H il I BE I I Kg] I HI 1 E Ipl || HIP HHBHr /-/" /f i ■ m t m wm fli Hi M \ L . ;j , ^SBB j 'Id ■ ' - i >\js :>' '«. •■' '' stZ^ •■*> - x / *>,&> Tf-'l ^■'■' 4, / v iff ,/" ' >'■ / . j ;; 3Y,'' f. _w-Al ^-i » ~ L I B HAHY OF THE UNIVERSITY Of ILLI NOIS Tom Turner Collection 82.3 v.l A SNAPT GOLD RING. BY FREDERICK WEDMORE. The hour which might have been, yet might not be, Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore Yet whereof life was barren,— on what shore Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea?"— D. G. Rossetti. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 1871. [the right of translation is reserved,] c/5 fo3 TO PATTY WBDyVLOI\E. London: April, 187 1. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/snaptgoldring01wedm A SNAPT GOLD RING. CHAPTER I. If London streets are tolerable at any time, they are tolerable in the cheerful bustle of early evening, when in the main thoroughfares carriage traffic is lessened, when shopping is over, when the stress of daily occupations is past, and the stream of middle - class life, released from counter and work-room, sets briskly westward for an hour of exercise in the fresher air of suburb or park. So thought Paul Warner, as he stood by the door of his club, in Hanover Square, about eight o'clock on a July evening, and considered what he should do. VOL. I. I 2 A SNAPT GOLD RING. He had performed the later duties of the day : having dined satisfactorily, and ascer- tained with some expenditure of time and trouble that there was nothing in the papers. His earlier tasks had been not less duly fulfilled ; for he had corrected some bad drawing in a study made the day before, and had added a few effective touches to a picture which had cost him three months' labour. Disinclined for further work, but dis- posed to contemplate with interest whatever slight affairs might arrest his attention, he gazed across the Square with the ready curiosity of a flaneur, and wished, like the Athenians, for some new thing. An opera-bound carriage, with well-dressed women, drove rapidly by ; a flower-girl crossed the Square, with her basket of faded geraniums; a match-boy offered lights for a halfpenny. There was nothing new. Only a cooling breeze came down the length of Brook Street from the Park : the light smoke steadily ascended from chimneys in the house- A SNAPT GOLD RING. 3 roofs, opposite the club ; and, high above the mazes of the town, thin feathery clouds, faint rose-coloured, were combed out delicately, upon the blue-grey breadth of placid evening-sky. " I will go westward, like the course of empire, — especially as I live in that direction," thought Mr. Warner. " At this hour the Park will at all events be full of people who are there because they like it, and not because it is ' the thing.' I will take the Oxford Street way." And in five minutes he was in Oxford Street : on the broad pavement of the upper side. There was the usual throng of homeward-bent or pleasure -bent foot-passengers : counting- house clerks who were late ; artisans' wives, with baskets holding the purchases they had made in Holborn; milliners' assistants, burdened with newspaper-parcels which there seemed no way of carrying ; shopmen and their sweet- hearts, arm-in-arm ; enterprising boys who recommended comic journals; human ''sand- wiches," bearing the board-advertisements of concert and theatre ; and here and there a 4 A SNAPT GOLD RING. detective, walking as if the very pavement were an object of serious suspicion. At the corner of Vere Street there was a cluster of people. At the corner of Bond Street, exactly opposite, there was a similar gathering. Had there been an accident in the road, or a chimney on fire, or was some Royal visitor to London expected soon to pass ? Mr. Warner stopped ; saw nothing particular ; and cast his eye upon police constable 49 B. That officer looked, to say the least, uninviting; and I am not dis- posed to blame Mr. Warner severely for appealing to the pleasantest face in the little crowd — it was also one of the nearest to him — and asking what had happened. The pleasantest face belonged to a girl of about nineteen, who turned at once to answer the question. Her full brown eyes, intelligent and bright, were little shaded by her bonnet of black lace, nor was her erect lithe figure hidden by the short blue jacket and light grey dress, with train sweeping the pavement. Ample A SXAPT GOLD RING. 5 brown hair, strong and slightly waving — not soft or silky — was gathered in three broad rolls at the back of the head, The features were scarcely regular ; yet they were not wanting in a certain harmony, which was more the result of a vividness and