 
 QUILDEHOr. 
 
 it was her want of amiability and of tact, they agreed, which 
 had' caused his errors. No one with such exquisite manners 
 as his could be otherwise than most easy to live with. Ah ! 
 why had he thrown himself away on anyone so utterly un- 
 sympathetic ? 
 
 Here and there some man who had always admired her 
 beauty, or who had reasons of his own for knowing that 
 Guilderoy was not a faithful husband or a constant lover, 
 lifted up his voice in her defence ; but such a one was always 
 in a very narrow majority, and rallied few to his opinions. 
 
 Hilda Sunbury, moreover, had pronounced against her 
 sister-in-law ; that was quite enough to condemn her. She 
 was not, indeed, at ease in her own conscience for having 
 done so ; but that society did not know. She was a woman 
 of honesty of purpose and rectitude of character. She was 
 aware that she had been the primary cause of the final sepa- 
 ration between Guilderoy and his wife, and she was con- 
 stantly haunted by Vernon’s farewell words. But her dislike 
 to the mistress of Ladysrood had been stronger than her 
 candor or her justice; her prejudices for her family were 
 stronger than her regard for pure truth. She had the power 
 of swaying her world in favor of her brother to the injury of 
 his wife, and she exercised the power, indifferent to the 
 claims of innocence and right. 
 
 “ I always knew you were an unsympathetic woman, but I 
 never thought that you were an unscrupulous one until now,” 
 Aubrey said to her unsparingly in that London world which 
 she was using all the force of her unimpeachable position 
 and her distinguished virtue to turn against her brother’s 
 wife. 
 
 “ I say what I believe,” she replied, with chilly dignity 
 and great untruth. 
 
 (i Ask your God to forgive you for your thoughts, then,” 
 said Aubrey. 
 
 He felt all the disgust of a man who knows the innocence 
 of a woman before the calumny of her by other women. 
 
 He knew that Hilda Sunbury in her soul was as fully 
 aware of the purity of her brother’s wife as he was ; and her 
 efforts to stain the whiteness of Gladys’s name, that her 
 brother’s faults might be dealt with leniently by the world, 
 seemed to him as dark a crime as any murder; almost worse 
 than crime, because more cowardly, since secure from all 
 punishment. He himself was powerless to avenge it. Any 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 313 
 
 protest of his made the position of the one whom he desired 
 to protect more questionable. 
 
 Almost everyone believed that he was her lover ; he felt 
 that, though no hint of it could ever be given to him. He 
 knew it by the silence of others about her to him and before 
 him ; he knew it by that instinct with which both men and 
 women of sensitive temperament become conscious of the 
 opinion of their society about them, even when it is most 
 carefully hidden from them. He knew it by the unwilling- 
 ness of his sister, once so warmly her friend, to speak at all 
 of Gladys to him. 
 
 There is a silence around us at times upon the name dear- 
 est to us which tells us without words that others know that 
 it is thus dear. 
 
 More than once he was tempted to write to or seek out 
 Guilderoy ; but he felt that by him, as by society at large, 
 his interference on behalf of Gladys would be at once sus- 
 pected and disregarded, might injure her greatly, and could 
 do her no possible service. 
 
 And his wrath was so bitter against one who could remain 
 absent, lulled in voluptuous pleasure, whilst her life was 
 beating itself as painfully against its prison bars as any 
 bird’s, that he felt incapable of preserving any measure in 
 rebuke, or even insult, if he once allowed himself to address 
 his cousin either by spoken or by written word. Any quar- 
 rel between them would become of necessity national prop- 
 erty for public comment. Hank, like guilt, “ hath pavilions 
 but no secrecy.” 
 
 Meanwhile, despite all, she herself did not repent her 
 choice. She would not, for all that the world could have 
 given her, have continued to dwell in his house and spend 
 his income. She would not at any price have borne the con- 
 stant stare of wonder or the semi-smile of pity with which 
 she would have been met in society by those whose spoken 
 words would only have been of homage or of courtesy. Of 
 all unendurable positions hers would have been the most 
 painful, had she been living amongst his acquaintances and 
 friends. Here at least she had such kind of tranquillity as 
 solitude can afford. The fisher people on the shore asked 
 her no questions ; the bright bold eyes of the orchard birds 
 had no cruel curiosity in them ; and the unobtrusive coun- 
 sels written on the pages of the dead men of old had no in- 
 quisitiveness or censure underlying them as those of living 
 
314 
 
 GUILDEROY, 
 
 speakers would have had. She was glad of such isolation, as 
 all those who suffer from humiliation as well as from calamity 
 are glad of it. But it seemed to her as if the whole world 
 were dead, and she alone living in it. 
 
 All that stir and blaze and noise and change and pomp 
 and pageantry of society, in which she had dwelt ever since 
 her marriage, were all gone as though she had never known 
 them. A silence like that of a tomb seemed always around 
 her. The steep white cliffs which rose in a semicircle 
 around Christslea were like the walls of a dungeon. She 
 heard nothing from the misty dawns until the starless nights, 
 except the rolling up of the waves upon the sands, the cry of 
 the owls flitting at dusk amongst the boughs, the distant 
 shouts of the crews in the fishing cobles out at sea, or the 
 shrill weak voices of the old man and woman of the house 
 garrulously quarrelling over their work in garden, kitchen, 
 cellar, or apple-house. 
 
 Sometimes it seemed to her as if the years of her life with 
 Guilderoy had been only the mere dream of a night. She 
 felt material losses, too, which it humiliated her to acknowl- 
 edge. The homely and simple ways of life at Christslea 
 were irksome and barren to her. All which she had despised, 
 whilst she had enjoyed them, of the beauty, the graces, and 
 the luxuries of existence were now lacking to her, and she 
 missed them with a continual sense of need of them which 
 surprised and mortified her. She had believed herself 
 wholly indifferent to those mere externals; those elegancies 
 and indulgencies which in the imagined asceticism of her 
 renunciation she had counted as wholly unnecessary to her. 
 She missed them at every turn, at every moment; she 
 realized how much they contributed to the ease and grace if 
 not to the happiness. Her father had voluntarily resigned 
 them all, and no expression of regret for them had ever es- 
 caped his lips, and she had fancied that she could emulate 
 his philosophy. But the youth and the sex in her had not 
 either his resignation or his endurance ; and she suffered 
 from the mere physical and material deprivation of her soli- 
 tude as he had never done, having attained the tranquillity 
 of middle age and of a scholar’s stoicism. She had over-esti- 
 mated her own strength, and underrated the power of mem- 
 ory and desire. 
 
 The little lonely house which had been the heaven of her 
 childhood was the prison of her body and her spirit now* 
 
GU1LDEB0Y. 
 
 315 
 
 She had force of character enough to make her adhere to her 
 decision, but she had not coldness of nature enough to make 
 her at peace in it. She had known all the fullest joys of the 
 passions, and all that the world could give of pleasure and of 
 admiration. She could not resign herself to these empty, 
 joyless, stupid, eventless hours, which succeeded each other 
 with eternal monotony as the lengths of gray worsted rolled 
 off the ball with which the old housekeeper knitted hose from 
 noon to night, by the hearth in winter and in the porch in 
 summer. 
 
 It was in vain that she strove to find those consolations in 
 study which her father had never failed to find ; in vain that 
 she opened the black-letter folios and the Latin volumes, in 
 which as a child she had thought it her dearest privilege to 
 read ; in vain that even in her fathers own manuscripts she 
 found nothing of wisdom, although their precepts of patience 
 were as true as those of Publius Syrius. In vain did she 
 seek those calm and golden counsels ; they fell cold as icy 
 water on the heat and pain of her restless suffering. When 
 she looked off from the written or the printed words she saw 
 the face of her rival, and she heard the voice of her husband 
 saying always, “ She is the only woman whom I have ever 
 loved. God help me ! ” 
 
 Often she pushed the books and papers aside, and went 
 out in all weathers, when the white rain was driving in fury 
 over the moors, and when the waves were rising in a wall of 
 foam to break in thunder on the beach. 
 
 Nothing hurt her. She returned home often drenched to 
 the skin, but she took no harm. Great pain, like great hap- 
 piness, often bestows an almost more than mortal immunity 
 from all bodily ailments. “And I am always well/ 5 she 
 sometimes thought, almost in anger with nature for its too 
 abundant gifts to her of health and strength. 
 
 “ He will think I do not care/ 5 she said to herself, bitterly, 
 “ because I do not die ! ” 
 
 She knew that, with a man’s hasty and superficial judg- 
 ment, he was very likely to think so if he thought of her 
 at all. 
 
 From the summit of the moor which rose behind the house 
 she could see Ladysrood in the far distance. On the rare days 
 of sunshine the gilded vanes and the zinc roofs glittered in 
 distant points of light above the woods. The great house 
 was left to that silence and darkness which had been so often 
 
 n 
 
GUILDEROY . 
 
 316 
 
 its portion in other years. Once or twice some of the old 
 servants came to Christslea and begged to see her, for she 
 was beloved by the household ; but she did not encourage 
 them to return. She had sent for her dogs, and for some of 
 her books from there ; that was all. She would not even 
 have any of her clothes. With an exaggeration of feeling, 
 which even to Aubrey seemed morbid and overstrained, she 
 stripped herself of everything which had become hers by her 
 union with Guilderov, and wore the plainest and the cheap- 
 est clothes that she could find. But the beautiful and sym- 
 metrical lines of her form gave their own nobility to those 
 humble stuffs ; and in her rough serge, white or black, she 
 had no less distinction than she had had in her pearl-sown 
 velvet train at a state ball. 
 
 The insincerities, the conventionalities, and the feigned 
 friendships of society had always been painful and oppressive 
 to her, even when she had been comparatively happy amongst 
 them. In her present circumstances they would have been 
 an intolerable torture. She had her father’s sensitive horror 
 of compassion and of comment, and if alone and wretched at 
 Christslea she was at the least unmolested. Her retirement 
 had been a nine days’ wonder to her acquaintances ; in a 
 short time other mysteries, other scandals, other interests 
 took its place ; she was not there, others were. Society, with 
 the indifference which follows its curiosity as surely as night 
 follows day, ceased to speak of her, and almost forgot that 
 she existed. 
 
 She had been left unopposed to abide by the choice she had 
 made; and of her husband she heard nothing. He had passed 
 out of her existence as utterly as though he lay in his grave 
 like her father. 
 
 “ If he were dead they would tell me,” she thought ; if he 
 were dead they would remember, for a day at least, that she 
 was his wife. 
 
 Unconsciously to herself, her selection of Christslea amongst 
 other reasons, had been actuated by the sense that thereat least 
 she would be sure to hear if any accident or illness befell him. 
 She could not bring herself to ask for tidings of him even of 
 Aubrey : but she knew that the lord of Ladysrood could have 
 no great ill happen to him without such at once becoming the 
 common talk of the whole country side. Day and night she 
 thought of him as she had last seen and heard him, passion- 
 ately declaring to her his preference of her rival and hi* 
 
aminEiior. 
 
 sit 
 
 allegiance to her. Yet even in that moment he had seemed 
 to her stronger, manlier, more worthy, than he had seemed to 
 her before in the incessant duplicities and the half-hearted 
 intrigues of his other and less open infidelities. At least 
 there was on his lips no lie, and in his acts no subterfuge. 
 
 Even in the agony of the jealousy and the indignity which 
 consumed her, she reached some faint perception of what her 
 father had meant when he had bade her attain a love which 
 could see as God saw, and pardon as men hope that their God 
 pardons them. But it was only in brief, far separated, 
 intervals, that such perception came to her; for the most part 
 she was devoured by those burning tortures of jealous imagina- 
 tions which make every moment of existence almost insup- 
 portable to those they torment. 
 
 She recovered her bodily strength quickly ; she had too 
 perfect health for it to be easily overcome by any suffering of 
 the mind or of the senses ; the vigorous and abounding life 
 which filled her veins became a cruel mockery of the weari- 
 ness and barrenness of her empty days and her starved affec- 
 tions. When she had thought of Ohristslea as a haven of 
 rest in which she could let her sick soul lie hidden in peace, 
 she had remembered it as it had been with her father’s pres- 
 ence filling it as with the benign and cheerful light of spirit- 
 ual sunshine. She had forgotten that without him it could 
 be only a lonely and dreary cottage like any other ; a bald, 
 poor, empty life, lived out face to face with eternal losses and 
 eternal regrets. 
 
 What had been left her through her father was a trifle 
 indeed; no more than one of the head servants of Ladysrood 
 was paid a year ; but it was enough for such few wants as 
 her life here comprised, and the rental of the cottage she paid 
 into the hands of the steward every three months. 
 
 “My lord does not permit me to receive it,” said the 
 steward, in infinite perplexity and distress. 
 
 “But I insist that you shall take it,” she replied, “Pay it 
 into the poor-box of Ladysrood parish church if you can do 
 nothing else.” 
 
 And it was paid to the poor accordingly. She would not 
 owe to him one square inch of the soil in which the stocks and 
 the sweet-briar grew. Everything that was not the gift of 
 her father, or of Aubrey and his sister she had left behind 
 her; all her costly wardrobes, her furs, her laces, her fans, 
 her pictures, her jewels of all sorts, she left in his houses 
 
318 GVILLEUOT. 
 
 where they were, locked up in their chests and cabinets amd 
 cases, and the keys were deposited with his steward. 
 
 tc You have acted as though you were guilty, and not he,” 
 Aubrey said to her again and again, remonstrating with 
 what seemed to him exaggerated feeling. 
 
 “ I could not have borne my life if I had kept any single 
 thing of his,” she answered, with an energy which was 
 almost violence. “ Everything he ever gave me is at Ladys- 
 rood, from my bridal pearls down to the last gift he bought 
 for me.” 
 
 “ I do not deny that there is nobility and renunciation in 
 your withdrawal into this obscurity and beggary,” replied 
 Aubrey, “ but it is a mistake. It has made a thing which 
 the world need never have known become inevitably the 
 world’s talk. It may sound priggish, pretentious, or unfeeh 
 ing perhaps, my dear, if I say so, but I have always held 
 that people of our order have no right to gratify their own 
 private vengeance, or even set themselves free from painful 
 obligation, if by so doing they bring the name they repre- 
 sent upon the common tongues of the crowd. This is the 
 sense of the old noblesse oblige . We do not belong only to 
 ourselves. We are a part of the honor of our nation. When 
 we do anything on the spur of personal passion or personal 
 injury, which brings those whose name we bear into disre. 
 pute, we are faithless to our traditions and our trusts.” 
 
 She sighed heavily and the tears rolled off her lashes 
 down her cheeks. She knew that he was right ; no appeal 
 to dignity and honor could leave untouched the inmost 
 chords of the heart of John Vernon’s daughter. 
 
 “ I will never do anything to lower his name myself,” she 
 said, with emotion. “ Never, let me suffer what I may.” 
 
 “ That I am sure of,” replied Aubrey; “but without 
 thought you have done what must inevitably draw the com- 
 ment and the censure of the world upon you both.” 
 
 “Not I. It was not my fault, though I have taken all 
 blame for it. He had left me openly for her ; he had re- 
 solved to do so before I set foot in Naples.” 
 
 “ It need never have been known to the world in general 
 if you had continued to be the mistress of his houses, and 
 with time you might have regained his affections.” 
 
 A hot blush of deepest anger scorched up the tears upoa 
 her cheeks. 
 
GTJILDEUOY. 319 
 
 u I could not live like that ; I would not exist a day in 
 such hypocrisy and degradation.” 
 
 “ Why will you talk of death, my dear ? You will out- 
 live me and Guilderoy by many years. You are hardly more 
 than a child still.” 
 
 “ And do not children die ? It is true death never takes 
 those who wish for it ; and I am always well — cruelly well — 
 absurdly well ! ” 
 
 “That is ungrateful to Fate, my dear. Would you be 
 happier if you were lying on a sick bed, paralyzed with 
 bodily pains torturing you, as well as mental ? ” 
 
 u It would be a less harsh contrast. Oh, yes ! I know that 
 I am thankless, ungracious — wicked, I dare say; but when 
 I feel such perfect health in me, such untiring strength, 
 I wonder what are the use of them, why they stay with me, 
 why they could not make my little children strong enough 
 too, so that they might have lived. His sister always says it 
 was my fault that they died. I do not think it was.” 
 
 “Yes; I wish your children had lived. You would not 
 have severed your life from his then.” 
 
 “ Oh, yes, I should. I should have done just the same ; 
 only I should have had them with me. He would not have 
 taken them away from me. I heard him say once that a man 
 was a brute who could take her children from any woman, at 
 any age, whatever the law might allow to him ! ” 
 
 Aubrey looked at her in surprise. 
 
 “ My dear, when you can recognize qualities and feelings 
 in him like this why did you not have more patience with him ? 
 Human nature cannot give unalloyed excellence, and human 
 affections should not expect it. In what we love we are sure 
 to find grave faults, and faults which often are of the kind 
 which we of all others most disparage; but we must accept 
 them just as we would accept blindness or lameness, or any 
 physical accident in the person we loved.” 
 
 “ That depends on the character of the faults.” 
 
 “ Does it not rather depend on our own character ? I ad- 
 mit that what is vile or utterly false and feeble will kill affec- 
 tion, because it destroys the very roots in which it is planted. 
 But the infidelities of the passions and the waywardness of 
 the instincts are not sins so dark as to be unpardonable ; they 
 are, indeed, faults almost inseparable from manhood.” 
 
 She looked at him wistfully. 
 
 “ You would be faithful to any woman you loved, I thinly* 
 
32 0 
 
 OUILDEROY. 
 
 “ There is no question of myself/’ said Aubrey impatiently. 
 “ I have had no time for the soft follies of life, and my mis- 
 tress is England, who is a very exacting one. The question, 
 under consideration now, is of my cousin. His offences 
 against you are very grave ; but they are of a kind which you 
 must have learned enough in these years to know are insepa- 
 rable from such a temperament as his, and which I think every 
 woman should force herself to overlook.” 
 
 “ If she felt herself in the least loved by him or necessary 
 to him, yes,” she answered, with force and emotion. “ All 
 the question lies there. If he had ever loved me I might be- 
 lieve that he might care for me more or less again. But I 
 knew — I knew almost at once — that he never did. As far as 
 he can love at all he loves her. I am nothing to him but a 
 person who is in the way ; who prevents him from marry- 
 ing her; who encumbers his life and draws down unpleasant 
 comments on him from the world. You cannot alter that. 
 There is nothing to touch or to appeal to in it.” 
 
 “I think that you mistake — that you exaggerate. Look 
 in your mirror, and see if you are a woman to whom a man 
 so susceptible to female charms as he is, can ever be wholly 
 indifferent.” 
 
 She smiled sadly, with that premature knowledge of the 
 world which had so embittered her life with its disillusions. 
 
 u If I were a stranger ora mere acquaintance I should have 
 charm for him perhaps. Surely, my friend, you must under- 
 stand that, being what I am to him, I have none.” 
 
 He looked at her again ; they were walking by the edge of 
 the cliff behind the house in one of the rare hours in which 
 he permitted himself to visit her. It was a rough, rude day, 
 with boisterous winds and a high sea tumbling black and 
 frothy far down below them. The mists hung heavily over 
 the inland landscape, and all the northern horizon, where the 
 woods of Ladysrood were, was hidden by a white thick fog. 
 But on the table-land of the cliffs the breeze was blowing 
 strongly, and it gave warmth to her cheeks and brilliancy to 
 her eyes, and blew some of the short waves of her hair in dis- 
 order upon her forehead. The wind, and the cold, and the 
 air from the sea, lent her a vividness of coloring and of ex- 
 pression which for the moment banished the gloom and sad- 
 ness which were now habitual on her face. 
 
 “ If he could see her now,” thought Aubrey, “ surely he 
 would come back to her.” 
 
GUILLEROY. 
 
 321 
 
 He turned his own eyes from her and gazed out over the 
 stormy sea, afraid of the emotions into which he might be 
 hurried. 
 
 His position grew daily more and more difficult as sole 
 counsellor and friend of the deserted wife of his own cousin ; 
 more and more painful to himself and invidious before others. 
 Though passion had had little place in his life, his nature 
 was far from passionless, and he realized that the time might 
 come when it would be impossible for him longer to preserve 
 this attitude of calm, paternal affection towards her. 
 
 With all the unconsciousness of a woman whose thoughts 
 and feelings are centered elsewhere, she unwittingly tempted 
 him and tortured him a hundred times an hour. The very 
 pleasure with which she welcomed him ; the very sense she 
 often expressed to him that he was her one consolation and 
 protection, the very instinct of confidence in wdiich she 
 turned to and leaned on him in her loneliness, appealed more 
 than any other thing could have done to a man of his wide 
 and magnanimous temperament. But they also tried his 
 self-control more cruelly than any other things, and often 
 made him dread that his voluntarily accepted office would 
 be one beyond his force. 
 
 All the public obligations and national interests with 
 which his life was filled, although they gave him that hold 
 on duty and on honor which it would have been a crime in 
 his eyes to relax, his position before the country being the 
 conspicuous one which it was, they yet could not still in him 
 either the rebellion of chained passions or the natural yearn- 
 ings of the heart. 
 
 He was a man of higher principle and stronger force of self- 
 denial than most ; but he was also a man of warmer feeling 
 than most, and his love had never been weakened by being 
 divided and frittered away in such innumerable amours as 
 had swayed in their turn the fancies of Guilderoy. All 
 the grave and absorbing claims upon his life from his party 
 and his country could not prevent his unspoken attachment 
 to his cousin’s wife growing daily and hourly in influence on 
 him. But he had strength to keep it untold, for he felt that 
 any expression of it would destroy the serenity of trust with 
 which she looked to him in all things, and would alarm her, 
 dismay her, and leave her utterly alone. 
 
 He was her only friend ; for all others whom she knew had 
 fallen from her. Her life was dreary and dangerous as it 
 
 21 
 
322 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 was. With none to whom she could show her aching heart, 
 it would become to her, he knew a solitude beyond the 
 strength of any woman so young to endure. She herself had 
 that oblivion of possible calumny and of the imputation of 
 low motives which is at once the strength and the feebleness 
 of noble natures, and leaves them exposed to the false con- 
 structions of those who, unheeded by them, observe them 
 with malevolence and coarseness ; such malevolence and such 
 coarseness as are always the foundations of the superficial 
 judgments of society. She did not think for a moment of any 
 possible misconstruction of that kindly and honest affection 
 which Aubrey had shown her ever since he had first met her 
 in the little Watteau cabinet at Guilderoy House the day 
 after her first Drawing-room. He had been always there to 
 serve her in any difficulty, to counsel her in any distress ; it 
 was natural that he should come to her now in her solitude. 
 
 It seemed to her strange that he came so little ; it seemed 
 even unkind and unjust. She accused him in her thoughts 
 of leaning to his cousin’s side, of being so swayed by family 
 considerations of pride and sympathy of kindred that he 
 palliated and excused hi: cousin’s conduct to an extent which 
 was injustice to herself. Woman-like, she required in her 
 friend unlimited approval and undivided sentiment; she 
 wanted to hear him tell her that she had done wholly right, 
 was wholly to be pitied and esteemed. The slightest reserva- 
 tion in sympathy struck on her aching heart as with the cold 
 severity of censure. 
 
 It made him afraid for her sake to assume any prominence 
 in her affairs or to take that part on her behalf with his 
 cousin which it would have been his natural impulse to take. 
 Neither Guilderoy nor the world would ever have credited 
 him with the unselfish feelings which would have been his 
 only motive power. H saw no way in which he could assist 
 without more greatly injuring her. He knew, too, that it 
 was likely enough they would associate his own name with 
 the cause of her voluntary retirement ; and he was conscious 
 that every step he took, and every word he spoke in her pro- 
 tection or defence, would only create more strongly the im- 
 pression that he in some way or another controlled her 
 destinies. 
 
 Nor did he disguise from her that all his family blamed 
 her ; even his sister blamed her. They were intolerant of a 
 publicity and eccentricity which they could not conceal from 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 323 
 
 *oeiefy, and of which with more or less undisguised inquisi- 
 tiveness the world around them wearied them incessantly for 
 the explanation. They felt all the impatience of a proud 
 and sensitive race at the needless wonder and conjecture 
 which were aroused by her retirement to her father’s cottage. 
 It had caused a public scandal where the world need have 
 known nothing of the differences between herself and her 
 hasband. 
 
 True, she herself knew that Guilderoy had left never to 
 return to her, and that such total separation from her had 
 been the price put by her rival on her reacceptance of his 
 vows ; but they did not know this, and had they known it, 
 would have thought it a mere delirium on his part which 
 would pass away with time and with indulgence. They 
 would have censured him strongly, but they would not have 
 deemed her justified by his conduct in taking such a course 
 as gave her name to the whole world to tear in pieces in the 
 excitement of its curiosity and baffled interrogation. The 
 view which Hilda Sunbury took of her action was in the 
 main the view of all those powerful families with which 
 Guilderoy was connected, whether closely or distantly, by 
 blood or alliance. They defended him because he belonged 
 to them ; and the^ visited her with their displeasure because 
 they thought, as his sister did, that she had been grossly at 
 fault throughout, that she had never known how to obtain 
 any influence over him, and that, having confirmed his faults 
 by over-leniency to them in the first years of their marriage, 
 she had now injured him by sev rity and severance when 
 both were ill-time d and misu sers ood. 
 
 Though often when she was °lone the conscience of Hilda 
 Sunbury smote her, r A membering the last words which she 
 had heard John Yernon speak to her, yet in society she did 
 not hesitate to exculpate her b other at his wife’s cost. She 
 did not scruple to hint, with many adroit phrases, at incom- 
 patibility of temper, want of sympathy, coldness of feeling, 
 which excused if they did not justify, Guilderoy’s indiffer- 
 ence. 
 
 “ I say nothing ; I blame no one,” she replied continually 
 to her questioners ; but there was a tone in the words which 
 implied a more injurious censure than any direct accusation 
 would have done. 
 
 And when Aubrey, angered and in earnest, told something 
 of the truth, and took up the defence of his cousin’s wife. 
 
324 
 
 GU1LDER0Y. 
 
 society listened to him with apparent deference, because be 
 was a great person in more ways than one and a leader of 
 opinion, both social and political ; but, in his absence, smiled 
 and said that he had always been her friend, always been 
 conspicuously attendant on her from the earliest days of hei: 
 appearance in the world. Without the voices of the women 
 of his House raised on her behalf, he could do but little in 
 her service ; and they, at their friendliest, thought of her as 
 the Duchess of Longleat did, who said one day to him : — 
 
 “ If she would come and stay with me, if she would hold 
 her own at Ladysrood, if she would lead any natural life so 
 that the world need not talk, I would support her in every 
 way. But as long as she buries herself in this ridiculous 
 isolation, as long as she virtually blames herself by her ac- 
 ceptance of an utterly invidious position, I can do nothing 
 for her even if I wished. You say that Guilderoy leaves 
 her; it may be so; but to all appearance it is she who leaves 
 him. You say that she has voluntarily given up her place 
 in his life and all her rights; I do not doubt you, but there 
 is certainly every appearance that it is he who has refused 
 them to her for some just cause ; I say just, because, were it 
 unjust, she would most certainly protest. I have always 
 been attached to her ; first because she pleased you, and 
 then because she pleased me myself ; but she has placed her- 
 self in an absurdly false position, even accepting your ac- 
 count of the causes which have led to it, and I do not see 
 what anyone can possibly do to sustain her in it.” 
 
 u I thought you more generous and less conventional,” 
 said Aubrey, angered deeply, u and I think that when I give 
 you my word that her conduct has not only been blameless 
 but admirable, you might trust me enough to believe in my 
 assurance.” 
 
 “ My dear, I do not doubt that you give it in perfect good 
 faith,” said his sister. a Who could doubt your good faith 
 who knows you ? But you have always been infatuated 
 about her — pardon me the word — and I confess that I think 
 your chivalry is doing her, in her present position, infinitely 
 more harm than good. If she will come and stay with me I 
 will receive her. What more can I say ? I have always 
 been greatly her friend. But so long as she condemns her- 
 self in society’s opinion by living alone in a little cottage 
 where she is only visible to you, no one can be of any solid 
 service to her. You say that Evelyn is living openly with 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 325 
 
 the Duchess Boria. It may be so. But the world does not 
 believe it, because the Duchess Soria is a woman wise enough 
 always to please and pamper the world ; and even if it be 
 ever generally known, every one will declare that Lady 
 Guilderoy could have only one or two courses open to her — . 
 either to carry her case to the tribunals, which is what vul- 
 gar women do, or else to go on her usual routine as if she saw 
 nothing and heard nothing, which is what women who are 
 gentlewomen do all their lives long.” 
 
 “ It is what she is doing.” 
 
 “No; what she is doing is a romantic, headstrong, idiotic 
 thing, with which you have great sympathy, but with which 
 no one else living will ever have the slightest patience. She 
 is drawing the whole world’s attention down upon her, and 
 no woman can ever do that without being condemned by it. 
 When the season comes, and she is not in her house in town, 
 not in her place at Court, not in her position in society, not 
 in her home of Ladysrood, and everyone knows that she is 
 'living alone in the cottage her father died in, what do you 
 suppose that society in general will say ? ” 
 
 “ If it can ever say the truth by any miracle, it will say 
 that she is so living because she is too sensitive and too 
 proud to accept the maintenance of a man who is unfaithful 
 to her without secrecy or excuse.” 
 
 “No ; the world will say nothing of the sort, for it does 
 not believe in miracles. It will take the side which is popu- 
 lar ; it always takes the side which is popular, and you know 
 it does; it will exonerate Guilderoy, because it has never 
 liked her; and, being essentially vulgar, which all society is 
 in our day, it will utterly refuse to credit that any woman 
 voluntarily surrenders all the material pleasures of a great 
 income and a great position. When all our maidens are 
 brought up only to think life worth living if they can sell 
 themselves for those, who will be likely to hear with patience 
 that Gladys alone of her sex despises them ? You know, 
 as well as I do, that though you proclaimed it in West- 
 minster Hall with sound of trumpets, you would not find any 
 living creature to believe you.” 
 
 “ I supposed that you would believe me,” said Aubrey, 
 with great anger and some emotion. 
 
 Ermyntrude Longieat looked at him with tenderness and 
 anxiety. 
 
 " I have not said that I do not, my dearest. But I know 
 
326 
 
 ^uiLDunot. 
 
 her intimately, and I know that her education has given her 
 that unworldliness and unwisdom which always appear either 
 a crime or a lunacy to the world at large. I believe her mo- 
 tives to he what you say ; but I think the act they have re- 
 sulted in is deplorable. It must make the breach between 
 her and Guilderoy irrevocable. You seem to me to remem- 
 ber that too little. You forget that after all we are his rel- 
 atives, not hers ; and in my opinion her first obligation was 
 to him, not to her own pride. You would see this as I sea 
 it if your feelings were not biased by strong personal inter- 
 est in her which blinds you to common facts. Forgive me, 
 dear, if I have said too much.” 
 
 “ It is precisely because we are his relatives, not hers, 
 that common justice and common honor call on us to defend 
 her against him,” said Aubrey, passing over her latter words. 
 “ Guilderoy requires neither pity nor support ; he does what 
 he pleases ; he would always do what he pleased if the whole 
 world were burning. He leaves his wife much as he would 
 any cocotte. He offers a different price, it is true. He has 
 told his lawyers to give her half his income. But the feeling 
 which governs him is the same as if he were paying off a 
 woman he wanted no more. He deems himself quitte par 
 la bourse” 
 
 “ And she refuses ? ” 
 
 “ She refuses. She will live on the little her father left 
 her. I confess I am amazed that such choice in so young a 
 woman does not move you to admiration.” 
 
 “ I cannot admire what is making the whole of society 
 talk ill of a person who s related to me.” 
 
 “ You speak as if he were blameless.” 
 
 “No; but if every woman in our world made such an 
 esclandre as she, society would be at an end.” 
 
 “ She has made none. She has simply withdrawn herself 
 to the life that she led before marriage.” 
 
 “ And pray, what is that but a public separation ? ” 
 
 “ It is a separation certainly, but not a public one. It 
 would be utterly ignoble if, because we are closely connected 
 with him, we upheld him against a wholly innocent woman. 
 She may not have acted judiciously, but she has most cer- 
 tainly acted as only a wholly innocent woman would act ; 
 and she is as entirely sacrificed to him as if he had killed her 
 in the flesh, as he has in the spirit.” 
 
 His sister listened to him with sorrow and apprehension. 
 
GTJILDEBOY. 327 
 
 cc I hc^e to heaven you will not be sacrificed to her in 
 turn!” she thought, but she forbore to say it. 
 
 Aubrey was disappointed and angered at her want of sym- 
 pathy, and took his leave of her, failing for the first time in 
 their lives to influence her by his opinions and his desires. 
 
 Knowing the world profoundly as he did, he divined all 
 that the world was saying of Gladys, not in his hearing in- 
 deed, nor in that of any member of his family, but never- 
 theless saying unsparingly, inevitably, with all its inexhausti- 
 ble powers of exaggeration and invention. Who beside him- 
 self and the few who knew her intimately would believe in 
 the story as she told it, in the motives as she gave them ? 
 
 When her position was a target for the arrows of slander, 
 how could she escape them ? Who would believe in the pride 
 and indignation of a character, still so childlike in its im- 
 pulses and so unworldly in its estimates that it could avenge 
 its wrongs by stripping itself of every material advantage 
 and every pleasure and pomp of life ? 
 
 Her choice was one of those things which the world will till 
 the day of judgment utterly refuse to credit, because, break- 
 ing all its canons and ignoring all its estimates, they afford 
 to it no kind of common ground on which their motives can 
 be judged. 
 
 Aubrey knew that ; and he knew that it would be as likely 
 a task to persuade geese hissing on a common of the beauty 
 of a sunrise as to induce the mass of society to give credence 
 to the reasons which had led her to return to the house at 
 Christslea. 
 
 It was an exaggerated sentiment, and when some idea of 
 what she had done was bruited about in society it was called 
 morbid and mad by the few who did not go still further and 
 say that she had been forced to do it by her husband on the 
 discovery of her attachment to his cousin. It was an unwise 
 act ; unwise with that mingling of sublimity and folly which 
 characterizes most acts of any strong feeling. She seemed 
 by it to give color and ground to the conjectures raised 
 against her ; it was an error which none but a very young 
 and very proud woman would have made. 
 
 The money which her father had inherited, and which had 
 come in due course to her, Guilderoy had immediately secured 
 to her in such a manner that it was her own as absolutely as 
 if she had never married. Under her marriage settlements 
 ker father had been her only trustee, and his sudden death 
 
328 
 
 GUILDER OT. 
 
 had made her sole mistress of her actions. Yernon had neve* 
 felt the least anxiety as to her safety in her husband’s hand* 
 with regard to all material welfare. Guilderoy was at all 
 times not only generous but scrupulous in the observance of 
 all obligations of that kind, and had never had the slightest 
 disorder in his personal affairs. What he had once promised 
 in the little study at Christslea on this point he had thoroughly 
 and blamelessly fulfilled. She was, therefore, so placed now 
 that no one except himself could have any legal title to in- 
 terfere in her actions, and he did not seek to interfere. 
 
 It angered him deeply, it oppressed and humiliated him, 
 to know that his wife was living on her own resources in a 
 little cottage ten miles off his own country house. He was 
 well aware of how the whole world of their acquaintances 
 would speak of so strange a thing, and of how many and how 
 strange would be the constructions placed upon it. But he 
 did not endeavor to prevent it. He felt that he had wronged 
 her too much to have any moral right to dictate to her. It 
 seemed to him that only a cur could exercise the power given 
 him by the law, when he had voluntarily declined the power 
 given him by the affections. To attempt to dictate to his 
 wife when he had abandoned her would have appeared to him 
 the very basest depth of low breeding. 
 
 Her choice embarrassed and pained him ; it made him feel 
 forsworn in all the promises which he had given to provide 
 for her material welfare ; it rendered the memory of John 
 Yernon doubly reproachful to him. He knew that it must 
 emphasize and darken his own acts in the sight of his rela- 
 tives and his society in general. To a man like him, who 
 was always careful to atone for moral unkindness to women 
 by great care for their material welfare, and who looked on 
 them as beautiful and delicate animals which needed luxury 
 and shelter as racers did, it was intensely distressing to 
 think that the woman he had made the bearer of his came, 
 should be living in a manner which to him seemed scarce^ 
 above penury. His pride was hurt by it ; both his pride of 
 place and that higher kind of pride which goes with all the 
 sentiments of a gentleman. He never dreamed that the 
 world would blame her, as it did do, instead of himself, and 
 he felt that he must appear in its sight a brute, who not only 
 wronged but defrauded his wife. He was veiy far from 
 imagining Miat the capriciousness of society would transfer 
 all its blame from him to her. Knowing the world aL 2i© 
 
GTTTLT)EBOr. 
 
 329 
 
 did, such inversion of it never occurred to him as possible. 
 
 But Gladys had never had the favor of her world. All 
 her courtesies, her generosities, her many thoughtful and 
 tender-hearted acts had failed to atone for the unconscious 
 hauteur of her manner and the tacit rebuke which her 
 silrnco was to the amusements around her. She had had at 
 all times as her enemies the many women who had loved and 
 had lost Guilderoy, and their voices in the earliest days of 
 her debut had set the current of feeling againsf her. 
 
 Rumor excused his weaknesses and distorted her failings. 
 The Duchess Soria was beloved and followed by the great 
 world. It had never condemned, it would always be very 
 slow to condemn her. It would unquestionably hesitate to 
 see anything harmful in any of her friendships; and it would 
 as certainly refuse to believe that any woman of years so 
 youthful as those of Gladys would voluntarily and innocently 
 retire into the poverty of a rural and obscure life. 
 
 The world has its own reasons for believing and for disbeliev- 
 ing ; the facts of any case do not enter into these, nor in any 
 way affect them. There are those who can do no wrong in 
 its sight, and these have a charter of infallibility ; there 
 are others who can do nothing to its taste, and these are con- 
 demned even before they act. 
 
 Then not a few also were envious of what was considered 
 her accaparement of such a man as Aubrey. His great posi- 
 tion and reputation made him the desire and the despair of 
 many: and when it was seen how much time he could find 
 to give to his cousin’s young wife, though for no other dal- 
 liances of the sort had he leisure, there had never been want- 
 ing those who were ready to suggest that his attentions to 
 Lady Guilderoy had as their ultimate object something 
 much less innocent than the mere pleasantness of family 
 regard. 
 
 The proud and the delicate disdain the favor of the world, 
 but they pay heavily for their disdain ! The favor of the 
 world makes us walk on the sunny side of the street, gives 
 us a south aspect to our house of life, sweeps the dust and 
 the mud from the paths we tread, and when we set sail from 
 any port sends us favoring winds and smiling seas. She had 
 never had that pliability and popularity which gives a woman 
 in a difficult .position the support of a thousand friends who 
 make common cause with her. That rare high-breeding and 
 that delicate hauteur which had marked her actions and her 
 
330 
 
 GUILD EROT. 
 
 manner in the world had made her many enemies. There 
 were few other women in European society who would not 
 be gratified to think that proud young head was humbled. 
 He could hear, as though he were present at them, the mil- 
 lion and one different conversations in which the fact of her 
 separation from her husband would be discussed, accounted 
 * for, embroidered on, censured, and ridiculed, all by turns. 
 
 No one wrote to her or came to her except her one friend. 
 
 The world will always let any one fall out of its favor who 
 chooses to do so. She had made none of those intimacies 
 with women which give a woman sympathy and support. 
 She had been disdainful of the society of her own sex ; to her 
 mind, used to communion with such intelligences as her 
 father’s and Aubrey’s feminine conversation and confidences 
 seemed trivial and frivolous. Men who had admired her 
 despite her coldness, and would gladly have atoned to her 
 for her husband’s neglect had she given them the slightest sign 
 of permission, were afraid to seek her out in her solitude, 
 because of the generally credited report that Aubrey was 
 primarily responsible for her selection of it. He was not a 
 man with whom other men cared to meddle. The very cold- 
 ness and indifference to women of his life hitherto made it 
 generally supposed that his dedication of himself to his 
 cousin’s wife argued some deep mutual attraction which would 
 not brook any interference. 
 
 It was altogether in vain that he in real truth saw her 
 seldom, was careful to do nothing which could give grounds 
 for calumny, and made his visits to her of brief duration. 
 The world only saw in such scrupulous care the secrecy and 
 the consciousness of a concealed intrigue which his public 
 career made it necessary to conduct with the most delicate' 
 observance of appearances. “It is nothing new; he was 
 always in love with her,” said men and women both ; and it 
 seemed to them all as clear as daylight that it was the origin 
 of Guilderoy’s abandonment of her. He had discovered what 
 he did not choose to condone, no doubt, and so had exiled 
 her to her father s house in preference to seeking any more 
 public remedy. He and Aubrey were near relatives. Their 
 families were proud. Of course the matter had been arranged 
 thus for the sake of peace and of the avoidance of the 
 country’s disapprobation ; the attitude of Lady Sunbury and 
 her ominous silence made them certain that this wa£ tb$ 
 
GUILDEROY. 331 
 
 truth of the whole position. They blamed Aubrey more than 
 they blamed Guilderoy. 
 
 The latter had always been frankly a man of pleasure, un 
 homme leger ; he had never assumed any serious attitude 
 before the nation. But Aubrey was a politician of distinc- 
 tion and of immense influence : that he should cause any 
 scandal of the sort seemed an offence against the country 
 itself ; a kind of immorality which was almost a treachery 
 to it. “ And his cousin’s wife, too ! ” they cried ; “ and a 
 woman so young ! ” All the great ladies who had had 
 histories in their own lives, and all the fashionable femmes 
 tarees who keep their footing with difficulty in society, were 
 so shocked that they could not bring themselves to speak of 
 it. And a Scotch waiting-woman who had taken service 
 with a Scotch marchionness of very strict religious opinions 
 sighed and hinted that she had left Lady Guildero} r ’s service 
 because even at that time Lord Aubrey had been more 
 intimate in his cousin’s house than her principles had per- 
 mitted her to countenance. 
 
 u I am a poor woman who work for my bread, my Lady,” 
 said the good creature, “and I have five small children 
 dependent on my earnings ; but let me suffer what I might, 
 I could never consent to prosper by taking the wages of 
 sin ! ” 
 
 “ Your feelings and your scruples do you very great honor,’ 
 said her employer who was of a different political party to 
 that of which Aubrey was a leader. 
 
 And little by little the impression grew into a certainty 
 with the world that Guilderoy, however blamable, had had 
 much cause to blame others, and to leave the country. 
 
 CHAPTEE LI. 
 
 The delicately good taste of Beatrice Soria had made it easy 
 for the high society of Europe to see nothing, if it chose to 
 see nothing, blamable in the renewed intimacy between her 
 and Guilderoy. Theirs was one of those positions — they are 
 not rare — in which the popularity or unpopularity of the 
 persons concerned wholly determines the amount of in- 
 dulgence or of censure which they shall receive from others. 
 Tact goes for much in this, an^* ^ af \nction for much. The 
 
332 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 great lady does unblamed what the woman of yesterday would 
 he stoned for attempting. There is a sublime nonchalance 
 and a calm superiority to calumny which repel it utterly, 
 much more effectually than any mere virtue. The world hut 
 asks from us external observances ; if we do not give these, we 
 are such fools that we merit that sentence of banishment from 
 it which is as terrible as the fiat of exile to Ovid. Beatrice 
 Soria had always been heedful to give those observances ; not 
 from want of courage, for she had great courage, but from 
 good breeding. It seemed to her vulgar to put out your 
 passions in the street, as the poor hang their soiled linen. It 
 is enough for you to know your own happiness ; you do not 
 want the crowd to see the rose hung above your portal. 
 
 She had made it her condition that he should now leave 
 bis wife utterly for her sake, because it seemed to her that 
 nothing less than that could atone to her for his abandon- 
 ment of herself, could reconcile her to her own lost dignity, 
 or ensure her against a merely partial offering of his life, 
 such as would have seemed to her at once an insolence and 
 a humiliation. “ I alone, or nothing ! ” she had said ; as every 
 woman says it, although so few have power to enforce it. It 
 had been the only means by which she had been able to test 
 the sincerity of his regret and the loyalty of his return. 
 
 True, she had sacrificed to it an innocent woman ; but it 
 was only natural that the fulness of her own triumph had 
 weighed more with her than any memory of her rival’s 
 misery. Like all great conquerors she felt that it was not 
 for her to heed or to pause for the fallen. 
 
 She was in no way a cruel woman, but she felt the con* 
 tempt of all women who have great dominion over men for 
 those who cannot attain equal power over them. 
 
 “ She has loveliness, and youth, and many rare qualities of 
 both heart and mind, and yet she can only sigh and suffer 
 because he is faithless ! ” she had often thought with wonder- 
 ing disdain of Gladys as she had studied her in society. She 
 allowed nothing in their apparent intercourse which could 
 give rise to any scandal, except such as must be inevitably 
 caused by his continued residence in Italy. She made him 
 live in his own houses, visit her with precaution, and never 
 publicly presume upon his relations to her. It was her wis- 
 dom as well as her good taste which influenced her, She 
 knew the truth that 
 
 Dulcia ferimus : succo renovamur amore* 
 
GUILBJEROY . 
 
 333 
 
 fend she did not allow their intimacy to he degraded into a 
 i too facile habit which would inevitably have become with 
 time careless and over-sure. 
 
 She knew his nature and the temperament of men too well 
 to allow him that too constant access to happiness which soon 
 results in making such happiness insipid and unenjoyed. All 
 the faults which had cost her so dear in her first association 
 with him she avoided now ; and even still at times he was so 
 doubtful of his influence over her, despite all the proofs he 
 had of it, that he asked himself uneasily whether his surren- 
 der to her had not been demanded by her rather through 
 pride than love. It was the uncertainty, the stimulant, the 
 mortification, which were needful to sustain at its strength 
 the passion of a man whose conquests had been as easy as his 
 caprices, and had been short-lived. 
 
 “ Even now I do not believe that you love me as you used 
 to do ! ” he said to her more than once. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 “ What is love ? ” she said dreamily. “ Sometimes I think 
 it is the most absurd and the basest feeling of our lives ; and 
 sometimes I think it is the only spark of immortality which 
 we ever have in us.” 
 
 “ It seems to me immortal when I look on you,” he an- 
 swered ; and he was sincere in what he said. 
 
 All these months had passed with him in a happiness 
 which had been more nearly the ideal happiness of his 
 early dreams than any he had ever known. His re-conquest 
 of her glorious physical beauty and the potent and subtle 
 charm of her intelligence exercised a sway over him which 
 was deeper and more enduring than the first passion which 
 she had excited in him. The amorous spell which lies 
 in the climate of the country which had always been the 
 land of his preference, and the easy languor of life in it, added 
 to the spell of her influence upon him. He marvelled how- 
 ever he could have been mad enough to leave her ; he 
 wondered how he had passed years of his existence without 
 her. Either warned by her previous loss of him, or calmed 
 by the greatness and completeness of her triumph, or per- 
 chance bringing rnw into her relations with him as much of 
 wisdom as she had once brought of passion, she gave him all 
 the loveliness of love without its exactions and its violence. 
 She bent all the varied resources of her mind, which were iiv- 
 finite, and all the powers of her seductions, which were end- 
 
334 
 
 GXJ1LDER0Y. 
 
 less, to prove to him all that he had missed in missing her, 
 all which no other woman on earth could give to him ; and she 
 succeeded. She succeeded, now that it was a matter with her 
 rather of supremacy, and prilde, and triumph, than of love, 
 where she had failed when it had been to her a thing of life and 
 of death, on which all her soul had been cast. Passion serves 
 women ill ; it makes their eyes blind, their steps rash, their 
 acts unwise, and unselfishness in love serves them still worse. 
 Desire of dominion, on the contrary, is their most safe and 
 subtle servant, placing illimitable power in their hands and 
 leaving their sight clear to use it in their own interest as 
 they will. 
 