mobility of expression than of actual physical beauty. There was nothing, then, to strike an admirer of living dolls ; but face and gesture spoke — - spoke plainly in the firm line of the mouth, in the quick light in the eyes, in the bold curve of vigorous hair, and in the swift unhesitating movement — of a strength of nature not often possessed by girls so young, and least of all possessed by those about whose aimless lives there has been wound the velvet chain of " English comforts." Perhaps Paul Warner, looking at the bright countenance, was a little disappointed by the answer. If so, he should have remembered that his own question had been perfectly com- monplace, and that in all probability the girl was merely a milliner. 6 A SNAPT GOLD RING. " I haven't the least idea what it is," said the young woman ; " but I expect it's nothing worth waiting for." And she left the cluster of people. Her way lay down Oxford Street : so did Paul Warner's. It would have been easy for him to have raised his hat, and crossed to the other side. But he did not do so ; and, having walked a score of steps by the side of the girl, it seemed slighting to turn off without a word or a sign. " You are going home alone ? " said the bachelor, who was never very brilliant upon awkward occasions. " I walk home alone every evening," was the reply ; " and I walk to business every morning, -too." " The amount of energy you need must depend upon the distance." " What a civil way of putting a question ! I live at Notting Hill." " Quite a journey for you," suggested Paul. " They know me on the road ; and at one A SNAPT GOLD RING. 7 or two shops they say the clocks are set by me. For I leave home at half-past eight, and get to business exactly at nine. It takes me half-an-hour to walk from Notting Hill to Bond Street, if I put on the steam — which I always do. This sort of walking wouldn't do it, though." " You make a long day," said Mr. Warner, considerately, " and I thought you must be tired. We will walk faster, however. And if it's not a very rude question, what is the business that occupies you so ? " " I'm in a corset-maker's shop ; a stay- maker's — you understand ? " " Behind the counter ? " " Sometimes ; but quite as often upstairs, where I work a sewing-machine. Only, every evening I have to undress my window in the shop, and every morning I dress it." Warner smiled. She spoke as if the window were a child. " They won't let anybody else do it now. Once, another girl did, and in the morning there was a pretty row, indeed. A pair of silk stays 8 A SNAPT GOLD RING. — mauve moiris, too — were quite spoiled. Put away in a dusty drawer. So now I always do it." " You evidently understand the business," remarked Mr. Warner. " Well, I ought to ; for it's five years that I've been working at it — that is, ever since I was fourteen years old. We used to do hand- work at first, and when the sewing-machines came in it would have been all up with me if I hadn't got father to buy me a small one, that I learned to use in the evenings at home." " So you know how to take care of yourself, and be up to the times." Kate Lemon laughed, and answered, " Per- haps I do. Much care would be taken of me if I didn't take care of myself ! " She grew graver then, and added, " A girl has need to, here in London : the streets at night show that, unless you shut your eyes." " Then you don't go much to places of amusement. Never been to Cremorne, I sup- pose r Kate hesitated for a minute ; then quickly A SNAPT GOLD RING. 9 spoke, — " Well, I won't tell you a story. I did go to Cremorne once." 11 And why ? " u I went from curiosity, to see Hilda Grant. You've heard of her ? " Warner nodded. " Seen her photographs, perhaps ? Every- one has. She used to go to school with me. How she was dressed, that evening at Cremorne ! Gracious me ! She did look altered. And, do you know, she recognised me at once, and touched me on the shoulder." " What did you do then ? " 11 Never spoke or looked round. How could I ? Poor silly thing! When a girl has got a good home of her own, she should stick to it. At least, that's my opinion, Hilda Grant was always rather fast, and never cared about work. I like work and fun too." " I can tell you," said Warner, " you are a thousand times happier than she is ; though all London talks about her diamonds and her painted beauty," IO A SNAPT GOLD RING. These were simple words, but spoken with genuine impulse. Paul's companion ' looked up at him, in the pleasure of confidence. It was a touch of nature. The dusk had fallen now. They were near the Marble Arch ; and by the broad Park-side the line of lamps glimmered down the long Bayswater Road, in the grey