 Beatrice Soria had been a better woman when he had 
 thought her a worse one, a tenderer woman when he had 
 thought her a more violent one ; her heart still beat for him, 
 but no more with the rash, ardent, delirious warmth of earlier 
 days. Dominant over her impulses of revived passion was a 
 colder and more egotistic intent to make him and to keep 
 him once more wholly hers. 
 
 In the autumn of the year, Guilderoy was for a while in 
 Venice, nominally living at his own palazzino there, whilst 
 she was at one of the villas of the Brenta which she had in- 
 herited as part of her mother’s dower ; one of those marvels 
 of art and architecture which stand amidst the gladiolus- 
 filled marshes and the green mulberry-shaded pastures of the 
 Veneto, so little known, so rarely visited, but as much me- 
 morials of the greatness and luxury of the Venetian patricians 
 as are the streets of the city herself. In early autumn, when 
 the rose and white alveoloe are in flower in all the hedges, 
 and the last aftermath is being mown in the meadows, and 
 the barges come down the river laden with purple and yellow 
 grapes, and the marvellous sunsets burn over the wide- 
 spreading waters, and the little gray owls flit under the 
 poplar shadows, these villas on the Brenta form as lovely a 
 retreat as the world can offer ; and the gayety and the pageant- 
 ry of Goldoni and of Carpaccio seem to be renewed, and the 
 lovely ladies and the gay gallants of Rosalba and of Longhi 
 seem to live again in them. 
 
 Por the most part they are, unhappily, abandoned to neg- 
 lect, decay, and silence ; but in hers the animation, the bril- 
 liancy, and the courtliness which her society brought thither 
 were worthy of the traditions of Catarina Corner, the adored 
 and adorable who once had held her court there. 
 
&UlLDflB0r. 
 
 §35 
 
 Guilderoy was little in the city, much at the villa, and the 
 da^s were long and light and sensuous and soft as the music 
 of G-retry, which had used to echo over those waters and 
 down those marble colonnades in the days of Madama 
 Cattina. 
 
 One of the most potent seductions of Beatrice Soria lay in 
 the forms of life with which she surrounded herself. The 
 atmosphere in which a woman lives stimulates, or kills, love 
 for her, as much as does her person or her mind. Even one 
 who is not beautiful derives a certain reflection of beauty 
 from beautiful surroundings ; and where she has ever about 
 her pleasure, grace, and gayety, she will have in them strong 
 auxiliaries to charm and retain those whom she desires to 
 please. The varied and brilliant existence which she created 
 by her magnificent modes of living, and her unusual wit, 
 made her houses wholly unlike any other. 
 
 “ You alone know how to live ! some one said to her once ; 
 and she thought sadly, “ Yes ; I know how to live ; it is much, 
 no doubt, but how to exorcise that spirit of dissatisfaction 
 which dulls all sooner or later would be more — how — how ? 
 It has perplexed and baffled every voluptuary and every 
 artist since the world began ! ” She interrogated in vain the 
 shades of the great pleasure-seekers and the glad lovers who 
 had passed down those marble staircases and under those 
 canopies of trellised vine before her, in the days that were 
 dead. 
 
 Sulle rive d’ Adria bella. 
 
 Men had always been her playthings ; she had done what- 
 ever she had chosen with them ; but she had always for them 
 that indolent, indulgent, and yet at times impatient derision 
 with which a woman of high intelligence and profound pas- 
 sions is apt to regard both her lovers and her friends. 
 
 And in her, now, besides this, was a vague, slight — very 
 vague, very slight — sense of disappointment. 
 
 Was it because she failed to feel those intensities of emo- 
 tion which she had felt before ? Was it because no one sum- 
 mer is like another? Was it because the mind and nature 
 change with time, and what is delightful and exquisite in 
 one season cannot wholly content them in another ? Or was 
 it because the passions are such subtle, self-willed, and mys- 
 terious agents of our being that they resist the appeal to 
 them to build in last year’s nests ? She could not tell ; all 
 the penetration and intuition of her intelligence and experi* 
 
336 
 
 GUiLTjEROT. 
 
 ence did not suffice to explain to her why this vague, iaint 
 sense of disappointment followed on the renewal of her 
 romance. 
 
 It was no fault of his. 
 
 He was the most devoted and the most tender of lovers. 
 It was perhaps that her memory and her imagination had 
 expected more than it was humanly possible for any leve to 
 give from their reunion ; or perhaps she unconsciously missed 
 the stimulant of that desire to regain his affections which 
 had moved all her strongest feelings since his marriage. She 
 had nothing more left to wish for ; in the full, rich, and pam- 
 pered life of Beatrice Soria that fact was almost a loss in 
 itself. She felt for him tenderly and with warmth, indeed ; 
 but it was not the same feeling as had subjugated all her 
 soul and her senses in the first days of its ascendency. 
 
 “ Perhaps I grow old, and so indifferent/’ she thought ; 
 but then she looked in her mirror and smiled, and knew 
 that it was not that. 
 
 Was it then the inevitable reaction of expectations too 
 great for finite human passions to fulfil them ? Was it that 
 the lost music had seemed so sweet in its remembrance that 
 no strain of it, heard now, could never seem to equal it in 
 melody ? “I loved him better when he was n.t mine,” she 
 thought sometimes with the saddest consciousness that can 
 ever visit love. Alas ! it is not an unfrequent visitant. 
 
 Coming down the Grand Canal one early forenoon, when 
 the pressure of gondolas there was greater than usual owing to 
 some Church festival, his own was jostled between two others 
 and had to pause in its outward voyage while the rival rowers 
 exchanged the usual maledictions with uplifted oars and in- 
 finite variety of florid oaths. He heard his own name spoken 
 by one of two men who were sketching in a gondola tied to 
 one of the piles before a water-gate. They were making 
 drawings of all that is left of the Falier palace, and of its 
 little garden court and wooden wicket ; they were painters 
 well known in the artistic world of London, and they recog- 
 nized him as he passed. 
 
 u Where is his wife, do you know ? ” said one of them. 
 u She was a lovely creature. You remember Leighton’s por- 
 trait of her three years ago ? ” 
 
 “ She is always living alone in a little house on the se# 
 coast, I believe,” replied the other. 
 
 " Separated, then ? ” 
 
GUILD EE OY. 33 f 
 
 “Yes, virtually. Lord Aubrey consoles her, I believe. 
 Some people say that he always did.” 
 
 “ Aubrey ? The Minister ? ” 
 
 “The man who was Minister in the last Administration — 
 yes. There is only one. He is this man’s cousin.’’ 
 
 “ The relationship gave him opportunities, I suppose?” 
 
 The other artist laughed; and they both went on with the 
 drawing of the little acacia tree by the green gate of the 
 court of the palazzo. 
 
 Guilderoy felt a strange emotion as his gondola, extricated, 
 passed on its way towards the Lido. There was no truth, he 
 knew, in this foolish gossiping; and yet it wounded, offended 
 tod irritated him. 
 
 As he passed outward on his way towards the lagoon, lying 
 back on his black cushions, he could not shake off the rough, 
 unpleasant impression of the words which he had overheard. 
 Was that how they were talking of him in England ? Such 
 a possibility had never come before his thoughts before. 
 
 He had actually and morally set his wife as free as though 
 his death had released her from him. He did not believe 
 that Aubrey had as yet become her lover, but he suddenly 
 realized that it was a possibility which was more than possible. 
 It did not find him indifferent. It touched that sensitive 
 nerve in him which men call honor for want of a clearer name 
 for it, although it is in truth rather personal pride and 
 love of dignity than honor. 
 
 It suddenly waked the image of Gladys from that dim for- 
 gotten past into which it had retreated, and restored her to 
 a place, not in his heart indeed, but in his memories and in 
 his susceptibilities. 
 
 She had seemed to him scarcely more than a shade, as she 
 had last appeared before him in the ghastly and pallid hues 
 of the dream-like chambers of the Neapolitan palace ; an 
 avenging shape arisen to reproach him and to curse him. 
 But now she became more than this ; he realized that she 
 was a living woman of breathing life and motion, who had it 
 in her power, if she chose, to return him the harm that he 
 had done to her by a vengeance which would touch him to 
 the quick and humble him in the eyes of all men. 
 
 And why should she not do it ? If she did, could h© 
 honestly blame her ? 
 
 He knew he could not. 
 
 Why should he demand from a young and lonely woman a 
 
338 
 
 GUTZnttROY. 
 
 fore© of self-control of which, his own strength and manhccwl 
 had been incapable ? The consciousness oppressed and 
 haunted him with a vague dread. He remembered the warn- 
 ing Aubrey had given him ; Nil Helen peccat . Had his cousin 
 meant to give him in it a personal and not a general adveiy 
 tisement of impending possible ill? Had Aubrey with his 
 habitual candor, meant to say to him, “ What you do not car* 
 to guard I shall consider that I am at liberty to approach as 
 I may choose ? v He knew the loyalty and frankness of 
 his cousin’s character; it would, he knew, be very like him 
 that on the eve of a prohibited attachment he should frankly 
 endeavor to warn and place on his defence the man whose 
 honor would be involved. 
 
 It was a beautiful afternoon as his boatmen took him, a 
 few hours later, up the Brenta water, through the sparkling 
 sunshine. The leaves were yellow on the poplars, and the 
 trees looked made of gold. The wide green meadows were 
 bathed in light. The thatch roofs of the cottages looked like 
 the brown nests of big birds amongst the ever-flowering 
 foliage. Huge barges and flat-bottomed boats, with painted 
 sails, leaning motionless on the lazy air, passed him laden 
 with grapes and gourds, amber pears and rosy-cheeked apples. 
 The far hills were sweet and fair with all the colors of the 
 opal and the amethyst in them. But the beautyof the scene 
 was lost on him. 
 
 He was thinking ever of the Nil Helen peccat. 
 
 When he reached the water-stairs of the villa, with steps 
 of marble shelving down into the bulrushes and yellowing 
 water-lily leaves, the day had grown dark. It was the hour 
 of reunion in the great central hall, with columns and sculp- 
 tures of Sansovino and a domed ceiling where frescoes of 
 Tiepolo’s were lost in the immense height of the vault. Its 
 owner was accustomed to gather her guests about her there 
 before dinner in the autumn evenings, when the great olive 
 and oak logs burning on the enormous hearth under its 
 porphyry caryatides had a welcome warmth as the cold 
 vapors of night succeeded to the warm sunshine of the passed 
 day. 
 
 He felt out of mood for that gay circle ; for once, when he 
 hacil changed his clothes and joined it, the brilliant gathering, 
 wdiere the men had the wit of Carlo Gozzi and the women 
 the beauty of Teresa Venier, jarred upon him in its brilliancy 
 and mirth* 
 
GUILDEROT . 339 
 
 M You have taken a chill on the water,” some one said to 
 him. He answered absently, “ No — yes — perhaps.” 
 
 Much later in the evening Beatrice Soria herself noticed 
 his preoccupation. 
 
 “ You have heard something which displeased you of your 
 wife,” she mused, for her quick intuition let her read the 
 souls of men, even in their secrecies, like open hooks. 
 
 She had taken means to inform herself of the manner in 
 which Gladys had chosen to live, though her name had never 
 once been mentioned between them. 
 
 To Beatrice Soria she was a woman beaten, forsaken, in- 
 different, insignificant ; she pitied her and never spoke of 
 her. But, she mused, it was so like a man because he had 
 deserted her to think of her, even to think of her regretfully ! 
 Men were such children ; such weak, wayward, fearful chil- 
 dren — as she had said once on the banks of the Thames to 
 Aubrey — always wanting that which they have not, always 
 regretting their own actions when it is too late to efface 
 them, always putting the blame upon Fate which is due to 
 their own folly, caprice or instability ! 
 
 It is always “ The woman tempted me and I did eat,” in 
 the wilderness of the world as in the Garden of Eden 
 
 u You are ill at ease and out of spirits,” she said as she 
 passed him. “ Do not look so ; people will say that I tyran- 
 nize over you ; nothing is more absurd than that.” 
 
 u I cannot tutor my looks,” he answered, with impatience. 
 “ Perhaps I am not well. I do not know.” 
 
 They were unobserved for a moment : others were dancing. 
 He looked at her with an imploring gaze. 
 
 u You do love me ? ” he added. “ Tell me again.” 
 
 “ What a child you are ! ” she said with a smile. “ What 
 is the use of saying what is proved ? ” 
 u But is it proved ? ” 
 
 “ What can you possibly mean ? ” 
 
 “ I mean, in this gorgeous life of yours, flattered, amused, 
 ahd adored as you are, what room is there for any great or 
 exclusive feeling ? ” 
 
 “ It seems to me, my friend, that it is very late for that 
 doubt to come to you.” 
 
 “ Perhaps I am jealous. You have so many who love you, 
 and you are too indulgent with them.” 
 
 “ Do not become Othello because we are in the Yeneto. It 
 
340 
 
 GU1LDEROY. 
 
 will not suit you in any way. Your love has always jean 
 galanterie” 
 
 “Not always.” 
 
 “ Yes, always, I tliink, at heart.” 
 
 “That is cruelly unjust! What greater evidence — — ” 
 
 Coldness and anger came into her eyes. 
 
 “Do not remind me of your sacrifices! It is very bad 
 taste.” 
 
 “Sacrifices! Who spoke of sacrifices ? I simply meant, 
 what more could any man do than I have done ? ” 
 
 “ I do not know, my dear, that it was so very much that 
 you did. You were tired of your English wife; what we 
 are tired of it does not cost much to renounce, and some 
 people do say that it was rather your wife who renounced 
 you than you your wife.” 
 
 “That is utterly untrue.” 
 
 “ It may be,” said Beatrice Soria with a gesture of entire 
 indifference. “ I suppose you quarrelled. We will not 
 quarrel, my dear ; it is the sorriest and the meanest grave 
 that love can ever find.” 
 
 She passed her hand lightly over his hair as she spoke, 
 with something which was compassionate and mournful in 
 the lingering caress. 
 
 “Now go and join those dancers and look happy. I can- 
 not have my people think I make you otherwise than happy. 
 In truth, you will never be happy very long, for you are life’s 
 spoilt child.” 
 
 He kissed with passionate fervor the whiteness of her arm 
 as it was near his lips. 
 
 “ You have made me as happy as a god this whole long 
 year.” 
 
 “ Then it should seem a very short year to you ! ” she said 
 with her low sweet smile, and left him to join her guests. 
 
 His eyes followed her with worship. Alone for her had 
 he ever approached that strength and constancy of passion 
 which is the love of the poets. It was foreign to his tem- 
 perament, and ill akin to all his inconstant habits, but it 
 had been illumined in him for her. A vague and painful 
 sense perpetually haunted him that though he again pos- 
 sessed her he did not again possess her soul ; that though he 
 had renewed his position towards her, he was powerless to 
 regain over her that vital ascendancy which he had once 
 owned and had wantonly thrown away; and this doubt increased 
 
GUILDEROY. 341 
 
 the influence she had upon him by the perpetual conscious- 
 ness which he felt of uncertainty and inequalitj^. 
 
 When he had had power to nlake her absolute wretched- 
 ness, to be her arbiter of fate, to cause her tortures by a day’s 
 absence, by a month’s silence, by a careless homage taken 
 elsewhere, he had been indifferent to his power and often 
 also too indifferent to her pain. But now their positions 
 were reversed; he did not feel for an instant that he was 
 vitally necessary to her; he did not feel that she was life 
 and death to him and mistress in the uttermost sense of all 
 his fate. 
 
 CHAPTER till. 
 
 A few days later Guilderoy sent to one of his men of busi- 
 ness to come to Venice. There was an intricate question 
 pending in England, affecting some leases on one of his es- 
 tates, which afforded reason enough to summon his land-agent 
 to a personal conference. When the matter had been dis- 
 cussed in its financial and legal aspects, he inquired as care- 
 lessly as he could: 
 
 “ And what of Lady Guilderoy ? Is she well ? Is she al- 
 ways living in the house her father had at Christslea ? ” 
 
 His agent answered in the affirmative, feeling on his part 
 considerable embarrassment, for this separation, into which 
 the law did not enter, this unexplained and unregulated sever- 
 ance, was little understood by any of his people. 
 
 “ And does she keep herself wholly withdrawn from the 
 world ? ” he added. “ Does she see no one ? I regret it if it 
 is so ; she is too young for such solitude.” 
 
 “ She sees no one,” said the man of business, more and 
 more in doubt as to what answers he should make. “ At least 
 Lord Aubrey comes sometimes, as no doubt your lordship 
 knows.” 
 
 Guilderoy’s face flushed. “ Yes, I have asked him to do 
 so,” he said quickly. 
 
 It was a falsehood, but it was an instinctive one to save her 
 from suspicion. 
 
 He inquired no more. 
 
 The agent returned home with a doubt, which had not be- 
 fore visited him, that Lady Guilderoy was nof §o wholly in- 
 nocent as she looked. 
 
342 
 
 GTJILDEROY' 
 
 iC After all,” thought the man, “she keeps him out of Eng- 
 land ; so it is she who must be to blame, there can be no doubt 
 of that.” 
 
 He had told Aubrey himself that it was a pity that he had 
 not married her, and he had thought so honestly. They 
 would have been perfectly sympathetic one to another. Yet 
 the knowledge that these sympathies which were between 
 them had now full leisure and free scope to be developed and 
 indulged in any way they chose, in the absolute loneliness of 
 Christslea, was detestable to him. After all, he thought, he 
 could not refuse her the liberty which he had himself taken. 
 It would have seemed to him mean and unworthy to enjoy a 
 freedom for himself which he did not accord to her. He had 
 the large morality, or immorality, of a man of the world ; if 
 she could console herself in any way for the disorder and 
 desolation which he had brought into her life, he would be 
 a brute to grudge it to her. So he reasoned. 
 
 He had put her out of his own existence ; he could not com- 
 plain if she made a separate life for herself. And yet the 
 idea of his cousin alone with her in those little quiet rooms 
 of Christslea was disagreeable to him. She had said that she 
 would always respect the honor of his name ; but those were 
 only words, though they might have been words sincerely 
 meant when they were spoken. He knew that the heart of 
 any woman once seriously involved will force her to abandon 
 her strongest principles, as the warmth of summer forces the 
 willow and the sycamore to drop their spring-time catkins. 
 And he thought of her more than he had ever done before. 
 
 She had grown very vague to him. His memory had but 
 seldom reverted to her. He possessed the happy faculty of 
 being able to dismiss from his mind what he did not wish to 
 think of ; and the coldness, the harshness, and the scorn 
 with which she had spoken to him in their last interview 
 had hardened his heart utterly against her. But since the 
 words of his man of business, few and trite though they 
 were, the manner of her life came before him more painfully, 
 more positively. The little house at Christslea and the rec- 
 ollection of John Yernon came to his recollection with painful 
 clearness. He remembered the first day that he had gone 
 thither and been welcomed with such frank cordiality and 
 simplicity. He had repaid the welcome ill ; he knew it, 
 and, being by nature generous, the sense of his own lack of 
 generosity oppressed him with a sense of error y/hich all the 
 
QUILbEBOT. 343 
 
 moralists on earth would never have succeeded in bringing 
 home to him. 
 
 As he walked in the glad sunshine by the hanks of the 
 Brenta, he thought of Christslea as he knew that it must be 
 then ; bleak, cold, gray, cheerless, with dull, angry waters, 
 and high winds blowing through black, leafless trees, and 
 lonely moorlands shrouded in icy mists. Winter on that 
 coast had always seemed to him an unendurable and hateful 
 thing; and yet she was living through it by deliberate 
 * choice, uncompanioned, unfriended and alone. Nay — not 
 always alone. She had Aubrey. Aubrey was a man of 
 scrupulous honor he knew ; but he also knew that there are 
 hours in the lives of all those who love in which resistance 
 and strength sleep like the tired Samson in the noon siesta. 
 He knew, too, that his own conduct had given him no title 
 to complain of whatever advantage any other man might 
 take of his absence. 
 
 Aubrey was there, sometimes at least, in such familiar in- 
 tercourse as solitude in the country perforce creates. The 
 idea was not welcome to him. There had been occasionally 
 in him a vague impatience of the high esteem in which she 
 held his cousin, and the comparison which she had openly 
 drawn more than once between their manner of life. Au- 
 brey had been indifferent to women, but women had never 
 been indifferent to him ; his person, his intellect, and his 
 fame were all such as might well captivate a poetic and seri- 
 ous woman such as Gladys was, especially if united to a ro- 
 mantic and chivalrous devotion, aided by the auxiliaries of 
 solitude and misfortune. 
 
 Guilderoy, who was so profoundly versed in the contradic- 
 tions and intricacies of the feminine temperament, knew that 
 there is no moment at which it is so susceptible to attach- 
 ment as that in which it is bruised and bleeding from the 
 offences and the wounds of desertion. 
 
 Well, if it were so, he told himself, he had no right to 
 object to it, or to censure her ; he had no possible title to ask 
 her to lead a joyless, passionless existence in the full flower 
 of her youth and her beauty. He had taken his own freedom, 
 his own happiness as he conceived it to be ; he had no right 
 whatsoever to deny any possible compensation to her. And 
 yet his pride was hurt at the possibility, though his affec- 
 tions were wholly indifferent to it. 
 
 The subject occupied his thoughts when he was alone to 
 
S44 
 
 GtnLDEnor. 
 
 an extent which surprised himself, and rendered him at 
 times preoccupied when in society, or even when alone with 
 the woman he loved. 
 
 The letters of his sister had been so incessant and so 
 monotonous in their perpetual invective and reproach that 
 he had wholly ceased to reply to them, and of late had long 
 let them lie unopened. Her reproaches had always incensed 
 him ; and now that he felt they had much reason for their 
 outcry they were trebly irritating and distasteful to him. 
 
 But when his man of business had left him he remembered 
 them and broke the seals of two or three of the later ones, 
 and glanced rapidly over tfieir contents, passing over their 
 oft-repeated conjurations and condemnations in search of the 
 recurrence of his cousin’s name. He found it more than 
 once. In the last letter, which had a date of two months 
 past, the writer wrote : 
 
 “ The whole world is, I think, in accord in attributing 
 your wife’s retreat to the influence of your cousin. It may 
 be right, it may be wrong ; but it is certain that it thinks 
 that he, much more than you, has had power to determine 
 her selection. I give no opinion myself. Of course I always 
 saw that he was more than commonly attached to her; but 
 he is a man of honor, and he would not throw his name to 
 the four winds of earth as you throw yours for the sake of 
 any woman. Still, he is mortal, and the position he occupies 
 is at once very dangerous and very insidious in its appeal to 
 his sympathies. He is the only person whom she ever sees, 
 and the only friend who is admitted to advise her. His 
 sister has repeatedly argued with him to induce him to see 
 this as the world sees it ; but always in vain. He appears to 
 consider that he is the natural heir to the duties which you 
 have declined to fulfil — to what extent do you choose him to 
 be so ? Whatever may happen, you cannot complain that it 
 happens to you undeservedly.” 
 
 He read the lines with great wrath and intolerant impa* 
 tience ; then tore the letter up and with it those of similar 
 strain which had preceded ifc. She was always a mischief- 
 maker, seeing what did not exist, straining at gnats, weaving 
 ropes of moonshine, setting friend against friend, and sowing 
 the seeds of disunion under the plausible pretext, and perhaps 
 in the honest persuasion, that she was pleasing God and 
 serving man. He had always known her to be like that ever 
 since he had been of age enough to be at all observant of 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 345 
 
 what she did ; she was a good woman — yes — like thousands 
 and tens of thousands of good women, who have all the vir- 
 tues in their own persons but have not in their temperaments 
 one chord of sympathy, one fibre of indulgence, one touch of 
 that erring human nature which makes the world akin, one 
 single impulse of that sweet and tender kindness which 
 soothes and stills and comforts maladies which it cannot 
 cure. 
 