of evening. Paul Warner took the girl's hand, and drew it within his arm. A SNAPT GOLD RING, I I CHAPTER II. No two persons who walked that evening, in the beginning of July, along the streets of London, can have presented in their characters a much stronger contrast than did Paul Warner and Kate Lemon. They were alike, perhaps, in one point only — disregard of the conven- tional. And even here they were not quite alike, since the girl's was an unconscious dis- regard, while the man derived a frequent satisfaction in measuring the gulf that lay between himself and those whose first question in the acts of Life is, " What will people say ? " A poet of society has told us, with the truth that wounds, that ours is a world Where many are afraid of God, But more, of Mrs. Grundy. 12 A SNAPT GOLD RING. Warner might belong to the first class : he could never belong to the second. Now the little stay-maker knew nothing beyond the streets of London ; and no quick-thoughted girl, familiar with those streets, could have been simpler-minded. She had a merry country- heart, in the crowded town. But Warners life had been a different life, and had borne a very different fruit. He was the son of an English physician, who had practised in Paris. His mother was a French- woman. His childhood, chiefly spent in Paris, had been in character half- French, half- English. He had astonished his schoolmates, in the Faubourg St. Honore, by his wish to introduce the boyish games which he had learned during holidays in England ; but he had also astonished the English playfellows who had instructed him, by his previous ignorance of " I spy," prisoner's base, football, and cricket. In earlier days he had been taught at home, and his pleasures had been pleasures of imagina- tion. At seven years old he was surrounded A SNAPT GOLD RING. I 3 by a company of invisible acquaintances, who dwelt in various corners of his father's reception- rooms, and with whom he had frequent and confidential interviews : now beneath the dinner-table, now by the sideboard, now under the friendly roof of his mother's grand piano. He knew their names, and their affairs in detail. It was imagination's earliest move- ment. Two years later, when reading was no longer an irksome task, and his pen moved quickly over writing-paper — spelling by sound — he thought his father's books, whose covers he had dared to gaze upon, the most remark- able productions of any that had struck his marvelling and enquiring age. He would write a few lines of childish nonsense on bits of note-paper shaped and folded like a volume ; and on the first page would inscribe some title with which he had grown familiar. Thus were issued to his mother his youthful reproductions of Oliver Twist, Hood's Poems, and Taifs Maga- zine. Then, when school-days came, with their 14 A SNAPT GOLD RING. allotted task of work, the boy gave up these idle dreams of authorship, and slowly rose from the Delectus to Nepos, from Ncpos to Cczsar, and so reached the day for opening that page — "Anna virumque cano" — which is the gate of Latin poetry. In later years he mounted, on warm spring mornings, the roof of an early omnibus, and rode from the Faubourg to a spot near the Tour Saint Jacques ; where he descended, then crossed the Seine by the Pont Saint Michel, and threading his way through narrow streets, reached the shady lecture-room of the grey Sorbonne. Here, with the youth of the Quartier des Ecoles he sat, note-book and pencil in hand, while a white-haired professor discoursed on Latin history and Greek song ; or while a younger man made an exposition of Roman law, with numerous allusions to the events of the day — allusions which were taken up readily and cheered loudly by the mixed crowd of impetuous students, anxious jour- nalists, unoccupied notaries, and indigent philo- A SNAPT GOLD RING. 1 5 sophers, who longed for a new regime. The vision of intellectual life had faded, and its reality had begun. In leisure hours he strolled before the long range of pictures in the Louvre ; gazed with delight upon the groups of Velasquez, the Psyche of Gerard, and Rafael's Virgin with the flowers ; or left the canvases on which the Flemish "genius of evil" wrought out — with strong and gorgeous pencil — his degrading conceptions, to descend to the cool galleries filled with antique sculpture, and reach the place where perfect beauty and perfect power are incarnate in the Venus de Milo. Art, which was a pleasure first, had become an education. Warner went at first to see the pictures, and then he went to paint from them. Once it had seemed enough to him to notice Titian on the walls, but now it was a keener delierht to see