 A perfectly good woman — yes — and as utterly incapable of 
 doing any real good by her influence as though she were the 
 vilest of her sex. How many of them there are on earth, and 
 how many men have lived to curse them as they never cursed 
 the sinners ! He threw the fragments of her letters with 
 hatred into the waters of the canal beneath his window. He 
 knew the irrepressible pleasure in her own accuracy of pre- 
 diction, in the vindication of her own forebodings by the 
 present facts, which had been in her, all unknown to her, 
 while she had penned all the invectives and lamentations 
 which had preceded and followed her introduction of Aubrey’s 
 name. Some hatred he felt against himself, whose actions 
 had given up the fair name of Gladys to the malevolent 
 speculation of the world and to the gratified jealousies of his 
 sister. 
 
 He remembered her as he had seen her first in her father’s 
 garden in the late autumn afternoon, with the dog’s head lean- 
 ing against her knee and the red foliage of the early autumn 
 touching her hair. What a base return he had given for that 
 sincere and simple welcome ! She had spoiled his life inno- 
 cently, and he had spoiled hers criminally. Absolve himself 
 as he would, his conscience perpetually returned to convict 
 him of his offence. He forgot the intervening years, and 
 only thought of her as John Vernon’s daughter; the fair and 
 innocent child of the days before her marriage. His feelings 
 were capricious and ephemeral, but they rarely lacked gener- 
 osity ; and he felt that he to her had been ungenerous, that 
 he had not allowed enough for her youth and her inexperi- 
 ence, that he had brought against her ignorance all the un- 
 equal forces of worldly knowledge and trained intelligence, 
 and that he had received her life into his hand in the mere 
 unformed clay of girlhood only to throw it in pieces among 
 the potsherds of calumny when it had become the full am- 
 phora of womanhood. Again and again this image of her 
 recurred to him with increasing reproach. He felt an un- 
 
846 
 
 GTJILDEUOT. 
 
 easy and restless wish to return to his own country for a 
 moment, and to see for himself what truth there was in all 
 these stories of Aubrey’s visits to her. He did not doubt the 
 facts ; but he doubted, or, rather, he refused to believe, the 
 construction put on them by others. Aubrey had always 
 been her friend, he certainly would not have ceased to be so ; 
 but from friendship to love there were distances which he did 
 not credit that his cousin would ever pass. The honor which 
 fenced in the wives of other men had never seemed to Guilde- 
 roy a very high or impassable fence ; but the honor which 
 surrounded his own seemed to him sacred and high as heaven. 
 Yet he thought often, and with ever-increasing irritation, of 
 that stormy and sorrowful isolation of Christslea in the winter 
 solstice which was again so near. 
 
 His anger deepened against her with his remorse. She 
 had rejected all his offers, she had withdrawn herself from 
 his home, she had brought the condemnation and observa- 
 tion of the world upon him by the extravagance and strange- 
 ness of her actions. So he thought and so he reasoned to 
 himself; but all his anger could not extinguish his conscious- 
 ness of having drawn her into a position which scarcely any 
 woman of her years could possibly issue from unharmed and 
 unslandered. 
 
 He had thought her cold, irresponsive, unsympathetic ; 
 but he had been always sensible of the fineness and purity 
 of the many qualities of her character, and he knew that 
 they were those to which he could alone now look for self- 
 control and self-sacrifice strong enough to bear her un- 
 harmed through such an ordeal of isolation and abandon- 
 ment. 
 
 “If I could speak to her,” he thought, more than once; 
 but this was forbidden him by ten thousand reasons. His 
 word had been passed to the woman whom he loved ; his 
 desires had been granted him on a condition which was the 
 more imperious because based solely on his honor. He knew 
 that if he again broke his word to her, even though in the 
 very smallest and slightest thing, he would fall lower than 
 the lowest in her sight, and would be degraded beyond words 
 in his own forever. He had received the gifts of her life on 
 certain terms which were a millionfold more binding on hin? 
 because merely left to his own good faith. His knowledge 
 of Beatrice Soria told him that the meanest galley-slave at 
 work on the quays of Naples would seem to her infinitely 
 
GVILDEROT. 34? 
 
 manlier and worthier than he if in the merest trifle he trans- 
 gressed the stipulation she had made. 
 
 She had left him wholly free to accept or refuse her con- 
 dition, but she had understood, and had the right to under- 
 stand, that the condition, if accepted, was inviolate. He 
 did not reproach her for it ; she could have asked no less, 
 looking both to the past and to the future. Nor could he 
 have said that he regretted it ; for he was still happy, al- 
 though one fear and one remorse assailed him — the fear that 
 though he had again recovered his position towards her, he 
 had never recovered his influence over her ; and the remorse 
 that he had been disloyal to the promises he had given to 
 John Vernon. 
 
 In all his faults and follies he had been a man of delicate 
 honor, as the world construes the conventional honor it de- 
 mands of a gentleman ; lie had never given the world the 
 title to deride or to disdain him ; he had always been care- 
 ful to keep his name out of the mud of public discussion and 
 conjecture ; and he was morbidly sensitive to the fact that 
 for the first time in the history of his race, a shadow, if not 
 a stain, had been cast upon his name — one which might 
 deepen and darken as the years passed away, and most prob- 
 ably would do so, whilst he would be powerless to efface it 
 and would have but himself, to thank for it. In the conflict 
 of feelings which had agitated him in his last interview with 
 his wife, he had not reflected on the innumerable conse- 
 quences inevitable on his action. He had only seen, on the 
 one side, a woman whom he passionately regretted and loved, 
 and on the other a woman who chilled, fretted, offended, 
 and alienated him. He had chosen between them on a 
 natural impulse, with scarce a moment’s hesitation ; and he 
 had cast hardly a thought to the many difficulties and pen- 
 alties which would follow on his choice. 
 
 All his life long things had gone well with him. The 
 most serious sorrow of it had been his repentance for his 
 rupture with Beatrice Soria, and she had been entirely right 
 when she had told him that all the phases of his love had 
 been rather gallantry than passion. Deep and painful emo- 
 tions were novel to him and hateful. But they now forced 
 their way into his thoughts, and would not be gainsaid. 
 
 He knew well the estimates of men of the world ; their 
 large tolerance of many, and their intolerance of some few 
 things. He knew that amongst these few must be his own 
 
348 
 
 GTTILDEROY, 
 
 action in driving so young and blameless a woman as hi* 
 wife into her present position. He knew that his contem- 
 poraries, however elastic in judgment, must be now his severest 
 critics, not for what he had done as for how he had done it. 
 He had put himself outside the pale of those easy indulgences 
 which the world willingly accords so long as no violence is 
 offered to its codes of convention. 
 
 He was proud, and his pride w^as hurt at the mere thought 
 of how all his friends and acquaintances were speaking of 
 him whenever they remembered him at all ; and they would 
 so remember because of the prominence of Aubrey’s name. 
 With little right or justice in his anger, he grew each day 
 more deeply angered with his cousin. He persuaded himself 
 that it must have been Aubrey’s influence which had decided 
 so young a woman as Gladys to lead so strange and wretched 
 a life. 
 
 “ I left her everything she could want or wish,” he thought 
 in his self-justification. “ She was free to live in the world at 
 her pleasure ; I had taken care that no blame should rest on 
 her, and I had given her the half of all I possessed ; she 
 might have been happy, quite happy, in her own way if she 
 had chosen ; it was not I who exiled her to a cottage by a 
 lonely weather-beaten shore, and bade her exist on the pit- 
 tance that came to her from her father.” 
 
 Why could she not have continued to enjoy all those 
 material consolations and compensations with which he had 
 so liberally surrounded her ? If she had done that, his con- 
 science would have been at rest, and the world would have 
 seen in their separation nothing but a mutual and excusable 
 agreement to lead their lives apart. 
 
 It must have been Aubrey, he reasoned, who had sustained 
 her in her headstrong and extravagant resolution ; it was 
 just such a choice as would commend itself to him, austere, 
 romantic, and unworldly. 
 
 After a few weeks of irresolution and of many agitating 
 and conflicting impulses, he said abruptly and with much 
 embarrassment to the Duchess Soria. 
 
 u It is absolutely necessary that I should go to England. 
 Would you allow and not misconstrue it ? ” 
 
 She looked at him some moments before she replied : 
 u My dear, I am not your keeper. And I suppose you 
 have honor ? ” 
 
GUILDEROY. 343 
 
 He felt himself color under the profound gaze of her deep 
 eyes. He kissed her hand with emotion. 
 
 “ I thank you ,” he said simply ; he knew that he had. once 
 given her every cause to mistrust him forever. Her con- 
 tidence in him seemed very noble, and appealed to him as no 
 expressions of doubt or of fear could have done. 
 
 “ I am utterly unworthy of her ! ” he thought bitterly. 
 How often his suspicions had wronged her in days that were 
 gone by ; how little fitted he had been to be the supreme 
 passion of such a woman’s life. 
 
 Several days passed by ; she asked him neither why he 
 lingered nor when he would go. That reserve in one to whom 
 he had given every title to doubt his word in their past re- 
 lations seemed to him very magnanimous. 
 
 He loved her, he thought, more than he had ever loved her, 
 out all the strength of his admiration could not drive out 
 from him the restless, haunting remembrance of what might 
 be then being said and being done in England. 
 
 It was now well nigh mid-winter ; there, dreary, misty, 
 cold, with drifting snows; here gay, luminous, brilliant, with 
 gorgeous sunsets and buoyant wind-tossed seas. 
 
 “ I shall be away but a very little while,” he said to hei 
 with hesitation. 
 
 u Go as you will,” she answered him. He felt that these 
 reins let fall thus upon his neck did in truth and honor hold 
 him more closely than all chains. 
 
 “ Ah ! if only you had always been as kind and as gener- 
 ous,” he murmured, thinking of those other days, when her 
 impetuous demands and her violent exactions had chafed his 
 soul into revolt. 
 
 She smiled with a little sadness. 
 
 “ Alas, alas ! ” she thought, “ men should not quarrel as 
 they do with our jealousies and importunities ; when we 
 cease to feel them life has taken the tenderest fibre out of 
 our hearts. 1 am never jealous of him now ; but sometimes 
 I wish to Heaven that it were only possible that I could be ! 
 It is those tempests of folly which give birth to the sweetest 
 of our joys.” 
 
 She would have given half that she possessed could she 
 only once more have felt all those intense and exquisite pains 
 which are the procreation of the richest joys, could only his 
 absence have tortured her, his presence intoxicated her as it 
 bad once done. 
 
350 
 
 GUTLDEnor. 
 
 Was it mere caprice or wantonness of fate that now, when 
 he was so utterly her own in all ways, she had so little glad* 
 ness in her empire ? 
 
 Was it indifference, or pride, or really magnanimity which 
 made her leave him unquestioned to go whither he would? 
 
 “ Nay,” she thought, and rightly. “ He could not now he 
 faithless to his promise if he would. The handless and foot- 
 less god that smote Glaucus would smite him for me. He 
 would be the lowest of the low.” 
 
 And she let him go, and asked him nothing. 
 
 “ Alas!” she thought again. “It is when men most curse 
 us that they should bless us most. All that immense love 
 which makes them into the deities of our lives only wearies 
 them, satiates them, and makes them cold and fretful ; and 
 yet, if only they knew how much better we are when we can 
 still feel it ! — what poor, innocent, fond fools, though so bur- 
 densome to them ! And when it is gone, it is gone forever, 
 and something which was best in us is gone too, and we live 
 for our senses, or for our triumphs, or for our intelligences, 
 but we live for a great love no more ! But we have learned 
 wisdom, and wit comes to us where adoration has died, and 
 our lovers find us calmer, and they deem their loss their gain 
 — fools ! fools ! both we and they ! ” 
 
 CHAPTER LOT. 
 
 He went without halt across Europe to his own country f : 
 the weather was cold and dark, the seas were stormy, the 
 winds piercingly cold : after the radiance and the softness 
 of the land he had left, it seemed to him like entering some 
 dreary Gehenna of tormented and icy air. He travelled 
 straightway to Ladysrood, and went thither unannounced. 
 Pie had old and faithful servants who kept all others of the 
 household in obedience and subjection, but the great house 
 had a desolate air in its utter abandonment. There was little 
 light, little warmth ; all the furniture of the rooms was 
 shrouded in its linen coverings, and only in the central hail 
 was there a large fire bjurning. His step sounded hollow on 
 floors from which their zealous thrift had removed the car* 
 pets, and the hastily-lit lamps struggled feebly against the 
 general gloom. 
 
GUILDEEOY. 
 
 351 
 
 u I have always told you to keep tlie house as perfectly 
 ready as though you expected me at any moment/’ he said 
 with anger. 
 
 The people were afraid to reply that after so many months 
 of absence Lis arrival had seemed to them the most unlikely 
 of all possible chances. 
 
 The silence, the coldness, and the loneliness of his home 
 chilled him to the bone. It seemed an emblem of tha* soli- 
 tude to which Gladys was condemned in her youth. The 
 night was very cold, and one of the wild winter storms of the 
 south-west country raged without until morning. He slept 
 very little, and rose from his bed unrefreshed. He regretted 
 that he had come there. He sighed for the evergreen orange 
 and magnolia groves, the purpling violets, the unfrozen 
 fountains, the dancing sun-rays of the glad gardens of the 
 Soria Palace. Here was the winter of the earth and the 
 winter of the soul. He cursed the morbid restlessness, the 
 uneasy discontent, which had drawn him from his paradise. 
 
 How that he was here, what more could he know than he 
 knew? He could not seek his wife; the woman whom he 
 loved had trusted him ; he had too much good faith and 
 sentiment of honor left in him not to be true to an unwritten 
 bond. 
 
 The storm had subsided with dawn, but the day was dull 
 and heavy, the skies were obscured, and the air was charged 
 with vapor. The sense of immense weariness and depres- 
 sion, which had in other years always come upon him in Eng- 
 land in winter, returned upon him a thousand-fold now. 
 He passed the forenoon in his library, in intercourse with his 
 men of business and stewards, in the examination of those 
 questions of leasehold and freehold, of forest rights and moor 
 rights, of rents and investments, which had been the ostensi- 
 ble reason of his momentary return home. It was well for 
 him that those who served him had truly his interests at 
 heart, for he heeded very little the explanations which they 
 gave him, and signed many papers without knowing very 
 clearly why he did so. Ho was thinking, as he apparently 
 attended to the prolix arguments of his visitants, of the 
 day when, in tin chamber, he had .written the letter which 
 had broken off his relations with Beatrice Soria. He was 
 overwhelmed with the greatness of her pardon when he 
 thought of that unutterable insult to the proudest of all liv- 
 ing women. Then his memories wandered away from her to 
 
352 
 
 GUILDER OY. 
 
 that other day when he had held the Horae open for a young 
 girl to read, and watched her first blush rise like sunrise over 
 her fair face. It was only five years before, and in those five 
 years what suffering he had caused to both these women ; 
 and yet how well one at the least still loved him, if the other 
 — What of the other? — even if she had been even too passion- 
 less to care for him, yet how much she had lost through him ! 
 
 The tedious gray day wore away slowly, most of its hours 
 occupied with prosaic details and dull discussions of ways 
 and means, of law and equity, of forestry and finance, and 
 all the various matters of importance which grow out of the 
 management of great estates and of a great fortune. It was 
 dusk when his people left him ; he remained in the library 
 beside the hearth, where there was not even a dog to wel- 
 come him. 
 
 “ Where is Kenneth ? ” he asked of a servant who came in 
 at that moment to light the chandeliers. Kenneth was a 
 collie which had been a chief favorite with both himself and 
 Gladys. 
 
 The man hesitated with some embarrassment as to how he 
 should reply. 
 
 u Where are Kenneth and the other house dogs ? ” repeated 
 his master impatiently. The servant answered timidly that 
 her ladyship had sent for them to Christslea a year ago. 
 
 6C Ah, of course ; they were hers,” Guilderoy replied quick- 
 ly, regretful of his question. 
 
 She had been quite within her right to take the dogs, nor 
 did he grudge her their innocent companionship ; but the 
 kind brown eyes of Kenneth and his comrades, if they had 
 been there to look at him then, would have seemed to break 
 the spell of this horrible loneliness, to ease the burden of 
 these painful memories which weighed on him. 
 
 The evening was yet more gloomy than the day. He 
 paced to and fro the suite of the Queen Anne apartments 
 wearily and drearily. They were all restored to their fullest 
 comfort, and had all that light and warmth and the fragrance 
 of hot-house flowers could bring to them, but to him they 
 were immeasurably, unconscionably melancholy. 
 
 All his past life came before him in those solitary hours. 
 He recalled all his childish ideals, his boy’s admiration of 
 great men, his vague dreams as a youth of some greatness 
 which he would achieve, some added lustre which he would 
 bring to his name and. race. Where had all these gone f 
 
GTTILDEBOY. 
 
 SS3 
 
 In what had all these ended ? In the lassitude and languor 
 of satiety, in the nerveless indifference of a polished pessi- 
 mist, in the evaporated fumes of innumerable pleasures 
 quickly tasted and exhausted. 
 
 " At least I have enjoyed,” he, thought. " Could Aubrey 
 gay as much ? ” 
 
 But though his philosophy consoled, his conscience did not 
 satisfy him. It was not for mere self-indulgence alone that 
 his fathers had lived ; it was not for mere self-abandonment 
 that his country had been made what it once had been. 
 
 Great men had, indeed, in all ages been lovers of pleasure, 
 but pleasure had been their pastime, not their sole pursuit. 
 He walked to and fro the length of the now warm and illu- 
 minated rooms, and his surveys of his past brought him more 
 dissatisfaction than contentment. To men he knew that he 
 seemed but an idler ; to women, perhaps, he seemed a traitor. 
 
 The vision of his wife, alone in that lonely little house, 
 amongst the dense sea-fogs and the bare black orchards, 
 haunted him with pain; and the memory of the woman 
 whom he loved, as he had left her in the splendor of her 
 beauty, and of the golden evening sunlight pouring through 
 her painted chamber, haunted him with that irresistible and 
 unresisted power which she always possessed over him. In 
 the depression of his solitary musings he seemed in his own 
 sight unworthy of either of them, and wholly undeserving of 
 their constancy or their regret. 
 
 With the morning hours of the following day he rode to- 
 wards Christslea. Before he slept he sent for the old house- 
 keeper of Ladysrood. She had been with his mother on her 
 death-bed, and had nursed and played with him as a child. 
 He could ask of her what he could not bring himself to ask 
 of any of the men. 
 
 " Tell me, Margaret/’ he said to her as soon as she stood 
 before him in the warm red drawing-room where John Ver- 
 non had bade his daughter live for hopor if she could not live 
 for happiness — ■"tell me, do you ever see my wife ?" 
 
 The old woman was silent for a while ; the tears started to 
 her eyes. 
 
 " Alas, my dear lord, that ever you should have to ask me 
 that ! 99 she murmured. 
 
 "Never mind why I ask you; answer me. Do you oftea 
 see her or ever see her ? 99 
 
354 
 
 GTJILBEROY. 
 
 “ I have s«en her very rarely, my lord, and never ro speak 
 to ; it was in the open air, and my lady shunned me.” 
 
 “ How does she look ? 55 
 
 “ She looks older, hut she looks well, my lord. The air is 
 very fine and strong at Christslea . 55 
 
 Guilderov felt a sense of mortification, for which he hated 
 himself. 
 
 “ She looks well, do you say ? 55 
 
 “Not ill, my lord, but much older. 5 / 
 
 “ You must hear of her often from the servants or the vih * 
 lagers ? 55 
 
 “ There is little to hear, my lord . 55 
 
 “ You mean that she leads such a retired, such a secluded 
 life ? 55 
 
 “ That is so, my lord. It is the same life as her father led ; 
 it suited him, no doubt, but it cannot suit a childless woman 
 of her years . 55 
 
 Guilderoy sighed impatiently. 
 
 “ It was her own choice . 55 
 
 The housekeeper was silent ; she respected him too much 
 to contradict him, and she respected truth too well to agree 
 with him. 
 
 “ She has all the dogs, they say ? 55 he asked. 
 
 “Yes, my lord; she was ever very fond of the tykes . 55 
 
 “ And how does she spend her time ? 55 
 
 “Reading, they say, my lord, when she is indoors; and 
 always out when the weather holds, and ofttimes'even when 
 it is very bad . 55 
 
 “ And whom does she see ? 55 
 
 “ No one, I believe, my lord . 55 
 
 “ Not my sister ? 55 
 
 “ Her ladyship has never been nigh her . 55 
 
 He hesitated a moment, then said : 
 
 “ But she receives visits from my cousin Aubrey, I am 
 sure ? 55 
 
 “Well, my lord, he is the only one of his family who has 
 stood by her . 55 
 
 “ I am grateful to him . 55 
 
 Nevertheless his face flushed with an emotion which was 
 not one of pleasure. 
 
 “ Is he often there ? 55 
 
 ** Often, my lord, one may say, for one who is ever toiling 
 
QtTILDEROr. 355 
 
 for the country as he is, and has so little time left to him- 
 self.” 
 
 “ It is very good of him. You may go, Margaret. Good- 
 night.” 
 
 The old woman curtsied, and withdrew ; but as she drew near 
 the door she took courage and came a few steps back towards 
 him. “My dear lord, if I may make so bold, my lady is very 
 young to be left in that lonely life. Maybe she chose it, but 
 some say she was drove to it. She may have her faults, but 
 she has more virtues, and — and — she lost her two children, 
 my lord. Will you not go and see her now you are here, if 
 only for sake of that one memory, my lord ? ” 
 
 Guilderoy’s eyes grew dim. 
 
 “No, no, I cannot do that,” he said hastily and sternly. 
 “But you are a good woman to urge it, Margaret. You do 
 not offend me. Good-night.” 
 
 “ Good-night to you, my lord.” 
 
 The door closed on her, and he was alone with his own 
 thoughts, which were painful companions. 
 
 He had an intense wish to see Gladys a wish stronger than 
 his anger against her. But all that remained to him of loyalty 
 to a woman who had trusted him to be faithful to her forbade 
 him such double duplicity. The words “ Go, you have honor,” 
 were ever in his remembrance. Any interview with his wife, 
 any effort even to seek one, any single word which could even 
 distantly foreshadow the faintest reconc-iliation with her, 
 were forbidden to him ; he had plainly and forever renounced 
 any possibility of such when he had accepted the conditions 
 on which the woman he loved had again become his. 
 
 To have accepted them only to break them, to have had the 
 fulness of her faith only to cheat and evade it, as a man can 
 ever do if he wills, would have seemed to him something so 
 foul that he would have not borne his life under the sense of 
 degradation which such an act of betrayal would have left on 
 him. His honor might “rooted in dishonor stand,” but it was 
 at least loyal to the one who had trusted it. Yet a great desire 
 was upon him to see his wife ; the remembrance of her was 
 upon him as he had known her in the early days of Christslea, 
 and that remembrance softened his heart towards her and 
 outweighed the heavy and bitter memories of their last inter- 
 view in Naples. The night passed with him again sleeplessly 
 and painfully. 
 
 The winds were high and swept round the stately and 
 
356 
 
 GUILVEUOY. 
 
 solid house with gusts of fury ; the stillness between them 
 was filled with the sound of rushing rains. The day broke, 
 with no rain falling, but with low and heavy clouds. At 
 noon he rode out in its gloom, and through his woods 
 towards the moors; rode fast against the watery cold air, 
 over the soaken turf, and thinking ever as he went of the 
 time he had ridden thus to seek John Yernon, on a mere idle 
 caprice which waywardness and imagination had raised into 
 a fancied passion for one fleeting hour. The sky was low, 
 the sea was still, the earth was silent as he went ; the dull 
 atmosphere and the melancholy solitude oppressed him as 
 with some sensation of physical ill. Through the mist which 
 hung everywhere over the water and the land, the few distant 
 sails on the sea, the few forms passing on the moors of men 
 or cattle, looked unsubstantial and unreal. To him, whose 
 life was always passed in movement or in pleasure, in the 
 gratification either of the senses or of the intelligence, the 
 winter stillness and loneliness of the country and the shore 
 had a feeling of death in them. 
 
 His horse, tired with the wet and heavy ground, went 
 slowly, and he did not urge it to more speed ; he rode on, 
 lost in his own thoughts, taking, almost without knowing it, 
 the road to the cottage at Christslea. He had the fullest re- 
 solve not to see his wife, nor to allow himself to be seen by 
 her ; yet with an unconscious and irresistible impulsion he 
 took his way towards the place where she dwelt, until from 
 the level turf of the cliffs above the house he looked down on 
 its thatched roof, its peaked gables, its thick environment of 
 tangled branches. There was not a sound coming from it; a 
 little smoke hung on the vaporous air ; a few pigeons flew 
 low under its eaves ; a holly-tree stood glowing with scarlet 
 berries tall and straight against the sky. To him, come from 
 the vast palaces and marble terraces and sun-bathed gardens 
 of the south, it looked almost like a hovel, with its humble 
 lowliness and modest coloring so like the brown earth and 
 the gray boughs which surrounded it. It hurt his pride to 
 think that his wife should live there in penury and obscurity. 
 She bore his name, she was the mistress of his houses, she 
 had a right to his riches and his possessions of all kinds, and 
 she dwelt here in less comfort and less stateliness than the 
 wife of his steward enjoyed. 
 
 And all his world knew it, and any one of his friends, who 
 
GU1LDKH0Y 357 
 
 chose could come a^d see the poorness and lowliness of 
 her lot. 
 
 He dismounted and walked to the edge of the cliff and let 
 his horse stray as it would, blown and heated, cropping the 
 short wet turf to its own hurt. 
 
 A vague desire to <enter the house and ask for ner and see 
 her face to face was in him. But he would have been per- 
 jured and degraded had he yielded to it. Far away in the 
 golden light of the Neapolitan day was a woman who had said 
 to him — “ You have honor ! ” 
 
 He remembered her, and to her at least was faithful. 
 
 On the table-land of the cliff near at hand was the little 
 barn-like rustic church of this small sea-parish, and around 
 it were those obscure graves of which John Vernon’s was 
 one, conspicuous amongst the low-lying headstones by the 
 fair column of white marble she and he had raised there to 
 his memory, with one line graven on it in the language he 
 best loved : 
 
 Mori est felicis antequam mortem invocat. 
 
 He looked at the white pillar looming faintly through the 
 sea-fog, and had he been a woman he could have wept. 
 
 “ I was false to him, I was false to him ! ” he thought ; 
 and his heart ached with the futile- pang of a regret which 
 cannot reach or atone to the dead. 
 
 He had too often pardoned to himself his own transgres- 
 sions, too often, too carelessly excused to himself errors and 
 follies whieh he thought lightly of because they were welcome 
 and easy ; but the sense of his own disloyalty he could not 
 palliate or smooth away with sophistry ; he deemed it a dis- 
 honor and he hated it. For the first time in all his years he 
 was guilty in his own sight. He had promised what he had 
 not fulfilled ; he had been untrue to a man who could no more 
 call his actions to account. 
 
 As he stood looking down on the russet roof and the tan- 
 gled wood in the shadowy misty winter’s morning, he saw 
 the figure of a woman leave the porch and pass under the 
 branches outward towards the shore. He could not see her 
 face from his position so far above her, but he could see by 
 her figure, by her bearing, by her step, that the housekeeper 
 had said truly — she was in perfect health and strength. 
 
 S 7*e walked quickly and firmly, the dogs leaping on her 
 and inning on before her. She wore the long black cloak of 
 
GUILDEBOY. 
 
 sm 
 
 sables in which he had seen her last in Naples. For some 
 minutes he lost her from view under the trees ; then she 
 appeared again on the strip of sandy shore, where the waves 
 were rolling up with low angry murmur as though exhausted 
 by the fury of the past night. Then she turned from the sea, 
 and mounted the cliff path leading to the churchyard. He 
 perceived that she had a basket of evergreens and snowdrops 
 in her hand ; she was coming no doubt on her daily errand 
 of visiting her father’s grave. The mist was lighter now, and, 
 though some way off her, he saw her plainly, as she mounted 
 the steep path cut in the granite of the cliff, so familiar to her 
 from her childhood. 
 
 “ What a life ! What a life ! he thought. “ What a 
 wretched life if she have no consolations ! ” 
 
 A violent impulse moved him to demand from her if there 
 were any; if the gossip of the world was true which traced to 
 Aubrey’s influence her choice of this seclusion; he wished to 
 tell her that he would be the last to blame her if it were so, 
 and that here, within sight of her father’s grave, he would 
 ask her pardon and gave her his ; so at least there might be 
 peace between them. 
 
 And yet, as he watched her from the distance, crossing the 
 grass of the cliffs with that elastic step which he had so often 
 admired, and which all women had envied her, a more sombre, 
 and more ignoble feeling moved him — a restless jealousy of 
 past possession, a sense that the dignity of his name was in 
 her hands and that she could play with it as she chose, and 
 that he had lost the right to blame her, whatever she might 
 select to do with it. 
 
 He watched her pass across the table- land towards the 
 graveyard ; she did not look towards him ; she went straight 
 on to the wicket of the burial-place, opened it, and passed 
 within ; the growth of rose-thorn and privet and holly within 
 its low walls of rubble hid her entirely from him. 
 
 He hesitated a moment; a great, almost an ungovernable 
 wish arose in him to go there and to say to her by her father’s 
 grave all the truths which had been so imperfectly uttered in 
 the haste and bitterness of their last interview. 
 
 But a thousand miles away a woman trusted him ! 
 
 To approach his wife, were it even only to say to her an 
 eternal farewell, would be to be a traitor to his pledged word. 
 
 He had often been the slave of his passions, the fool of hi* 
 fancy, but he had always bien the servant of his honor, 
 
GTJILDEROY. 
 
 359 
 
 One ill is not mended by another he knew ; one defalca- 
 tion is not filled np by another ; because he had been untrue 
 to the dead man lying there was no reason or excuse that he 
 should be untrue to the living woman who loved him. 
 
 He had voluntarily renounced his right to seek or to give 
 explanations from and to his wife. It was one of those priv- 
 ileges of intimacy which he had of his own accord consented 
 to abjure forever. 
 
 He looked once more at the dusky foliage of the church- 
 yard with the slender white column rising into the gray air, 
 and with a sigh he drew his horse’s bridle towards him, and 
 led the beast down the precipitous and broken path which 
 turned away from Christslea. 
 
 CHAPTER LVI. 
 
 With evening he had left his own house, having learned 
 nothing more than he had known before, but carrying with 
 him in his soul the thorns of a restless disquietude, and of an 
 impotent regret. 
 
 He reached London in the morning and went straight to 
 Balfrons House. Parliament had met and Aubrey was in 
 town. There was a heavy rain falling, and the air was full 
 of ice and sleet. The streets at that early hour were de- 
 serted. The city seemed a vast, colorless, smoking city of 
 the dead. 
 
 Aubrey had risen with the day, after an hour or two’s rest 
 after a prolonged debate. He was in his study, walking up 
 and down the room and dictating to his secretaries before he 
 broke his fast. The yellow and sickly air poured through 
 the chamber, dark with bookshelves and bronzes and tables 
 laden and littered with documents of all kinds. 
 
 When he saw his cousin enter he paused in the dictatior 
 of his letters and stood still, without any word of gesture or 
 greeting. 
 
 “ Can I see you alone for a moment ? ” asked Guilderoy as 
 he entered. 
 
 Aubrey motioned to the young men to leave them ; they 
 passed into the large library beyond and closed the door. 
 
 Aubrey still spoke no word. He stood erect, the habitual 
 stoop in his great height changed to a stateliness that was 
 
860 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 almost stiffness. He never held out his hand or said any 
 syllable of greeting or of inquiry, his features were cold and 
 stern. 
 
 Guilderoy heeded neither his attitude nor his expression. 
 
 Twelve months and more had passed by since they had 
 met at Venice and had parted with unuttered but mutual 
 hostility and offence. The knowledge which he had of 
 Aubrey’s certain scorn and condemnation of him gave to him 
 an hauteur and an impervious impatience which seemed tq 
 his cousin mere arrogance, and unbecoming, insolent, and 
 out of place. 
 
 Guilderoy was very pale, and his eyes looked sleepless, but 
 he had the manner and the courage of a man who arraign* 
 another for wrong done to him, and is very far from all com 
 fession of error in himself. 
 
 “I am about to put to you a question which no man am 
 swers,” he said rapidly, and without preface or explanation 
 of his appearance there. “ At least, no man answers in th* 
 affirmative. But whether affirmative or denial be in youi 
 case the truth, I expect the truth from you, having regard 
 to the blood relationship between us and the position in which 
 we have always stood to one another. 
 
 Aubrey looked him full in the eyes. 
 
 “ What is your question ? ” he asked in his coldest voice | 
 a passing expression of ineffable disdain came over his feat* 
 ures as he spoke. 
 
 " It is a very simple one,” said Guilderoy. “ Are you, a* 
 the world says, my wife’s lover ? ” 
 
 Aubrey’s eyes met his fully. 
 
 “ I certainly need not answer,” he replied with a grav$ 
 rebuke and scorn in his voice and in his gaze. “ You hav* 
 lost all title to put such a question.” 
 
 “ I have not lost the right, since she bears my name.” 
 
 u You have lost it morally, not legally. You could not be 
 go ungenerous as to refuse a liberty which you take.” 
 
 Guilderoy’s face flushed hotly. 
 
 “ If you prevaricate, I shall consider prevarication admist 
 sion.” 
 
 Aubrey smiled slightly ; a very cold contemptuous smile. 
 
 “ It is not my habit to prevaricate. I will answer youv 
 question, though I shall refuse to admit your title to put k 
 to me. I am not your wife’s lover, and if you had the slight 
 
( WILDEHOY . ,‘!Gi 
 
 / 
 
 stfi knowledge of your wife’s character you would not come 
 to me on such an errand.” 
 
 Guilderoy was silent ; he did not doubt the truth of the 
 speaker ; the whole country would have taken Aubrey’s word 
 unwitnessed against that of all other men $ but he was dis- 
 satisfied. 
 
 “ If you deny that you are her lover/’ he said after long 
 silence, “ you cannot deny that you have for her a feeling 
 A r hich is far beyond friendship, that you visit her in her soli- 
 tude, that your assiduous attentions to her are matter of 
 notoriety.” 
 
 “ Am I bound to account to you for feelings unuttered to 
 any human ear ? Am I bound to respect for you ties which 
 you have yourself strained to rupture ? By what title do 
 you come here ? You have forsaken your wife utterly. You 
 have told me that she was wearisome, unsympathetic, indif- 
 ferent to you. What is it to you what I feel for her, or what 
 I do not feel ? I deny your right to attempt to penetrate 
 my feelings, or to arraign my acts.” 
 
 He spoke with a force which was almost violence, and with 
 a scorn which penetrated the very innermost fibres of his 
 hearer’s nerves. 
 
 “ In every syllable of your answer you confess what you 
 feel ! ” he said with equal violence. u I may have no title to 
 command my wife's affections ; I never possessed them ; but 
 she is the holder of my name, and my name is dear to me, 
 and no man shall play with it without being compelled to 
 atone to me.” 
 
 Aubrey looked at him with unspeakable disdain. 
 
 “ What would you do ? What could you do ? A man 
 who has abandoned his wife cannot challenge either her en- 
 emies or her lovers ; he is nothing in her life. If I were to 
 her what you suppose, what could you say to me in common 
 decency or justice ? I should but have filled up the place 
 you left vacant. I should but have soothed the wounds 
 which you caused. You would have no shadow of title to 
 arraign me for it. Even the world itself would prefer my 
 errors to yours ; would admit that you had but the payment 
 you merited.” 
 
 (t I care neither what the world would say nor what you 
 would think,” said Guilderoy, now white with passion. “ I 
 care for the honor of my name, and I should not pause either 
 for your relationship to me or for the admirable lucidity of 
 
362 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 your reasonings if I believed that you had- done me any 
 wrong which would make me absurd and degraded before 
 other men.” 
 
 Aubrey smiled ; the same slight, contemptuous, fleeting 
 smile, which stung Guilderoy like the stroke of a whip — • 
 stung him in his pride, his sensitiveness, and his conscience 
 all at once. 
 
 66 You would make a scandal ? ” said Aubrey coldly. “ You 
 would do unwisely. Men whose names are before the world 
 should keep them clean and hold them high. We might 
 agree to kill each other en cachette , but if we called the pub- 
 lic in to witness our quarrel we should be worse than fools. 
 We are not playing a melodrama of elective affinities; we 
 are living out our lives before a world which hates us, and is 
 every hour of its day gaping at us to find a chink in our har- 
 ness or a stain in our shields. You must gratify it if you 
 will. I shall not aid you. I am not the lover of your wife. 
 I have never spoken any word to her that you would not 
 have been free to hear. J have stood by her, certainly, 
 under the unmerited neglect and obloquy which have fallen 
 on her through you. I should so stand by any innocent 
 woman whose friend I once had been. And so much I 
 admit to you not for my own sake or yours, nor yet because 
 I in any way admit your rights or am moved by your men- 
 aces, but because such a declaration is due to her — since it is 
 the truth, so help me God ! ” 
 
 There was a tone in the last solemn words which stilled 
 the fury and awed the soul of his hearer. Guilderoy doubted 
 no more. 
 
 “ I believe you,” he said, briefly. “ The whole nation 
 would believe your bare word. I wish to Heaven,” he added 
 with emotion, C( that she had been yours, not mine ; we 
 should all have been far happier than we are.” 
 
 “ Suoh regrets are useless,” said Aubrey. u The greatest 
 burden of man’s life has been created by man, and it is called 
 the holy state of marriage. But — this I must say to you too 
 —if you imagine that she cares for me you are m great 
 error. She cares for you alone. You may bruise her heart 
 as you choose ; your name is still the only one written 
 on it.” 
 
 66 Do not tell me so,” said Guilderoy hastily and with pain 
 * It can make no difference now.” 
 
 « 1 have told you so because it is so,” 
 
GUIL DEBOY. 
 
 363 
 
 “ That maj be. It can make no difference in me.” 
 
 Aubrey was silent. 
 
 “ You intend always to live as you are living now ? ” 
 
 “I must in honor.” 
 
 “And you leave her virtually widowed at twenty-two years 
 *f age, and you exact her fidelity ? ” 
 
 “I exact nothing. And I beg to apologize to you for the 
 time which I have wasted for you in a demand which, as 
 I have expressed my belief, was founded on unjust sus- 
 picions.” 
 
 He lingered a moment, waiting for some expression in re- 
 turn from Aubrey ; some farewell, some acknowledgment of 
 his last words. But Aubrey remained standing where he 
 was and said nothing. He did not offer his hand ; his 
 features were very cold, his expression almost harsh. He 
 allowed his cousin to leave him without any word or gesture 
 of valediction. 
 
 Guilderoy bowed to him in silence and quitted the 
 room. 
 
 “ If I did not belong to my family and my country I 
 should kill him before he reaches the street,” thought 
 Aubrey when the door closed, as the fire ran through his 
 veins of that old barbaric passion which sleeps in the blood 
 of all men of high courage and strong feeling. 
 
 CHAPTER LV. 
 
 In the following week, his cousin stood on the cliff above 
 Christslea, he having responded to a wistful message asking 
 for his return there. 
 
 “ Why have you sent for me ? ” he asked her. 
 
 “ Why do you never come* to me unless I send ?” 
 
 He looked away from her. 
 
 “ Why ? ” she persisted. “You used to come and see me 
 «o very often.” 
 
 Aubrey hesitated. 
 
 “The world is suspicious, my dear,” he said at last ; “and 
 you are very young, and, though you always seem to forget 
 it, a beautiful woman. I do not wish them to say evil things 
 of you.” 
 
 She colored violently. 
 
364 
 
 GTTILI>EBO\ 
 
 ‘ s They would never dare to say of us 99 
 
 “ I fear they do, dear/' 
 
 She was silent ; her face was very flushed and pained. 
 
 “ How evil the world is ! ” she murmured. “ But let 
 them say what they will. It does not matter. We 
 know ” 
 
 “ It matters for you.” 
 
 He moved uneasily ; his posit on towards her became 
 every day of his life more embarrassing to him, more 
 strained, more difficult. The very frankness and per- 
 fectness of her confidence in him *vas an added embarrass- 
 ment the more. 
 
 It seemed brutal to rob her of her only solace, to sug- 
 gest misconstruction to so much innocence and courage, 
 to place between himself and her the constraint which 
 such a warning must of necessity create. 
 
 She sat on the edge of the cliff, unconsciously plucking 
 the little flowerets of wild thyme which grew so thickly 
 there. He stood beside her and looked down on her. 
 
 “ Gladys,” he said abruptly, “ my cousin came to me a 
 few days ago.” 
 
 Her face lost its warmth and grew very cold. 
 
 “ I heard that he had been a night at Ladysrood,” she 
 answered. 
 
 “ Yes. He did not approach you ? ” 
 
 “ Can you think that he would dare ? ” 
 
 “ You forget, he has still the right.” 
 
 “ He has no moral right ; no right on earth that I ac- 
 knowledge.” 
 
 “You are too harsh, my dear. His rights always exist; 
 and, whether you will hear it or not, I must say to you that 
 I believe his feelings for you are not wholly dead, as you 
 think.” 
 
 She cast the gathered thyme upon the ground and rose to 
 her feet. 
 
 “I care nothing what they are or are not. His life is 
 dead to mine.” 
 
 “ Is that how your father w T ould have had you speak ? ” 
 
 “ My father was a good and wise man, but he knew noth- 
 ing of a woman’s heart.” 
 
 “Perhaps he knew so much that he believed its forgive- 
 ness inexhaustible and its patience divine — as they should 
 be.” 
 
GTJILDEBOY. 
 
 365 
 
 She was silent. She stood looking out to th© gray wind- 
 blown sea. Her eyes were cold and had no relenting in 
 them, her face had grown pale. 
 
 “Some women may be made like that,” she said at last. 
 “ I am not. He has made his life without me. I have made 
 mine without him. That is all. Why talk of it ? ” 
 
 “ How have you made your life ? Child that you are, do 
 you mean that you can live all your lonely years like this — ■ 
 always like this, until old age comes to you ? ” 
 
 “Women live so in convents. Why not I ?” 
 
 “Women in convents live unnatnral lives, as from mis- 
 taken motives you are doing. Every life without the nat- 
 ural indulgence of its sentiments and affections is restricted, 
 barren, and unblessed.” 
 
 She was again silent ; her eyes watching afar off a fishing- 
 boat tossing in the deep trough of the waves. 
 
 “ Why do you say these things to me ? ” she asked at last. 
 “Surely when one is left alone, there are more dignity and 
 decency in passive acquiescence in one’s fate than in any 
 noisy revolt against it. 
 
 “ Yes : but if he returned to you ? Would your pride 
 stand in the way of reconciliation ? ” 
 
 “ Has he told you to ask me that ? ” 
 
 “Ho ; he said nothing which would even suggest it. But 
 it was clear to me that he regretted his own actions, and re- 
 gret is always near repentanee.” 
 
 “ He will never feel repentance, not even any very real 
 regret. He may feel inconvenience, irritation, anxiety for 
 the world’s opinion — caprice, fatigue, satiety — nothing more.” 
 “ I begin to think that you have never loved him, 
 Gladys.” 
 
 “ Perhaps not.” 
 
 He looked at her, troubled and perplexed by her tone, see- 
 ing no way into her real meaning, wondering at her strength 
 in keeping the secret of her own feelings so closely in such 
 long solitude. 
 
 “ There is no love,” he said almost harshly, “ where there 
 is any consideration of self. There may be desire, . pride, 
 pique, egotism ; but there is no love. I have told you so 
 many times. I should wish your own heart to tell it you 
 without me.” 
 
 “Are all feeling, all sacrifice, all pain, then, to be on one 
 side alone?” r 9 
 
GUILDEEOY. 
 
 “A great love never asks that question, my dear. It 
 gives all it has to give unweighed.” 
 
 Something in his voice as he spoke, something in his ex- 
 pression as he looked down on her, went to her heart with a 
 sudden sense of what his feeling was for her. She had 
 never thought of it before ; she had taken all his faithful 
 and tender friendship as created rather by his position 
 towards Guilderoy than by any personal devotion to herself. 
 She had been engrossed in that absorbing selfishness which 
 great suffering creates, and she had passed over unnoticed a 
 thousand things which might have told her what he felt had 
 not her whole thoughts and her whole emotions been given 
 to the tragedy of her own fate. Now some vague percep- 
 tion of the truth came to her, although he had so loyally 
 concealed it. Some sudden sense of all which he had done 
 for her, all which he wasted on her, all which he restrained 
 and denied for her sake, came upon her with a mute, ineffa- 
 ble reproach. How selfish she had been, and how ungener- 
 ous, before this immense and unuttered devotion ! She 
 dropped her head upon her hands and burst into a passion 
 of tears. 
 
 “ Forgive me, forgive me ! ” she murmured, weeping, not 
 knowing what she said. 
 
 “ I have nothing to forgive, dear,” he said, surprised and 
 touched to the quick. “I want you to forgive, because I 
 know that unless you do so no peace will ever come to you.” 
 
 He waited a moment, but she made no reply. 
 
 “ I must go now,” he said, “or I shall not be able to be in 
 London to-night. Will you think of what I have said ? The 
 day will come when you will have occasion to think of it. 
 And, my dear, do not deem me unkind if I cease my visits 
 to you. They are ill-judged by the world, and they displease 
 my cousin. Of course, if you ever need me greatly I will 
 come ; but not habitually, familiarly, as I have come of 
 late.” 
 
 Her face changed and her brows contracted almost sul- 
 lenly. 
 
 “You will sacrifice me to him?” 
 
 “ No. But I will not sacrifice you to the evil construe* 
 tion of either your husband or the world.” 
 
 “ I thought you had more courage.” 
 
 Aubrey smiled sadly. 
 
 "It is not courage which is wanting to me, my chili 
 
GUILDEnOT. 
 
 set 
 
 Perhaps some day you will understand my motives, if you do 
 not now. Meantime, do not misjudge me nor doubt my sin- 
 cere regard for all your truest interests/’ 
 
 The words seemed very cold to her and conventional. 
 
 She was very young still, and she longed for tenderness^ 
 for indulgence, for an affection which should let her lean her 
 aching life upon it and there find rest. 
 
 When he went from her in the dusky, windy, cloudy day 
 the sense of an immense loss came over her ; the solitude of 
 her life closed in on her ; and she saw night descend with 
 terror of its sleepless hours. 
 
 CHAPTER LYI. 
 
 Oisr that same day Guilderoy saw once more the smiling 
 sunshine, the green gardens and orange woods, the stately 
 marble halls of the Soria Palace. It was late in the after- 
 noon when he reached Naples. A glorious sunset was burn- 
 ing in the west. Innumerable sails covered the sea. The 
 zenith was a deep transient blue, the air clear and buoyant, 
 with gayety and healing in its breezes. The streets were 
 mirthful with the sports of early Carnival, and the shouts 
 and songs and clang of brazen music came softened to the ear, 
 as he sat once more in the little cabinet of the Albani and 
 looked towards the bay through the marble arches of the 
 loggia beyond. 
 
 Whether from pride, magnanimity, or forbearance (he 
 knew not which) Beatrice Soria had asked him no questions. 
 
 “ You have soon returned,” she said to him simply, when 
 he first came to her ; and she had made no after allusion to 
 his absence or its causes. She knew well that if he had 
 broken his word to her he would not have so returned, nay, 
 would never have dared to meet her eyes again. 
 