glowing upon the canvas, under his own hand, some likeness to the great old master. In technical qualities this was probably poor, 1 6 A SNAPT GOLD RING. when compared with the productions of copyists who had learned to draw, and who had copied everything and conceived nothing during twenty years. But technical qualities would come later, with systematic study. He longed for them now, and could not wait. Pushed by an irresistible vocation which might have been obeyed afterwards with a less restless haste — had Warner been other than himself — he left the University of Paris without his degree, and exchanged the lecture-rooms of the Sor- bonne for the School of Fine Arts. At the School of Fine Arts his progress was really steady and decided; though in his work there was more of promise than of present achievement. The old doctor began to be disappointed. On remarking his son's ability he had hoped for quicker results. Young Warner, instead of being already the rival of Gerome or of Frere, was painting with a laborious correctness what some thought cold and others weak. He produced an Ajax, seven feet high ; and nobody took much notice of it. A SNAPT GOLD RING. I 7 Then he painted a poor domestic scene, which sold at once to an Englishman. His acquaint- ances were delighted, and said he was on the road to fame. A great painter, who was then the glory of the school of France, and who kept in his old age the passion and enthusiasm of his youth, passed by the work with the comment that it was all the more shameful because it was done so well. Warner heard of this, and took the hint with the grateful readiness which is rarely wanting to nascent power. Possessed by a masculine love of production, he set himself again a worthier task, and worked at it with a will, but under circumstances which were not quite favourable. He was himself unsettled, restless, fermenting. And the work was done amidst the distractions of society ; in the youth of a nature whose impulse was not indeed towards laziness, but towards the excitement of pleasure. One or two critics saw that the picture promised greater things, and said so. But they were few ; and, for the most part, they VOL. I. 2 1 8 A SNAPT GOLD RING. addressed an unregarding public, occupied with known names. Then Warner's father died — in fever, caught from a patient. The doctor's .wife became ill in nursing him ; and, closely watched by her son, she halted for four weeks between life and death — rallying on one day to relapse the next. At last all was over, and on a January morning, with snow upon the ground, they laid her among the garlands of immortelles, the graveyard crosses, and the crowded tombs of Montmartre. Slowly down from the cold hill- side, into the bustle of Paris, and to the house that must now be a lonely home, came Paul Warner. He quitted it next day, for Fontaine- bleau. Anything for distraction, anything for change ! The forest that had looked gay in his youth, on summer visits, seemed sombre and significant during his first winter wandering. The outline of the woods stood definite and dark against the yellow sunset sky of early evening. Warner felt the landscape. For the time, his life had ceased to be pleasure. A SNAPT GOLD RING. 1 9 Then he made a decision which exercised upon his career a momentous influence, for good and evil, and which often in after times he looked back upon with regret. Paris seemed to him unbearable. It was associated, no doubt, with the teaching he had profited by, and the art to which he had devoted himself ; but also with the one pure affection of his youth — with his love for the parents who were dead. Its very streets seemed to him the reminding witnesses of a vanished happiness. So Warner went to London in the spring of 1865 ; and as the studies he had undertaken were far advanced, nothing occurred imme- diately to make him question the wisdom of the change. Four months later, still restless and unsettled, he started for Rome, anxious to correct his modern tendency to pettiness by " a long stare at Michael Angelo." In December he came back to London. The friends of his father opened their circle to him, and gradually his own circle widened into the spheres of literature and art. 20 A SNAPT GOLD RING. The next exhibition of the Academy con- tained a picture which was in part the result of Roman inspiration. But probably it was not severe enough to be unpopular : though the strength was there, men's eyes were taken by what seemed its easy grace. Popular opinion, variable as the wind, set in his favour ; and the artist, bidden to one great house and another, during the season in 1866 and 1867, ran the chance of being spoiled. His work might have deteriorated. His powers might have been relaxed or frittered in the following of society's monotonous routine. But that was not his danger ; for the life that he felt and cared for — a life of the intellect, a life of the senses — was almost as distinct from the glitter of fashion as from the dulness of middle-class Philistinism. Perhaps he would have been more appro- priately placed in ancient Athens than in modern London. True, he was modern enough in certain phases of his temperament ; but in others, at least as many, he was removed from the life that was led around A SNAPT GOLD RING. 2 1 him. He had no love of small proprieties and a conduct of convention. He would have rebelled against puritanical restrictions, and the little bourgeois virtues. Keenly sensitive in body and mind, a life without pleasure would have been to him no life at all. With him an evil act was a discord, rather than a sin. He had many regrets, but no remorse. And possibly it was this absence of personal senti- ment on the matter of morality — in that word's restricted sense — that made much of the weak- ness of his character and of the strength of his work. Good and bad were seen by him, expressed by him, with equal power, with equal promptitude. His dramatic sympathy was narrowed by no prejudice. The conduct of his life was regulated by no law. 2 2 A SNAPT GOLD RING. CHAPTER III. Paul Warner thought no more of the stay- maker of Bond Street. He had seen her safely home ; and when they parted the affair was over. It was but an incident in a crowded life. The idea of a new picture had lately grown upon Warner, and he was preparing to work at it. But there were other occupations, urgent enough for the present. The portrait of a friend who had done him services in London was upon the easel : though Warner did not like the task, he had promised to fulfil it. And it was then the middle of July : people were pressing into the remaining fortnight of the season engagements which should have ex- tended over a month. All day long — at lunch, A SNAPT GOLD RING. 23 tea, dinner, and at midnight — people were " entertaining," and being " entertained." It was laborious pastime. Hospitality waxed fast and furious as it drew to its close. Exhausted London was upon the eve of "recruiting" in the country. The fortnight passed, and another fortnight, too. The House had risen, then ; the Park was empty ; the clubs were in the hands of painters and decorators ; and an August sun smote upon the closed shutters and deserted pavements of Mayfair. Fortunate men were bringing down the grouse upon the moors. Industrious women had found fresh flirting- ground at many an English country-house, or foreign watering-place. But Warner was still in town. He had been asked into Sussex and to the Perthshire Highlands, but invitations had to be declined. At length, with the end of August, came his hour of release. He was thoroughly weary, and could only allow himself a month's holiday : perhaps scarcely that. The time was too short 24 A SNAPT GOLD RING. to make it worth while to go abroad, beyond Paris ; and Paris would have been no change. Where, then, in England should he go ? He was familiar with much of London life, but had never had the opportunity of becoming a Cock- ney. Had the Cockneys no favourite place of recreation where they could be studied by a painter who, in his hours of lassitude, might observe them not without advantage, since Truth as well as Beauty is the aim of art ? Bradshaw would indicate the way to Margate, and to Margate Warner would go. He wanted not only to be amused with the humours of a crowd : he required fresh air and open sea. Margate had these, and so our unconventional acquaintance departed thither, without thinking it needful to conceal his destination. The first thing that one does at Margate is to walk upon the jetty which Ingoldsby made famous. The evening of his arrival Warner performed this feat : warily moving amongst the crowd of London tradesmen, London me- chanics, shopmen and shopgirls, sailors, and A SXAPT GOLD RING. 25 " little vulgar boys." A refined face, he dis- covered, was a rarity. His professional studies of City mediocrities out for a holiday would soon become a weariness. But towards the end of the pier a face quite other than the typical face of Margate met his view. It was that of a very young-looking woman, who had been slowly pacing, alone, the extremity of the jetty, and who seemed to Warner to be waiting for some one expected to join her. Now she was still : gazing down at the light dancing waves immediately beneath her, or peering out upon the broad expanse of pearl-grey sea and evening sky, whose