 He longed to tell her all that he had felt ; the sweetest 
 charm of love is the power and privilege of laying bare the 
 soul in all its inconsistencies and follies ; but this pleasure 
 was refused to him by his own action in the past. Where he 
 had been once faithless to her before, delicacy made it impos- 
 sible for him to say one word which should seem to hint at 
 any regret or any change for or in his present faith to her. 
 That first disloyalty was always there as a spectre between 
 
368 
 
 GUILLEROY. 
 
 them. It would be impossible to show her all the conflicting 
 emotions which had swayed him by turns during his brief 
 visit to England. He would have been glad to do so ; he 
 felt something of the pathetic human instinct to confide in 
 some one he loved the doubts and the self-reproaches which 
 tormented him, and so in a manner be free of their burden of 
 * perplexity. But this he dared not do. Under the circum- 
 stances of their late reunion, any such confidence must inevit- 
 ably have appeared to be either a hint of desired freedom or 
 a confession of futile regret ; either would be an insult to her. 
 He felt that even any shadow which came over his face, any 
 momentary mood of abstracted thought or of visible depres- 
 sion, must seem a tacit admission that he regretted the price 
 which he had paid for the past year of happiness beside her. 
 He knew that he had once seemed to her the forsworn, 
 cowardly, and treacherous slave of his own caprices : he dared 
 risk nothing which could by any kind of possibility place him 
 in such a light to her agaiu. What could such a woman as 
 she was think of him if she ever felt that, even in the full 
 blessing and glory of her love, he could fret at and begrudge 
 the cost which it had been to him ? He respected the 
 stonger courage of her nature, he even respected her for the 
 scorn which now and then flashed out from her upon himself 
 and he felt both reverence and gratitude for the faithful and 
 fervent passion which she had spent and, in so much wasted, 
 upon his life. Nothing can be more untrue than that in such 
 relations as theirs reverence is impossible ; reverence is 
 excited by character, not by situation, and he had learned to 
 appreciate her nature as he had never done in earlier days. 
 The very completeness and sincerity of the proof which she 
 had demanded from him had showed a force in her before 
 which he felt himself wavering, weak, almost worthless of a 
 single thought of hers. 
 
 He did his uttermost to conceal the depression which 
 weighed upon him ; the distress with which he was haunted 
 when he thought of that little house in the gloom and silence 
 of the lone sea-shore; the anger and impatient shame with 
 which the reeollection of Aubrey’s words of scorn moved him 
 whenever they recurred to him. 
 
 He knew — he felt, that one living man despised him ; and 
 that man the one whom of all others he the most esteemed 
 himself, the most admired. He had always been irritably 
 conscious of the greatness of Aubrey’s life as contrasted with 
 
GUILDEttOT. 
 
 369 
 
 the frivolity and self indulgence of his own. It was an un- 
 endurable humiliation to him to be conscious that he had 
 made it possible for his cousin to address to him those scath- 
 ing words which pursued him in memory as though they 
 were the very voices of pursuing ghosts. 
 
 And although he had received and had accepted his cous- 
 in’s statement of his relations with his wife, and did honestly 
 in his soul believe them, yet it made him restless and un- 
 happy to know that their intimacy, however harmless, was 
 familiar and unwitnessed, that even, though only her friend, 
 Aubrey, was still her only friend and her most loyal servant. 
 It offended, it wounded, it tormented him ; and all his efforts 
 could not conceal from the penetration of Beatrice Soria that 
 the lassitude and dissatisfaction which she had observed in 
 him when in her villa on the Brenta in the past autumn had 
 increased greatly since his brief absence, and were rendered 
 even the more visible by the endeavors which he made to 
 hide them under the over-affectation of carelessness or the 
 over-protestation of devotion. She had the intuition and the 
 penetration which are alone possible to a woman who is too 
 learned in love to be the servant of it, and too sure of her 
 power ever to be vain with petty vanities ; she saw in him 
 the reflection of that vague disappointment which had haunted 
 her in her meditations amongst the autumn beauty of her 
 gardens in the Yeneto ; she realized that he, too, like herself, 
 though later than she had, failed to find the same wonder- 
 flower which they had found and gathered together in other 
 years. She was generous, she was proud to arrogance, and 
 she knew human character with a knowledge that made her 
 at once disdainful and impatient of it. She had had her own 
 way ; she had ruled him as she chose ; she had exacted and 
 enjoyed her just vengeance to the uttermost iota ; what more 
 could the future bring her ? And beside this likewise there 
 was in her the generous scorn of a patrician temper to hold 
 by obligation what had fled already in will, to enforce a bond 
 from which the soul has already gone. There was much 
 arrogance in her, and there had been some cruelty, but there 
 was more magnanimity than there was either. 
 
 She said nothing to him, but she watched him in the weeks 
 which followed on his return ; and she read his mind as 
 though it had been opened before her like a book. She felt 
 with a pang that what she read there mattered but little to 
 her ; a year before his emotions had been her world, now its 
 
370 
 
 GZTILDEROY. 
 
 seemed of small account that they should wander from her. 
 What joy would there be in slowly-dying illusion, in slowly- 
 fading rapture, in slowly-chilling passion ? What triumph 
 would there be in watching the sure, if gradual, change of 
 ecstasy into monotony, of gratitude into tedium, of fervor 
 into habit ? She knew the truth of the Greek counsel, 
 “ Break off the laurel bough whilst it is yet green and burn 
 it. Wait not until it withers.” She was an Epicureaki, and 
 carried into the passions of her life at once the fires of the 
 senses and the coldness of philosophy. When she had loved 
 him first she had been all fire ; now her wisdom was greater 
 than her love ; now she could bear to put her heart under 
 the spectrum and watch its pulses change from fast to 
 slow. 
 
 The months of Carnival follies passed, and the spring 
 equinox blew upon the spathes of the narcissi and called up 
 the golden sceptres of the asphodel in all the southern 
 pastures. One night they strolled together along the white 
 terrace which overhung the sea, as they had done a thousand 
 times in the year just passed and in the other years of a 
 still more gracious time. The full moon was shining, the 
 murmur of the waves was audible, the air was heavy with 
 the scent of lemon -flowers from the gardens beyond. It was 
 Italy — luminous, fragrant, amorous ; yet amidst it all he 
 sighed. The sigh was unconscious, but it was eloquent. She 
 paused and looked at him. A slight smile came on her 
 mouth, half of pity, half of scorn. 
 
 “ If you are not happy,” she said slowly, “ remember — I 
 am not your jailer. Say so, and go ! ” 
 
 He started violently, ashamed and bewildered, and 
 ignorant of what he had betrayed. 
 
 “ What do you mean ? ” he asked. “ Happy ? — you have 
 given me a happiness of which one needs to be god, not man, 
 to be worthy ! ” 
 
 “ Yes, you have been happy,” she said thoughtfully. u It 
 is something. Well, go whilst you still are grateful for ft,” 
 
 “Go ? Go where?” 
 
 “ Go to your wife.” 
 
 Even by the moonlight she saw how white his face 
 grew as he heard her; he was paralyzed with fear and 
 wonder. 
 
 “ Why do you insult me ? ” he muttered ; you have ray 
 word.” 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 371 
 
 “Yes, I have had your word/’ she said with disdain, but 
 with no anger. “ What is a corpse worth when its soul has 
 fled ? ” 
 
 “ You cannot think ” 
 
 “I think you are like all men. Once I thought that you 
 were unlike them. But that is long ago! ” 
 
 He winced under the words as though she had struck 
 
 him. 
 
 “ Is it dead in you ? ” he cried with the passion of despair. 
 “ Can no love live ? ” 
 
 “ I know not,” she said wearily. “ Perhaps not ; who can 
 tell ? ” 
 
 “I can tell. I love you forever.” 
 
 “ In a sense you do — yes.” 
 
 She sat down on one of the marble chairs of the terrace ; 
 the seat was shaped like Attila’s chair, and was covered 
 with a lion’s skin. She looked like some great queen come 
 to pass judgment; the silvery tissues and silvery fur of her 
 cloak gleamed in the moonbeams, the diamonds which were 
 round her throat shone, her eyes were full of light and heavy 
 with tears. 
 
 “My dear, do not let us part in any anger,” she said 
 calmly. “ Anger is so base in those who have been lovers. 
 Once I was angry often, and to fury even. I would that 
 that time were here still in all its madness, in all its abase- 
 ment. But it is dead. You have been happier than I in 
 our reunion. I was haunted by the past, which you forgot. 
 I wanted what I could not have — my youth. You had be- 
 longed to my jmuth,, and my mind had outgrown you, though 
 I knew it not. Hay, I mean nothing unkind. We change 
 in body and mind. Ho passion, once broken, will ever bear 
 renewal.” 
 
 She sighed heavily. He was silent ; he was deeply and 
 cruelly humiliated, and yet he knew that she had spoken the 
 truth of herself, if not of him. 
 
 “ Go to your wife,” she repeated. “ I am sure that you 
 have seen her, though I am equally sure that you have not 
 spoken with her, for you would never have dared to return 
 to me if you had. You do not care for her ; you will never 
 care for her. But she embodies to you peace of mind, social 
 repute, and personal dignity. You attach weight to the 
 opinion of the world. You are wretched if men speak ill of 
 you. With that character neither man nor woman should 
 
372 
 
 GUILBEEOY . 
 
 ever brave the world. They should leave that temerity to 
 those who have both a great passion and a great courage u 
 They alone can do it and never repent. You repent — now — 
 every hour of your life.” 
 
 “ You are cruelly unjust! Never once have I said or 
 thought or felt anything but the very deepest gratitude to 
 you.” 
 
 “ In a sense, no. I am not denying that you love me still. 
 I say that, having the temperament you possess, you cannot 
 be content without the world’s esteem. It wearies you 
 to earn it, but without it you are uneasy and ashamed.” 
 
 “ You would make me out the very poorest of fools ! ” 
 
 u No ; your feeling is not ignoble, for it comes rather from 
 faithfulness to your race and your traditions than from any 
 minor timidity or selfishness. But, let it spring from what 
 it may, it is in you. You are not a man who can long forget 
 hinself in love. You have been ever Lovelace, never Mont- 
 rose. You are incapable of a life-long devotion. 
 
 “ Try me and you will see how mercilessly unjust you 
 are.” 
 
 “ No ; you would promise what you could riot fulfil. Every 
 year, every day, our relations would grow more familiar to 
 you, and so less powerful to hold or satisfy you. Every 
 year, every day, you would remember with more bitterness 
 all that you have given up in sacrificing your good name and 
 your position in your own country. Your country is intoler- 
 able to you ; you hate its weather, its society, its politics, its 
 hypocrisies, and .its climate-, but yet, having given it up, you 
 sigh for it. As it is with your country, so it is with your 
 wife. You do not care for her — you will never care for her. 
 But she represents something which you have lost by your 
 own act, and so you fret for her.” 
 
 Where he stood beside her in the moonlight his face flushed 
 painfully. 
 
 “ It is not that. It is not what you think,” he said with 
 agitation. u You know well I have no feeling for her of that 
 sort. But I know that she lives in suffering, possibly even 
 in temptation ; and I cannot forget that when I married her 
 I swore to her father that I would make her happiness as 
 far as a man can make a woman’s. Of course those promises 
 are made and forgotten in all marriages — people cannot keep 
 them even if thev would ; but he was a man whom I honored* 
 eintf ne is aeaa; ana n seems vUe to nave been x&xse to him. 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 373 
 
 That is all the regret that I feel — that I have felt. I do not 
 think it is a feeling which, if you could wholly understand 
 it, you would despise.” 
 
 “ I do not despise it. But I do not see why it comes to 
 you so late.” 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 He knew well enough that yonder on the sea, the night 
 that he had been bidden by her to make and abide by his 
 choice, he had chosen the sacrifice of his happiness rather 
 than of his word, but that the anger into which his wife’s 
 unbidden presence had hurried him, and the impetuosity of 
 his emotions, had hurried him into the choice which had ap- 
 peared to his companion to be wholly voluntary and dispas- 
 sionately meditated. But he could not say this to her ; and, 
 after all, he knew that his conscience had not spoken to him 
 until in the streets of Venice he had heard the jest about his 
 cousin’s visits to Christslea. 
 
 “ But I love you, I love you ! I could not bear my life 
 without you ! ” he cried, as he kissed the silvery furs of her 
 mantle. 
 
 “ Oh yes, you will bear it,” she said with a smile which 
 was half sad, half scornful. “ You love me as much as you 
 can love, but it is not very profoundly. And I am quite 
 sure that you will love many after me. The only woman 
 you will never love is your wife. Of that I am satisfied. But 
 you will go back to her. You will place yourself right 
 in the world’s eyes. I dare say you will have many children, 
 like the virtuous prince in the fairy tales, and you will never 
 see me in the world without a sigh. It will be your contri- 
 bution to the past, and you will imagine that you are 
 wretched because you have lost me ; it will even serve you, 
 perhaps, as a pose to interest other women !” 
 
 He rose to his feet, stung and wounded beyond words. 
 
 There was germ enough of truth in the cruel words to hurt 
 him more profoundly than any accusation wholly unjust, and 
 yet there was injustice enough in them to rouse an agony of 
 indignation in his heart. 
 
 “Have I deserved this from you ? ” he said, with hot tears 
 standing in his eyes. “Have I ever given you right or 
 cause to say such things of me ? Once, indeed, I sinned 
 against you, I offended you. I have done my best to atone 
 for that. Which of us is it now who first speaks, of sever- 
 ance and of disillusion ? Which of us is it now who rincts 
 our relations insufficient and monotonous ? You are unjust 
 
374 
 
 GUILDEEOY. 
 
 to me — cruelly, barbarously unjust. I have told you tha 
 truth of my own feelings as I analyze and find them. If my 
 candor wrongs me in your sight I cannot help it. If a man 
 and a woman, after years of intimacy, cannot speak the truth 
 to one another, who can ? . The remorse that 1 feel for my 
 own failure to pledges which I voluntarily took has nothing 
 to do with my devotion to you. I am neither a great man 
 nor a good one, but such as I am I have given you all my 
 life. I ask nothing of you or of Fate but to be allowed to so 
 give it ever !” 
 
 The tears which had dimmed his eyes rolled down his 
 cheeks. He felt passionately and profoundly ! And he felt 
 also his own utter impotence to persuade her that he did so. 
 
 She looked at him with the tender but tranquil gaze of a 
 woman who has loved but loves no more. 
 
 “ Whilst I could and did believe that I loved you greatly, I 
 had the right to take your life to mine. How that I do not 
 believe that, now that I look in my own heart and feel that 
 in much it has ceased to respond to yours, I have no longer 
 such a right. I am bound to restore you to your world, to 
 your freedom, to your friends. ” 
 
 “And you think that my life is to be thrown aside like 
 that as if it were a mere toy of which you had tired ? ” 
 
 “ I have never treated it as a toy, nor ever treated It 
 lightly, though once you treated mine so. You are unhappy, 
 and you will be unhappy — for a time. But you will be rec- 
 onciled to yourself, to your society, and to your wife. Our 
 position is one in which there can be the most perfect happi- 
 ness, whatever moralists may say, so long as there is perfect 
 love. But so long only ; and that is not between us now, 
 though there are the memories of it. They must be sacred 
 enough to preserve us from all recrimination, from all enmity.” 
 The silence which followed on her words was filled only by 
 the voice of the sea. 
 
 The splendor of the night was around them, and in its still- 
 ness there arose the song of an early-singing nightingale, 
 breaking its heart in the orange grove. He gave a gesture 
 of despair and cast himself once more at her feet. 
 
 “ I cannot live without you ! I cannot — I cannot ! ” 
 
 She stooped and kissed him fondly, and with lingering 
 touch, upon his brow and hair. 
 
 “Yes, you can and you will. Do not wait to feel our love 
 perish by inches day by day. Let us part while we still care 
 enough to part in tenderness. So, dear — good night.” 
 
GUILiffiRor. 
 
 m 
 
 CHAPTER LVII. 
 
 A few nights later Aubrey walked home from West- 
 minster after a tedious debate — a weary waste of breath and 
 speech serving no purpose but to bewilder brains already 
 dull enough and deafen a country already only too obtuse. 
 He was fatigued, and was glad to breathe even the close air 
 of London streets after those many hours of suffocating and 
 useless verbiage. 
 
 His thoughts went, as they did ever in his lonely moments, 
 to Gladys. Was she sleeping and dreaming, forgetful of her 
 sorrows ? ' Or was she sleepless and dreamless in that little 
 chamber under the apple-boughs, within the sound of the 
 sea ? When he entered the great gates of Balfrons House 
 it was almost daybreak ; he went to his writing-room as 
 usual to glance at any letters or despatches which might 
 have come during the evening. There were several ; but 
 prominent to his eyes amongst them was a large envelope 
 bearing the post-mark of Paris and addressed to him by 
 Guilderoy. 
 
 “ The only woman whom I love has dismissed me/’ said 
 this strange message. “ I am free, with such poor freedom 
 as can be enjoyed by one who will forever drag behind him 
 the weight of an unchangeable regret. I shall never love 
 the innocent woman whom I have married ; but I will, if she 
 accepts such reparation, do my duty by her. 
 
 “I cannot, I dare not promise more. I have been false, 
 often involuntarily, to all my past promises save one hither- 
 to ; but to this promise which I now offer I will be faithful 
 if her indulgence is extended to me and her affections can 
 be satisfied with respect. I send my letter to her through 
 you, first because I know that you have more influence over 
 her than any one ; and in the second place, because I owe 
 you amends for the insult and the suspicion I passed upon 
 you. I can give you no better proof of my conviction that 
 both were undeserved by you than by sending through you 
 this offer of my future to her. I trust to your loyalty and 
 your honor in confiding such a mission to them, and can 
 think of no better way to prove to you that I am confident 
 you are her best friend and my most faithful adviser. You 
 used harsh and bitter words to me when we last met ; but they 
 were such as I esteem you for, and if severe they wer® de- 
 served. I have had too much vanity and too much success 
 in life and in love 5 I have, in both, now received the most 
 
376 
 
 GtTlLDEftOt. 
 
 humiliating and the most indelible rebuff. I have failed to 
 retain the heart and to satisfy the imagination of the one 
 woman for whom I have felt a lasting or an unselfish pas- 
 sion. For my suffering you will eare nothing, and you will 
 say that in bringing a crippled and mortified heart to my 
 wife I shall but offend her further. It may be so, and if she 
 thinks so I shall not protest against her decision. But, 
 again, }^ou have said that she loves me still, and women who 
 love content themselves with little. The immensity of their 
 tenderness is wide enough to cover all shortcomings, and 
 they are happy if they can heal any wounds, even if those 
 wounds have been made by other women. I do not know 
 that she has this tenderness to me ; she has always to me 
 seemed very cold. But you have said that she has it, and 
 has it for me. Be this as it may, she is proud ; she may 
 prefer to silence the tongues of the world by a reunion which 
 shall be as real, or merely as apparent, as she pleases. There 
 has been no publicity such as would make such reunion im- 
 possible, and the world, if we resume our former life, will 
 soon forget that we have been separated. At all events I 
 have thought that duty and honor, however tardily obeyed, 
 lead me to offer my future to her. She can do with it what 
 she pleases.” 
 
 Aubrey flung the letter on the floor in passionate anger. 
 Its sincerity he did not doubt, but the mission it placed on 
 him was loathsome. 
 
 “Can he not go back to her without my intervention ? ” he 
 thought bitterly. “ Must he needs call on me to rejoin his 
 broken ties ? Could he find no other messenger ? Could he 
 not write to her direct by ordinary means ? What title has 
 he to put such a burden upon me ? What right, in Heaven’s 
 name, to bid me carry his soul to her and beseech her to wash 
 it white ? ” 
 
 He knew that Guilderoy had written to him in all honesty 
 and well-meaning, intending to make reparation for his sus^. 
 picions by an act of perfect and even chivalrous confidence. 
 He did justice to the motives which had dictated the letter, 
 but he cursed the writer for his cruelty and for the task which 
 it laid upon him. For a while he was tempted to reject it ; to 
 send it back, with its enclosure and say, “ I cannot be your 
 ambassador. She is yours — go to her without preface.” 
 
 Thrice he wrote those lines, or lines similar to them ; and 
 then tore them up, dissatisfied with them as cowardice and 
 selfishness. If he loved her, as he did, should he lose any 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 377 
 
 Oftsion of opening the gates of happiness to her ? He knew 
 that she was proud and unforgiving ; that she deemed hen* 
 self hound in self-respect to adhere to her choice of a lonely 
 and self-sufficing life ; he knew that Guilderoy, going to her 
 simply because the woman whom he loved had dismissed him, 
 would almost surely be dismissed by her with scorn and even 
 with hatred. 
 
 Was not he, who knew this, bound to do his uttermost to 
 stand between her and what would be to her a lifelong sever- 
 ance from one whom she loved? To employ such means as he 
 possessed of swaying her mind and persuading her character 
 to bend to that forgiveness without which she would be eter- 
 nally wretched ? To do for her in this moment of her life 
 what her father would certainly have done had he been liv- 
 ing now ? 
 
 He was obliged in no way, indeed, to serve her or his 
 cousin ; he could let their lives drift apart as they might, and 
 would have no need to blame himself or fear the blame of 
 others. But that cold neutrality seemed base to him ; that 
 withdrawing of his conscience behind the pale of what was 
 obligation and what was not, seemed to him poor and mean. 
 Generous natures know nothing of such cautious limitations. 
 
 “ If I love thee, what is that to thee ? he thought. Noth- 
 ing, indeed, but to him it was much ; to him it seemed to 
 require from him as much devotion and service as though 
 she had been wholly his. She had trusted him — entirely and 
 innocently trusted him ; to Aubrey this gave her title to his 
 allegiance forever. 
 
 He took up the letter for her which had been enclosed in 
 Guilderoy’s. It was left unsealed for him to read it. He did 
 not read it — he could guess the contents ; they must be, he 
 knew, the same that had been said to him — softened and 
 mitigated probably, but the same in substance. He put it 
 unread in the inner pocket of his coat and rang for his 
 private secretary 
 
 ( ' I must go into the country for a day/' he said to the 
 young man. u There is nothing pressing at the House for 
 the moment, and I shall be back to-morrow night in time 
 for a division if there be one. See to these matters,” and he 
 gave him the directions necessary for the conduct of many 
 subjects of importance and urgency, with the rapidity and 
 clearness of explanation which become second nature to 
 public men. In another hour he was in the open country, 
 and in the midst of fields and woods bathed in pale sunshine^ 
 
378 
 
 GUILDJEROY. 
 
 going towards the south-west sea-shore where the village of 
 Christslea lay, with the swell of Atlantic rollers beating 
 against its cliffs. 
 
 He had not seen her since the day that he had told her 
 that he could have no mistress in any sense of love save 
 England. He had written to her briefly from time to time, to 
 hear of her health ; but no other intercourse had taken place 
 between them. In his letters to her he had pleaded the stress 
 ©f Parliamentary and Ministerial work as the reason of his 
 absence. She understood what the true reason was, and did 
 not urge him to visit her as she had been used to do. But 
 the weeks and months had been more dreary, more intoler- 
 able to her, now that she had lost the one relief, the one 
 solace, the one pleased expectancy of his occasional visits, 
 and often she wished wistfully that she were lying insensible 
 to all pain beside her father under the mossy turf. 
 
 The companionship and the correspondence of Aubrey had 
 been to her a far greater happiness and consolation than she 
 had known until they had almost ceased, or had at the best 
 passed into an infrequent and restrained assurance of friend- 
 ship. Often now as she walked to and fro the shore in the 
 rough winds of the early spring weather, she felt with a 
 feeling akin to terror that it was not Guilderoy but his 
 cousin whom she missed, whom she thought of, whom she 
 regretted. All that serious and tender solicitude for her, all 
 that manly and generous devotion to her, although so care- 
 fully kept within the bounds of friendship and family 
 relationship, had penetrated her inmost nature with its 
 unselfishness and moved her to a gratitude which was in 
 itself a form of affection. She had not been conscious of how 
 great a place he occupied in her life until the cessation of 
 of his visits to Christslea. 
 
 She began slowly to realize, as she had never realized 
 before, what were those dangers to her of which her father 
 had warned her in words whose meaning she could now read 
 by the light of her own heart. Her present was a blank, 
 and her future was one which terrified her. She began to 
 realize also how frightful a thing was this utter loneliness to 
 which she was self-condemned. There were moments when 
 it was all that she could do to find strength to resist the 
 impulse to cast herself headlong from the rocks, to find the 
 numbness and dumbness of death amongst those tossing 
 waves in which her rosy feet had paddled in infancy, finding 
 jn them her merriest playfellows. It was the memory of her 
 
GUILLERO?. 
 
 m 
 
 father which alone sustained her against the supreme temp- 
 tation of isolated lives. She seemed to hear his voice saying 
 to her in the words of the Athenian by whom a higher creed 
 was reached than any priests ever taught. “ When death 
 approaches, the mortal part dies, but the immortal part 
 departs, safe and uncorrupted, having withdrawn itself from 
 death.” Should she dare to put out that light of the soul 
 with her own hand ? 
 
 Her father had rightly foreseen that the friends who would 
 serve her best in the trials of her life would be those Im- 
 mortals with whom he had taught her, even as a child, to 
 converse. 
 
 With the coming of the tardy English spring the burden 
 of her days grew heavier, and their solitude more unbearable 
 in its vacancy. When all the gladness of reviving life is 
 coming to all animate things and to the waking earth itself, 
 all youth which is lonely and unloved feels its isolation, and 
 its physical and spiritual desires, with more cruel sharpness 
 than at any other period of the year. Greenness to the 
 grass and glory to the flowers can return — why not the joys 
 of the senses and the soul ? 
 
 She knew that Aubrey had said aright ; that her life was 
 barren and unblessed. Was it her own fault that it had 
 become so ? Had she lacked gentleness, sympathy, indulg- 
 ence ? — all those unpromised gifts which love should bring 
 unasked, and without which the bare promise of fidelity is 
 nought. Humility had come to her, and great sadness, and 
 contrition, and self-censure ; she began to learn how hard it 
 is to guard the gates of the soul from its tempters, how use- 
 less to pledge feelings which must change as the mind and 
 the heart grow older, and demand more, ere they can be sat- 
 isfied. She ceased to blame her husband in proportion as 
 she ceased to care for him. Her love seemed to have died 
 out of her with that violent and delirious jealousy which 
 once had moved her so absolutely, and now seemed dead as 
 last year’s leaves. 
 
 It was a balmy and sunny afternoon when Aubrey reached 
 Christslea. The cattle, released from their stalls, were stray- 
 ing at will on moor and pasture. The first fisher fleet of the 
 spring-time was visible in the offing: red-brown sails against 
 a silvery-blue sky. The orchards were all in blossom in a 
 sweet confusion of rose and white. The pigeons flew above 
 the boughs and the sea-gulls flew above the waves. It was 
 all soft, cool, pale and fresh ; English in its sobriety and 
 
380 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 simplicity of tint, and with the haze and the scent of the 
 morrow’s rain in the air. She was standing in the orchard 
 when he put his hand on the latch of the gate. A joy of 
 which she was wholly unconscious broke oyer the sadness of 
 her face like sunshine as she saw him and came towards 
 him. 
 
 “ It is so long since you were here/’ she said, holding out 
 both her hands to him. 
 
 He took them in his own, but did not hold them for more 
 than a moment. 
 
 “ Yes, it is long,” he said, with a sigh. 
 
 All that welcome and affection speaking in her face were 
 to him as the sight of a spring of clear w r ater to a tired way- 
 farer who cannot reach to drink of it. 
 
 “ Have you missed me ? ” he asked, involuntarily. 
 
 A shiver passed over her as she stood in the pale sun- 
 shine. 
 
 “ Very much,” she answered simply. 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 Then he said abruptly: “Let us go up on the cliff; I 
 have something to tell you which will be best told by 
 your father’s grave. Besides, under all these blossoms and 
 boughs one cannot breathe.” 
 
 “ I will go where you wish,” she said ; her new-born hap- 
 piness was startled and overshadowed. She had a presenti- 
 ment of ill. 
 
 They walked almost in silence out of the orchard and 
 across the stretch of rough grass-land which parted it from 
 the cliff- path which Guilderoy a few months earlier had seen 
 her ascend. It was early in the afternoon, and the silence 
 was unbroken around them ; the air was sweet and strong, 
 the sea calm. They crossed the head of the cliff until they 
 reached a seat under the churchyard wall, shaded by the 
 evergreen hedge and the yews and pines of its enclosure. 
 
 “We will wait here/’ said Aubrey. “ You can see the 
 sea ; it is always your friend and counsellor.” 
 
 The graveyard, with its tall and slender marble pillar rising 
 above the evergreen foliage, and the light, silvery, shadowy 
 wands of blossoming willows, was behind them, and before 
 them, far below, the gray and tranquil waters of the bay, 
 
 “ I have this letter to bring to you from Evelyn,” he said, 
 and took out the note addressed to her and gave it to her. 
 
 As she recognized the handwriting she grew very pale, and 
 an expression that was almost terror came into her eyes. 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 381 
 
 u He has no right, no right whatever, to address me,” she 
 said, and made a gesture to refuse the letter. It fell on the 
 turf between them. 
 
 Aubrey stooped for it and offered it to her again. 
 
 “ He has every right,” he said coldly, “ and you are bound 
 to read whatever he says to you. Do not be either obstinate 
 or ungenerous.” 
 
 “ It is you who are ungenerous to me.” 
 
 “ Do not let us quarrel, my dear,” said Aubrey, in the 
 words that Beatrice Soria had used to Guilderoy. u Life is 
 painful enough without dissension. I bid you read this let- 
 ter ; first because I know the contents, and know that they 
 are such as you are bound to consider, and because, in the 
 second place, as I have been made the bearer of it, he would 
 think that I had betrayed my trust if you refused.” 
 
 She was silent some moments; then she took the envelope 
 from his hand, and open it and read what it contained. 
 
 She read it rapidly, guessing rather than perusing its sen- 
 tences. 
 
 u Aubrey will tell you better than I can write to you what 
 it is I ask from you after these many months of silence and 
 separation. Do not think, my dear, that I would urge for a 
 moment any rights that the law may give me when I have 
 morally forfeited them ; and do not think that I would seek 
 to persuade or to solicit you. I tell you frankly, the woman 
 I love, for whom I left you, loves me no more. This avowal 
 is the greatest proof of my sincerity and of my humility that 
 I can give you. I make you no grand protestations, but, if 
 you care to do so, our life together might be renewed, with 
 every wish on my part to make it happier for you than the 
 past has been. Marriage is the cruellest of all mistakes, and I 
 cannot ever regret enough that I led into its captivity your 
 innocent and ignorant youth. I can only say that the error 
 was made by me in all good faith, and that if I have been 
 untrue to my promises to you and to your father I have al- 
 ways been so without premeditation, and with self-reproach 
 which has been more poignant than you would consent to 
 believe. I have offended you, and I will not seek to palliate 
 my offence by saying, as I perhaps might say with some show 
 of self-justification, that you did not give me either that 
 sympathy or that indulgence which I had hoped for from 
 you. It is enough to say now that if you care to do so I 
 am willing to begin our lives afresh.” 
 
 The letter was manly, sincere, and plainly written from 
 
382 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 the heart ; it would have touched and won any woman who 
 had loved him into forgiveness of faults even much graver 
 than his had been ; but it did not touch her because the feel- 
 ing which had bound her to him was dead, and a dead thing 
 can return neither cry nor caress. She read it. Then she 
 threw it again on the ground. 
 
 “ He comes to me because she has dismissed him ! ” she 
 cried with violence, her nostrils dilated and quivering like 
 those of a blood-mare under the spur. 
 
 “ It is at least honest of him to tell you so. He could 
 easily have affected to you that he abandoned her for your 
 sake. Believe me, candor in a man of the world to women, 
 and about women, is the very rarest of all qualities.” 
 
 She turned on him with passionate indignation and suffer- 
 ing. 
 
 u You defend him ; you always defend him ! Why should 
 he choose you as his messenger ? Has he not hurt me 
 enough already ? ” 
 
 Aubrey passed over the admission which was confessed in 
 her words. 
 
 “ He chose me because he had been unjust to me and 
 wished to give me this mark of his confidence,” he replied, 
 with that self-negation which he had imposed on himself 
 when he had accepted the mission to her. “ I do not defend 
 his past conduct. He knows all that I think of it. But I 
 am compelled in honor to say now, that I believe he desires 
 fully to make such reparation to you as may be in his power.” 
 “ Because the Duchess Soria has wearied of him ! ” 
 
 “ Not only because of that. He is neither heartless nor 
 conscienceless, and he felt bitterly months ago that he had 
 been false to his promises to your father. I think you may 
 believe what he says now the more fully because he makes no 
 protest of feelings which do not move him, and which would 
 be even an insult offered to you at this moment, however the 
 future may renew them in you both.” 
 
 “ They will never be renewed. Their love was renewed 
 because it once had been great ; but between him and me 
 there has never been such love — never, never ! A year ago 
 it would have made me glad,” she said wearily. ‘ “ I should 
 perhaps have scorned myself, as I told you that I should do, 
 but I should have been happy. Not now. He has waited too 
 long. What does he think I am that I should be willing to 
 meet him after all these months ? ” 
 
 “ He thinks you are what you are — his wife,” 
 
GU1LDEB0Y. 
 
 383 
 
 “ He set me free from that bond when he left me.” 
 
 “ Your father would not have said so.” 
 
 « But I say so. Go you and tell him so. Why does he 
 seek to return to me ? Not out of real remorse, nor any 
 tenderness ; only because he is proud and knows that th@ 
 world blames him.” 
 
 “ You are too harsh.” 
 
 “ Truth is harsh.” 
 
 He felt a mad longing to lift her in his arms and hear her 
 far away from all their world before his cousin could reach 
 there to claim her. For a moment all the soft pale sunshine 
 seemed to him red as blood, and the beating of the sea upon 
 the sands like the throbs of the many human hearts sound- 
 ing in agonized revolt against the brutalities and the hypoc- 
 risies of social law. 
 
 “If he had written it a year ago — six months ago — it 
 would have made me happy. I would have forgiven all — ah ! 
 what do I say ? — Love always forgives because it is love. 
 Now I cannot forgive because I have ceased to care ! Why 
 does he come to me when it is too late ? Go, tell him so. 
 It is too late ! too late ! ” 
 
 “ It is never too late for a woman’s mercy ” 
 
 “ Mercy ! What mercy would there be in a feigned wel- 
 come ? What is the body without the soul ? What use to 
 give him myself when I cannot give him my affections ? ” 
 
 “ You will give them again when you have seen him once 
 more. You are dreaming of coldness and of harshness that 
 you do not feel ” 
 
 “I have ceased to dream long ago. I know what life is 
 too well. Dreams are for the happy ! ” 
 
 “ Surely on your side ” 
 
 “Yes ; I loved him as one loves when one is very young ; 
 but it is dead in me ; it is dead, dead, dead, I tell you — like 
 Any skeleton of any drowned creature that lies at the bottom 
 of that sea ! ” 
 
 Aubrey turned from her, and walked to and fro upon the 
 turf before her. The pain of the moment was almost be- 
 yond his strength, well tutored though it was. 
 
 “You think so,” he said after a long pause ; “you think 
 so because you are hurt, indignant, and even more outraged 
 at his solicitation of forgiveness than you were by his origi- 
 nal desertion. But this will pass away. You once loved 
 my cousin with passion if not with wisdom ; he is not a man 
 whom women forget. When he comes to you ; you will eoa- 
 
384 
 
 GUILDEROY . 
 
 sent to what he wishes ; you will pass over tnose eighteen 
 months of bitterness, you will only remember that you were 
 once devoted to him, and that he was the man who taught 
 you the first meaning of love, and was the father of your 
 dead children.” 
 
 “No, no, no!” she said with violence. “No — forever 
 no ! His place is empty in my heart. There is a stone 
 there ; no warmth, no desire, no remembrance ; only a stone 
 — the stone which has the seal of oblivion, the stone that you 
 set on a grave ! ” 
 
 She threw herself on her knees beside the wooden bench 
 and buried her face in her hands, and sobbed with the con- 
 vulsive weeping which he had seen once before. 
 
 “ Why could I not meet you first ? You would have 
 been true to me ! ” she cried in the passion of her tears, not 
 knowing what she said ; knowing only that a great nature 
 was wasted on her in vain, without joy to itself or gladness 
 to her. 
 
 Aubrey sighed ; his features changed and his eyes filled 
 with an unspeakable yearning. 
 
 He saw that her heart in its indignation, its solitude, 
 its want of sympathy, and its recognition of sympathy, both 
 of feeling and of temperament, in him, turned towards him 
 instinctively as a beaten child turns to those who will soothe 
 and caress it. He saw that with but little effort he could 
 detach her from what still remained in her of love for his 
 cousin, and lead her humiliated and lonely soul to his, there 
 to find comfort if not joy. He knew that he had in him the 
 power to console her, the heart which could alone meet and 
 content her own ; but he knew, too, that it rested with him 
 to awake her to this knowledge or to let it slumber in her un- 
 aroused forever. He had never before deemed it possible. 
 He had been wholly sincere when he had told his cousin that 
 she cared nothing for himself. But at this moment, in her 
 whole attitude, in the tears she wept, in the broken words she 
 muttered, he realized that it would not be a task beyond his 
 powers to make her see in him more than a friend, to lead her 
 from gratitude to other and warmer emotions, to suggest to 
 her that the greatest chastisement which a woman can take 
 upon a faithless love is to find and make her life’s happiness 
 without it. For a moment all his heart and all his senses 
 made the temptation more than he had strength to bear • but 
 with an instant’s meditation he found force to resist. 
 
 " I should not have loved you in that sense, my dear,” he 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 385 
 
 said with a lie which was more heroic than any truth. “Long 
 ago I loyed one woman madly, and she was false to me. I 
 would have told you my story long ago, hut I never thought 
 that you would care to hear it. I gave to her all that a man 
 can give, and she rewarded me by the lowest of intrigue,., the 
 foulest of infidelities. I was very young when she robbed my 
 life of all its color and warmth, and left me only such cold 
 consolation as may lie in the pursuit of public duties. But 
 she closed my heart to passion forever. I can feel affection 
 and devotion — I feel them both for you — but nothing beyond 
 those. Do not think of me ever as a lover for any living 
 woman. The only mistress I shall ever have in any sense of 
 love is England.” 
 
 His voice was low and grave, and infinitely tender ; his 
 declaration was an untruth, but it was nobler than all truth. 
 
 “Even were it otherwise with me,” he said, wearily. “I 
 could not, I would not, risk the accusation from my cousin 
 and the world that I had abused his trust in me, that I had 
 taken advantage of his absence and your loneliness. I may 
 mistake, and think that honor in me which is only selfishness, 
 but this is what I feel and what would guide me if — if — you 
 Were still dearer to me than you are.” 
 
 He paused, and his deep and labored breathing sounded 
 painfully upon the country silence round them. 
 
 “And if,” he added, “if I be so urgent with you to receive 
 Guilderoy and reunite your life to his, it is because I feel 
 that in the earliest years of our acquaintance I perhaps did 
 wrong in enlisting your confidence and giving you my sym- 
 pathy. I often now blame myself ; I perhaps helped to 
 alienate you from him. I perhaps turned towards myself 
 sympathies and confidences which, had I not been there, 
 might have found their way in time to him. I ask you, dear, 
 to take this remorse from me. He has many lovable qualities ; 
 he has many high talents ; he feels sincerely towards you, if 
 not warmly ; you may make his future such as his boyhood 
 promised, if you care for him.” 
 
 “ But I do not care.” 
 
 She rose to her feet ; her features were stern and scornful, 
 her eyes were full of passionate feeling burning through 
 their tears ; he seemed to her as cruel as Guilderoy had been, 
 as the world had been, as life had been: caring nothing for 
 her and her pain and her fate ; caring only for the world’s 
 opinion and a man’s egotism, and the mere pride of race. 
 
 “ Then I have more remorse than I thought, or than I 
 
S86 
 
 GUILDEEOT. 
 
 have strength to bear,” he said, as his eyes met hers for one 
 moment in that regard which strips bare to the heart and 
 unveils the inmost soul. 
 
 Then, without another word, or any sign even of farewell, 
 he turned away from her and went with rapid steps across 
 the grassland and down the pathway of the cliff. 
 
 She stood motionless and looked after him, her eyes wist- 
 fully searching the vacant air long after he had passed from 
 sight. 
 
 The spring night was cold and the dews falling heavily 
 when she left the place where her father lay, and returned 
 with slow and tired steps to the house. 
 
 She had her husband’s letter in her hand. When she 
 reached her chamber, she read it again and again, trying to 
 awake with it one chord of the music which was silent in her 
 soul. 
 
 Life seemed to her hard, conventional, artificial, hateful. 
 
 One man left her because his honor was dearer to him than 
 she was, and one man returned to her because he was uneasy 
 whilst the world thought ill of him. 
 
 What was the worth of love or friendship if they quailed 
 before the opinion of others ? 
 
 What use were the beauty, and the heart, and the mind 
 of a woman if they could inspire nothing more than that ? 
 
 She passed the hours of the night walking to and fro that 
 narrow bedchamber where she had slept as a child, hearing 
 the^ hoarse notes of the village clock record the dreary 
 passing of the time. 
 
 CHAPTER LVIII. 
 
 That night Guilderoy was in his house in Paris, the prey 
 to many conflicting feelings, which banished the carelessness 
 and ease with which his nature had hitherto met the com- 
 plexities of human life. 
 
 He was not sure whether he most wished or most feared 
 his wife’s acceptance of his offer. He had been entirely 
 honest in all that he had written to her and to his cousin ; 
 but he dreaded the results of it with that shrinking from all 
 pain and all obligation which had always been so strong in 
 him. He could not dismiss the anxiety which governed him ; 
 he could not eat or sleep, or seek his usual distractions in 
 this city which was so familiar and so pleasant to him. He 
 was restless under the sense which haunted him, of the iu* 
 
GUILDEBOY. 
 
 387 
 
 •vitable scorn with which Aubrey would regard his vacilla- 
 tions and his confidence, and he already repented the impulse 
 which had made him select his cousin as his intercessor. 
 
 He wished that he had gone himself without any preparation 
 or mediation to Christslea as the day and the night wore on- 
 ward, and each succeeding hour might bring him a message 
 from Aubrey. 
 
 His heart ached for the first time in his life under a wound 
 which could not be closed or stilled by any anodyne or pleas- 
 ure. The humiliation with which the dismissal by the 
 woman he loved had filled him would not pass away for many 
 a year ; perhaps never. 
 
 He was conscious that she had weighed him in the scales 
 of her fine intelligence and found him wanting ; he knew 
 that he had failed to respond to her imagination ; he knew, 
 too, that what she had ceased to give to him she might give 
 to others. He had been weary, dissatisfied, and haunted by 
 remorse when with her, but without her his existence was a 
 blank and his soul torn by a vague but intolerable jealousy. 
 
 He who had never before known that passion which is the 
 companion of unhappy love was now, if it be possible to 
 be so, jealous at once of two women whom he had possessed 
 utterly, and yet whom he had both, through his own incon- 
 stancy and vacillation, lost: and for the first time in his 
 whole life neither his careless philosophy nor his swiftly- 
 changing caprices could solace him or build up anew the 
 cloud palace of amorous content. He was dissatisfied with 
 himself. All that was best and most spiritual in him con- 
 demned him in his own eyes. He could have defended his 
 conduct easily to others, but he could not defend it to him- 
 self. It was dawn in the streets of Paris, and birds were twit- 
 tering in the lime-trees beneath his window when his servant 
 brought him the telegram he was expecting from his cousin. 
 
 He tore it open nervously. 
 
 “ I have done what you asked,” said Aubrey, in it. “ I 
 have no mandate from her, but I believe it will be as you 
 wish. Go yourself.” 
 
 Was he glad or not ? He could not tell. He was con- 
 scious of a weight of duties and obligations which rolled back 
 like a stone over his life ; and he was also conscious of that 
 relief which comes from a choice finally resolved and a con- 
 science quieted and appeased. Amidst all the chaos of his 
 thoughts he was touched to admiration of Aubrey’s gent- 
 rosity and loyalty. Not one man in ten million would h&Y$ 
 
GUILD EROY. 
 
 %8S 
 
 accepted such a task, or, accepting it, would have executed it 
 to the end with perfect self-abnegation. He could not have 
 reached such Stoical nobility himself ; but he recognized the 
 greatness of it. 
 
 “ I shall go to England this morning, ” he said to his 
 people ; and as he spoke the door of his room opened and his 
 sister entered. She had arrived that moment in Paris, and 
 had come there without changing her clothes, taking an 
 hour’s sleep, or even breaking her fast. 
 
 He saw her with displeasure. They had not met since 
 the late snmmer which had followed John Vernon’s death; 
 and the remembrance of her letters which he had read in 
 Venice was fresh and hateful to him. 
 
 She seemed ever to him like a bird of evil omen, watching 
 and waiting till the corpse of some dead human happiness 
 fell to her. And yet she was what the world called a good 
 woman — pious, chaste, virtuous, and wise. 
 
 “Why are you here ?” he said with impatience and dis- 
 courtesy, making no affectation of a welcome which he could 
 not give or of a pleasure which he could not feel. 
 
 “Is that all the greeting you give me after all these 
 months ? ” 
 
 “ I cannot pretend what I do not feel,” he said irritably. 
 “ I am sure that you would not come to me thus, unannounced, 
 unsummoned, unless you had some bad new r s to bring or 
 some cruel suspicion to suggest.” 
 
 “You are unjust” — her voice was broken, her lips quiv- 
 ered ; she was tired, cold, and unnerved. In her own way she 
 loved him, and she felt that even such affection as he had 
 ever felt for her was gone. 
 
 “ I am not unjust,” he answered coldly. “ You have never 
 ceased to irritate and alienate me. You mean well, perhaps, 
 but if you have the intentions of a saint, you have the 
 insinuation of a fiend. I received all your letters in Italy I 
 never answered them because they offended and disgusted me. 
 You always hated my wife. You recognized the fineness of 
 her nature, but you never ceased to be pitiless to her. I do 
 not know it, but I am as certain as that we stand here that 
 it was you who informed her of my relations, before my 
 marriage, with the only woman I ever loved.” 
 
 “ I thought it right that she should know of them,” replied 
 his sister, who was never without courage. “And those 
 same relations renewed after marriage have been made public 
 to every one by yourself.” 
 
gtjillehoy. 
 
 389 
 
 “What is that to you?” said Guilderoy, white With ill- 
 controlled passion. “You are not my keeper. It is nothing 
 to you what I do. You are a good woman — oh yes ! — and 
 you make your virtues into a sheaf of poisoned arrows with 
 which you slay the lives of others. What did you write — 
 what did you dare to write — to me in Venice and elsewhere ? 
 You slandered Aubrey, whom the whole country respects ; 
 you slandered my wife, whose first and staunchest friend you 
 ought to have been ; and you insinuated to me suspicions 
 which might very easily, had I been either more credulous 
 or more hot-tempered, have ended in bloodshed between my 
 cousin and myself, or at the best in a public quarrel which 
 would have disgraced us both. That is what you call good- 
 ness — sincerity — affection ! God deliver me from them and 
 send me sinners ; sinners of every sin under Heaven, but 
 with sympathy in them, and generosity and mercy ! ” 
 
 She was silent for a moment. She had never seen him so 
 fully . roused, so reckless in denunciation ; she loved him 
 greatly, and she felt in every word the severance, one by one, 
 of the ties of consanguinity and habit which had bound them 
 together. 
 
 But she was a woman who was pitiless in pursuit of her 
 purpose, unchangeable in her opinions and her conduct, 
 unrelenting in her tyranny and curiosity and meddlesome 
 inquisition into the lives and thoughts of others. 
 
 “ I pass over your insults and your ingratitude,” she 
 said, with difficulty controlling the rage she felt. “ I wish 
 only to ask you one question. I have come from England to 
 ask it. I heard by chance that you w r ere in Paris. Is it 
 true that you intend to effect a reconciliation with your wife ? ” 
 
 “ Who told you that I do so ? ” 
 
 “ No one told me. But I heard its possibility discussed, 
 vaguely, in society.” 
 
 “Well? What then?” 
 
 “ You cannot mean it ! You could not drag your name 
 in the dust ! Your severance from her was bad enough ; 
 but your reconciliation to her would be worse, ten million 
 times worse. It is not to be thought of, not to be dreamed 
 of, for one instant ! You owe it- to your whole family ! ” 
 
 “ What do I owe to my family ? ” 
 
 He had grown quite calm. His violence had spent itself, 
 but she, who had known him from his earliest years, knew 
 that this tranquillity had more real menace and sterner 
 meaning in it. 
 
390 
 
 GUILDEBOr. 
 
 But she had never quailed before the fury of any of the 
 men related to her whom she had tortured, fatigued, and in- 
 jured for their good, as their good was seen by her. 
 
 “ You owe it to your family,” she replied, “to your family 
 and to yourself, not to take again into your life before the 
 world a woman who has lived as your wife has done in your 
 absence.” 
 
 “ How has she lived ? ” 
 
 “ How ? As no woman in her senses could have lived. 
 Withdrawn from every one ; herself a mark for the most 
 odious suspicions ; receiving no visits save from one man 
 whose name already had often been connected with hers. 
 You used to be proud, you used to care beyond all things for 
 your name — what will the whole world say of you if, after 
 more than a year and a half of such a life as that, Lady 
 Guilderoy is once more admitted into your house and your 
 heart ? ” 
 
 Guilderoy looked at her, and, bold woman though she was, 
 she was afraid of the effects of her words. 
 
 He smiled slightly. His smile was very bitter and very 
 contemptuous. 
 
 “ If you only came here to say this,” he said, “ it was a 
 pity you did not remain in England. I should then at least 
 have been able to forget all that you wrote to me in Italy. 
 You are a virtuous woman, but you are a cruel woman. If 
 you had any mercy in you, you would have been stirred to 
 compassion for Gladys ; you would have gone to her, you 
 would have counselled her, you would have set the shield of 
 your unblemished position between the world and her. Even 
 if you had hated her, still you should have done so for 
 my sake. Aubrey alone did what he could. I am grateful 
 to him. Whoever hints a w r ord against him is my enemy. 
 The mistake made by Gladys was the mistake of an imagi- 
 native, unwordly, and over-sensitive nature ; but it was a noble 
 mistake — one which one but an ignoble nature could possibly 
 misjudge. I am blamable in much, but I am not utterly 
 vile. I offended her, and, if life permits it to me, I will 
 atone to her. It never occurred to me as possible that the 
 world could blame her for my fault. Possibly it would never 
 have dared to do so had not you been the first to cast a stone 
 at her.” 
 
 “ Are you the dupe of your wife, as you have been of 
 others ? ” 
 
 “ I am no one’s dupe, except my own sometimes. An4 
 
GUILDEROY. 
 
 391 
 
 now you will pardon me if I leave you. The house of course 
 is yours to stay in if you choose. But I am about to leave 
 for England, and you will pardon me if I say that I wish to 
 go alone. Short as the journey is, it would he too long for 
 me to make it in the society of one who is the unkindest 
 enemy of myself and of those who are dear to me.” 
 
 “ What ? Does the devotion of a lifetime count for noth- 
 ing ? Are those dear to you whom you forsook, and by 
 whom you have been betrayed ? Do you utterly forget all my 
 affection, all my forgiveness, all my defence of your errors in 
 the world, for sake of a woman whom you are tired of one 
 day and idolize the next, only because she no longer cares 
 what you do ? ” 
 
 “ My good sister,” said Guilderoy, with something of his 
 old manner, “ I told 3^ou long ago that you were equally dis- 
 contented with me whether I took the paths of vice or the 
 paths of virtue, to use the jargon of the world’s very arbi- 
 trary and rather senseless classifications. You were indig- 
 nant when I left my wife. You are indignant now that it is 
 possible I may return to her. I do not see that in either 
 case you have any title to be my judge, and I regret to feel 
 that you have forfeited the power to be my friend.” 
 
 With that he left her ; and she, mortified, worsted, and 
 made impotent as an arbiter of fate, broke down into a fit 
 of womanlike and heartbroken weeping. 
 
 She recalled the voice of John Vernon saying in the sum- 
 mer stillness of his garden. “Be kind to her.” She knew 
 that she had been more than not kind ; that she had been 
 cruel, that she had deserted her, injured her, and been the 
 first to lead the world to see harm and disgrace in the soli- 
 tude of that simple life at Christslea. Eool that she had 
 been to let her prejudice and jealousy warp her judgment so 
 utterly ! Eool that she had been not to have had sense and 
 penetration enough to foresee that the time would come when, 
 her brother would resent as a dishonor done to himself all 
 slur and suspicion cast through her upon the innocence of 
 his wife ! 
 
 Her pride at last realized that she had no influence over 
 those she strove to move, no wisdom in her interference, no 
 place in the hearts of those she loved ; she saw at last her 
 own soul as it truly was, with curiosity in the guise of friend 
 ship, harshness in the mask of justice, meddlesome and vexar 
 b*ous authority in the form of affection, unconscious jealousy 
 *tfid malignity in the golden robes of virtue. 
 
392 
 
 GXIILDEROt. 
 
 CHAPTER LIX. 
 
 A whole day and yet another sleepless night had passed 
 with Gladys in that wretchedness of uncertainty in which the 
 soul is like a house divided against itself. All that was 
 noblest in her urged her to do what Aubrey had begged of 
 her ; all that was human, weak, passionate and selfish refused 
 to do it. 
 
 She understood why marriage, which is so burdensome and 
 so unrecompensed to the man, is to the woman so great an 
 emancipation and enrichment. Yet were she only free now! 
 — only a child as she had been when Guilderoy had found 
 her on the moors ! And she remembered bitterly that, even 
 if she were so, the world would only see in her feeling for Au- 
 brey ambition and acquisitiveness, as it had seen it in her 
 marriage ; and the voice of her father seemed to rebuke her, 
 saying, as he had often said, in the words of Socrates to Crito, 
 “ Is it worth while to think so much of the opinion of others ?” 
 
 No, it was not worth while ; all the natural nobility of her 
 nature recognized the nobility of Aubrey’s words and acts ; 
 but, womanlike, their austerity, commanding her admiration, 
 left her heart cold ; womanlike, she would have fain had him 
 think less of honor, more of her. An infinite regret, which 
 she knew would abide with her so long as ever she should 
 have life, weighed on her for the pain which she had brought 
 on him through her unthinking acceptance of his devotion 
 and her too selfish appeals to him. And yet it seemed to her 
 that after all he loved her but little ! Women can never ac- 
 cept or understand the farewell of Montrose. It only hurts 
 them. 
 
 With the contradiction of human wishes, the simple secluded 
 life of Christslea, which had seemed hardly better than a liv- 
 ing death, grew dear to her. The even and monotonous time, 
 the empty house, the homely ways, seemed safe and peaceful. 
 Beside the troubled course of passions, of pleasures, and of 
 pains, which make up the life of the world, her residence in 
 this little seaside hamlet appeared serene and sec r '*re ; as the 
 haven of a religious house appeared to those who, after the 
 deceptions of love and the temptations of power, withdrew 
 themselves to Port Royal of La Trappe. Its dreariness, its 
 vacancy, the despair before it which had often seized her iu 
 
OTTILDEROY. 
 
 393 
 
 its long moonless winter nights when the silence of snow was 
 all around, and in the gray melancholy summer evenings 
 when the hoot of the owl alone answered the lapping of the 
 waves — all these passed away from her mind ; she only re- 
 membered that here she had known that freedom from fresh 
 and poignant pangs which seemed to her the nearest approach 
 to happiness that Fate would ever give to her. 
 
 She shrank from all which return to her life with her hus- 
 band must mean for her. She was wholly honest ; and, ac' 
 cepting what he offered, she knew that she must fulfil all her 
 obligations to him. Some women might have made a feint 
 of forgiveness only to acquire the means to wound, to irritate, 
 to chastise, to mortify him ; but any such treachery as that 
 was impossible to the daughter of John Vernon. Returning 
 to her life at Ladysrood must, she knew, mean for her the 
 resumption of all those ties from which she* had for nearly 
 two years looked upon herself as freed. 
 
 She could do nothing meanly. As her severance from 
 him had been complete and uncompromising, so she knew 
 that her reunion with him must be entire, and her ac- 
 ceptance of him faithful in the spirit as well as in the letter. 
 Only a year ago it would have made her so happy to have 
 given that which he sought ! Though she had scorned the 
 suggestion of reconciliation with her lips, she had often 
 yearned for it in her heart ; but now — now it was too late to 
 give her any possible joy ; she shrank from its necessity 
 with both her body and her mind. 
 
 “ What am I to do ? What shall I choose ? ’’ she asked 
 herself, with a passionate anxiety to make the choice which 
 should be right in her father’s sight and Aubrey's. The one 
 was dead, the other absent ; but both seemed very close to 
 her through all these hours, both seemed at once her coun- 
 sellors and her judges. 
 
 At times she remembered Guilderoy as he had been in the 
 first weeks of their life together, and then a shudder passed 
 over her, thinking that all those ecstacies, those adorations, 
 those entreaties lavished on her then, had all been given since 
 to others. And at such moments the quiet chamber, the un- 
 broken solitude of this little cottage seemed to her the 
 “haven under the hill,” like that which sheltered the storm- 
 tossed fisher-boats of Christslea where the cliffs curved in- 
 ward facing the setting sun. 
 
 She passed the chief portion of the day pacing to and fro 
 under the willows and yews wheie the marble column said 
 
m 
 
 GUILDEROT. 
 
 of him whose mortal frame lay underneath it, shut within 
 the earth, that death comes kindly to him by whom death 
 has never been desired. The swallows flew in and out of the 
 quiet place, building their nests in the eaves and gables of 
 the church. The soft pale sunbeams fell through the dark 
 shadows of the yew-trees and the gray plumes of the willows. 
 Now and then some cry of a fisherman to another from the 
 shore came faintly on the air ; and the broad white wing of 
 a curlew brushed the topmost boughs of the churchyard 
 trees. When she left her father’s grave it was again even- 
 ing ; calm and colorless and sad as English evenings are, it 
 seemed like the reflection of her own soul. Her choice was 
 made. 
 
 It was late in the afternoon of the third day when she 
 entered the woods of Ladysrood. 
 
 They were in all the delicate and lovely greenery of their 
 first foliage. The braken and ferns were waving breast 
 high, and the birds were singing in the brushwood of the 
 undergrowth and in the branches of elm, oak, and beach. 
 The ground was blue in many a nook with pimpernel and 
 wild hyacinth. Across the grassy drives ever and again a 
 deer bounded or a hare scudded. He had never cared {or 
 sport as other men care, and his woods and forests were for 
 the most part the peaceful haunts of unmolested woodland 
 creatures. She thought dreamily of the old story of Gri- 
 seldis ; had Griseldis, when her triumph came, lost the love 
 out of her heart which had borne her through all her trials ? 
 Had she, when bidden to return to her kingdom, lost all 
 wish for it, and only felt the heaviness of the burden she 
 was summoned to take up — the weight and imprisonment of 
 the reunion ? 
 
 Likely enough ; likely enough that Griseldis had been a 
 happier women in her misery, when hope and love had still 
 been with her, than in her return to her palace and her pomp. 
 
 She passed through all the sunshine and stillness and 
 fragrance of the dewy giades, and entered the great gardens 
 of the south-west where the rose-walk was where her father 
 bade her have patience, and Aubrey had said the same words 
 to her — words which had seemed to her then so cold, so com* 
 monplace, so barren. 
 
 She saw the stately evergreen gardens, the long aisles of 
 the berceaux , the wide stone flights of the terrace steps, and 
 the western front of the house — its buttresses and casements 
 hung and garlanded with pink and golden banksia in full 
 
GUILDEnor. 
 
 $98 
 
 flower — and for a little while she could not see them for the 
 tears which blinded her eyes. There her father had stood 
 with her in the summer night and had said to her : — 
 
 “It lies with you to retain the angels which stand about 
 the throne of life — honor, unselfishness, and sympathy.” 
 
 The men at work as she passed and the two ser- 
 vants who were idling on the terrace recognized her, and 
 saluted her humbly, and were startled and afraid to see her 
 there. 
 
 She bade them send the housekeeper to her. 
 
 “My lord returns to-morrow. Prepare everything,” she 
 said briefly. 
 
 The old woman kissed her hand and murmured trembling, 
 “ The Lord be thanked ! ” 
 
 Gladys looked at her with a strange look. “ Will it be 
 well or ill ? ” she thought, and said no more ; but entered 
 the house where she was mistress, and uncovered her head 
 and sat down by one of the great windows, and gazed out at 
 the gardens smiling in the western sun. An infinite peace 
 seemed to lie like a benediction on the great house in its 
 silence and fragrance and majesty. But there was no peace 
 in her heart. 
 
 “ My father will be content, if he knows,” she thought. 
 
 She could not think of his soul as dead, as ignorant or as 
 careless of her fate. 
 
 She rose after awhile and went up the staircase to her own 
 apartments, Kenneth and the other dogs following her with 
 soft noiseless tread ; they knew the place again, but the 
 change to it troubled them. She let the women take off her 
 the rough serge gown she wore, symbol of the freedom and 
 the solitude she relinquished, and clothe her in one of the 
 many gowns which she had left there ; a gown of pale gray 
 velvet, embroidered with silver threads, with old laces at the 
 throat and arms. As she looked at the worn folds of the 
 serge skirts, with all its stains of sea-sand and of wet grasses, 
 she sighed as Griseldis might, despite all, when she put off 
 her peasant’s kirtle for the regal robe once more. 
 
 With the old worn gown she put away from her forever 
 liberty of the affections, liberty of the actions, liberty even 
 of the thoughts ; for she was very loyal — giving herself once 
 more she gave her undivided allegiance. 
 
 She clasped a necklace about her throat — a necklace 
 of old Venetian gold- work which he had given her in the 
 early days of their stay in Venice, and turned from the mii> 
 
396 
 
 GUILDEEOY. 
 
 ror, feeling as though a score of years had gone since she 
 had last stood before it there. Then she descended the stairs, 
 where the afternoon sun still streamed through the painted 
 windows across the broad steps and the oaken balustrade. 
 
 She went slowly, feeling as though she dragged a dead 
 body with her, the amber glow of the late afternoon shining 
 on the silvery softness of the velvet and the gold chainwork 
 of the necklace as she moved. The house was flooded with 
 that rich light — that evening splendor — that fragrance from 
 blossoming gardens and from dewy woodlands ; it seemed 
 to make a festival with its beauty and its odors and its color 
 for her as she moved. 
 
 But her face was white, her step was reluctant, her heart 
 sick. For she knew that he was on his way thither, and 
 would soon rejoin her. Even her return to Ladysrood would 
 be attributed by the world to coarse and selfish reasons ; and 
 the remembrance of the imputation of low motives which the 
 world is sure to cast on high emotions must ever be to the 
 nature which is above the herd a loathsome and gailing re- 
 membrance. 
 
 She looked at a portrait by Watts of Aubrey which hung 
 in the picture-gallery. It seemed to gaze at her with eyes 
 which had life in them, and its lips seemed to utter an 
 eternal farewell. They would meet as friends and relatives ; 
 they would meet perforce and continually, but the old sweet 
 intimacy was over for ever. 
 
 It left an immense loss, an immense void, in her life, 
 which she had no belief that the future could ever fill. 
 
 She wandered through the long succession of rooms and 
 galleries, and halls and corridors ; the places were all so 
 familiar, yet so strange to her. Like the dogs, she was 
 troubled by a divided sense of exile and of return ; after the 
 little lowly chambers and lonely shores of Christslea, Ladys- 
 rood seemed a palace for a queen. 
 
 Her husband had given it all to her ; he had found her 
 poor and obscure and had enriched her with all he possessed. 
 She had never cared for these things indeed, in any vulgar 
 or avaricious sense, but absence from them had taught her 
 to measure their value in the eyes of others, and to under- 
 stand why her father, least worldly of all men, had said to 
 her that the greatness of Gruilderoy ? s gifts demanded from 
 her gratitude and fealty. 
 
 She entered the drawing-rooms of the western wing; where 
 
GUILDEROY. 397 
 
 the last glow of the sunset was lighting up with crimson re- 
 flections all the beauty and luxury of the apartments. 
 
 She walked to and fro them in their solitude, bidding the 
 servants leave the windows open to the evening air, which 
 came in cool and damp and full of the fragrance of spring 
 flowers and spring woodlands. 
 
 It was the last breath of the life which she had given up 
 and left for ever. 
 
 Henceforward she would live in the world — for the world 
 > — of the world ; Guilderoy, she knew, would never lead any 
 other existence. The burden of its artificiality, the cruelty 
 of its crowds, the sameness of its pleasures, seemed to weigh 
 on her already with that monotony and that irritation which 
 she had always found in them. 
 
 The hours passed on ; the day altered into night ; the 
 servants came and lighted all the waxlights in the sconces and 
 chandeliers of the suite of rooms. She stood by one of the 
 ©till open windows, looking out at the shadows of the west 
 garden, listening to the peaceful splashing of the fountains 
 falling in the fishponds under the trees. ' 
 
 She could hear her own heart beat in the stillness. She 
 knew that he had returned, and must soon come to her. 
 
 Tenderness and bitterness strove together in her soul ; she 
 remembered her father’s words spoken in that chamber, and 
 she acknowledged their nobility and beauty ; but she also re- 
 membered the words with which Guilderoy had there de- 
 clared to her that he had never loved her and loved another 
 woman. 
 
 “ Why drag the chain between us when it is pain to 
 both ? ” she thought ; and her memory went to Aubrey. 
 
 The evening became night ; the curfew-bell, which was 
 still rung at Ladysrood, tolled from the clock-tower, the air 
 grew colder and had the sweeth breath of a million of prim- 
 roses and hyacinths to it. 
 
 In the stillness and sweetness of it Guilderoy stood before 
 her. He looked older, paler, more weary than he had done 
 when he had left her there eighteen months before. He had 
 suffered both in his passions and in his pride ; he had judged 
 himself, and the world had judged him, and the woman he loved 
 had judged him, and he and they had alike condemned him. 
 Would this other woman, whom he did not love, but in whose 
 hands the conventional honor of his name was placed by the 
 conventional laws of the world, condemn him also? She looked 
 at him and made no gesture or movement which could assist 
 
395 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 him ; her face was cold, and her eyes were passionless. 
 
 He crossed the room and kissed her hand with his accus- 
 tomed grace and with a ceremonious and serious courtesy. 
 
 His lips were as cold as the hand which they touched. 
 
 “ I thank you,” he said, simply. The words cost him 
 much to utter ; he felt the unresponding and fixed gaze <of 
 her eyes upon him, and the warmer impulses, the more ten- 
 der repentance, with which he had entered her presence froze 
 under them. 
 
 “You have nothing to thank me for,” she said coldly. 
 “You have asked me to return to you for the world’s sake, 
 and for the world’s sake I have accepted.” 
 
 “ Only for that ?” he said, with hesitation, perplexed and 
 troubled. 
 
 “ For that, and for my promise to my father. I said that 
 I would never bring evil repute upon his name and yours, 
 and I will not.” 
 
 “ But have you no other feeling ? None for me ? ” The 
 words escaped him almost unconsciously, and there was an ac- 
 cent of emotion, almost of entreaty in them. 
 
 “ No ; none now.” 
 
 The answer was sad and immutable as death. 
 
 His face flushed as he heard it. 
 
 “ Had you ever any ? ” he asked her. 
 
 “ Oh, yes ; ” she sighed as she spoke, and her eyes softened ; 
 and darkened with many memories. “ I loved you greatly ; 
 I have suffered greatly ; but 1 do not love you now, nor have 
 you power to pain me. I was a child when I loved you; I 
 am a woman, now. I will be honest with you. I do not care 
 — I shall never care ; but I will be to you what you wish ; 
 and the world — the world of which you think so much ! — 
 shall never know that it is so, and your honor shall be as 
 dear to me as though you were dear.” 
 
 He heard her witli profound humiliation, with unspeakable 
 pain. He had believed her cold, but he had thought that, so 
 far as she had loved at all, her heart had been always with 
 him. He had come to her in repentance, in wistful desire 
 for peace, in a vague hope of he knew not what new kind of 
 happiness ; and he found the chambers of her soul closed to 
 him, and occupied possibly by another. 
 
 He had nerved himself to bend to what was am act of 
 humiliation and supplication; and, unknown to himself, he 
 had looked in return for the tenderness and sweetness of rec* 
 onciliation, even of welcome. 
 
GUILDEROY. 399 
 
 (t I know/’ he murmured wearily, “ that my offences against 
 you have been many and great.” 
 
 “ It is not that. I have learned to know that they were 
 natural enough. I was nothing to you ; others were much. 
 In the beginning I did not understand you ; I did not know 
 anything of men’s natures or of their passions. I must have 
 fatigued you, been insufficient for you; that I can under- 
 stand. My father always told me I was to blame that I had 
 hot indulgence.” 
 
 “ Your father was merciful as a god, always and to all. He 
 would tell you to be indulgent now.” 
 
 “ Yes ; I know that he would.* I know that he would con- 
 demn me more than he would you.” 
 
 He gazed at her in silence ; she was still so young that even 
 suffering had had no power to mar her great personal beauty ; 
 her face was colorless and calm, her eyes full of unspeakable 
 sadness, her attitude unconsciously one of dignity and rebuke. 
 Vaguely he felt that it was possible that he should some day 
 love this woman hopelessly since she no more loved him. 
 
 “ If you have ceased to care for me,” he said almost inaud- 
 ibly, “ I cannot complain ; I have only caused you suffering 
 and mortification. I have told you that I will endeavor to 
 atone in the future j but there is no reason why you should 
 believe me.” 
 
 “ I believe that you mean it now.” 
 
 “But you have no faith in my constancy of purpose ? Why 
 should you have any ? Yet I am sincere. Her eyes rested 
 on him musingly, and softened as they gazed. 
 
 “ I do believe you, but I cannot give you the welcome 
 you wished,” she said wearily. “ I cannot — I cannot lie. If 
 you had come back to me a year ago I should have rejoiced ; 
 I loved you then — ah ! why can I not now ? Where is it all 
 gone ? Why did you leave me alone ?” 
 
 “ You were not alone ! You had Aubrey ! And what you 
 deny to me you give to him ! ” 
 
 She shrank from the name as if he had stabbed her with it. 
 
 “ That is ungenerous,” she murmured. “ He has been 
 loyalty itself to you ; only a day ago he pleaded for you with 
 all his might and blamed me ; neither my life nor yours is 
 worth one hour of his ! ” 
 
 Violent words rose to Guilderoy’s lips, but he repressed 
 them with great effort; the justice and the generosity which 
 were in his nature beneath all the egotism of long self-indul- 
 gence conquered the passion of jealousy and of offence which 
 
400 
 
 GUILDEROY. 
 
 stirred his life to its very centre. After all, what right had 
 he to blame or to judge ? What title had he left- to speak of 
 his right to her affections ? ” 
 
 “ The fault of all is mine/’ he said with great emotion. 
 “ I left you in a position of the greatest peril : if you had 
 injured me in any way I should but have had what I merited. 
 Forgive me, dear. I led you into the captivity of marriage 
 when you were too young to know what you did with your 
 life ; and I was too careless and too selfish to he your guard- 
 ian in it. It is the cruellest folly of all on earth — that bind- 
 ing of two lives together like two corpses from which the 
 life has fled. We are not the first victims to it by many 
 tens of thousands, and in all ages every greater and higher 
 soul has poured forth its eternal protest against it. If you 
 love me no more, how dare I blame you ? — I, who so soon 
 ceased to love you ? My poor child, believe me at least in 
 this — from my heart I beseech you to pardon me the mad 
 caprice in which I bound your fate to mine. I thought that 
 you would be content, like so many women, with all the ma- 
 terial pleasures of the world, of rank and of wealth ; I forgot 
 that you were your father’s daughter, and that those could 
 have no power to console you when your heart was seared 
 and your pride was wounded. Forgive me, dear ! ” 
 
 He knelt at her feet as he spoke, and he kissed the hem of 
 her skirts. She passed her hand over his hair with the same 
 gesture, half of tenderness, half of pity, which Beatrice Soria 
 had used. 
 
 A sigh which came from her soul’s depths breathed over 
 him where he knelt. 
 
 “I forgive you, I hope, and you must forgive me,” she 
 said gently. “Do not ask more of me yet.” 
 
 “ I will ask you nothing,” he answered, touched to the 
 heart. “For I have long ceased to deserve anything.” 
 
 A few months later the country learned that Lord Aubrey, 
 his party having returned to power, had accepted a distant 
 and arduous Vice-royalty, and, in its coarse foolishness, it 
 envied him his greatness. 
 
 [the end.] 
 

 

 
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