restful beauty strangely contrasted with the busy flutter on the pier. Warner looked at the water, and then at the lonely young woman. What did he see when he approached as closely as was compatible with Margate's code of politeness ? — and that is not a severe one. An affluence of pale gold hair falling loose to the waist. A fair white skin, clearly-cut features, and calm grey eyes. When first he saw her it was as if some novice 2 6 A SNAPT GOLD RING. — pleasant in face and pure in deed — had wan- dered beyond convent walls, or as if into some Greek girl's statue there had been breathed the breath of life, so that a woman stood before him, still, passionless, and pale as the marble. For she looked to him a quiet-hearted girl, with the world and her unknown life before her, and with little lying behind. Upon her fair unruffled face there seemed no record of a Past. She was as a sleeper but just now awakened. But whatever may have been the specula- tions of the rising painter upon the promising- looking subject at the end of the pier, they were interrupted by the arrival of a middle-aged woman who accosted the girl. The girl looked like a lady, but her new companion might rea- sonably have been taken for a well-to-do Bays- water lodging-house keeper, or the wife of a tradesman in the Borough. How was this ? " Kate's gone straight home, my dear. She was not long over her shoppin'. We must go likewise, I s'pose, as Mr. 'Assell will be wantin' 'is supper. I've pucchassed sausages, my dear." A SNAPT GOLD RING. 2J " A plebeian beginning ! " thought Paul Warner, as he heard the expression of the good woman's wifely solicitude. " Has Mr. Hassell been indoors all the evening, aunt ? " " Yes. He was fatigued with joggin' over to Broadstairs yesterday. Never mind. He's as 'appy as a prince, with his glass of old ale and his Lloyd's newspaper. This 'oliday have done him a precious deal of good . . . Come along, my dear ! " And they departed. " Is it possible," thought Warner, looking after them, " that a girl so refined and ladylike can walk through a crowd with this stout Juno of the Borough, and not be conscious of the incongruity ? Half the little misses of the day would go in fear of their reputation for gentility." But no such compunction rose in the mind of Madeleine Greyling. She was entirely simple, and wished no one to think of her as other than she was. Of her inexperience she 28 A SNAPT GOLD RING. was just aware. " I have been nowhere and seen nothing," she would sometimes say ; never in self-depreciation, but as the calm statement of a fact which there was no reason to suppress. Malicious people said she might have added with equal accuracy, " I have thought nothing, felt nothing, done nothing." But that was surely rather hard upon the owner of so sweet a face — upon the placid possessor of a charm so perfect. Warner's time hung heavily at Margate, and on the following morning he discovered that it did. He got tired of gazing at the sea and sky. If he sat down he found himself looking at his watch, and in ten minutes he would move off almost involuntarily. He could not bathe all day long. And when he had lunched once he could not lunch again. He had brought no books, for reading would have been no rest to him. At home he was always reading and painting. At last he bought a shilling Shakspeare, and tired his eyes over the small print, and A SXAPT GOLD RING. 2Q. thin grey paper. It was, at all events, better than playing pool with the " cads " who con- gregated in the billiard - room of the hotel. That which he felt the want of was companion- ship, to make his time of laziness go by without fatigue. He would have welcomed, as a friend and comforter, the dullest man he was accustomed to meet at his club, and observations which must have sounded trite in Piccadilly would have seemed absolutely brilliant at Margate. Warner resolved upon long walks as the best remedy for weariness. He would visit every day some village that was new to him, and would inspect its church. A church is always interesting. It is the centre of the village life, and when you have seen it the impression of the place itself is somehow better fixed upon your mind. " To-morrow," thought Paul Warner, " my rural visitation shall begin. The month will pass, and I shall have filled a note-book." Next morning was extremely wet, and the project had to be abandoned — or, at all events, 30 A SNAPT GOLD RING. postponed. Warner spent so dull a forenoon that he went so far as to direct the waiter to bring him Bradshaw s Guide, and the depar- ture of a guest from the hotel seemed imminent. But about one o'clock the rain ceased, — though swiftly-driven clouds were dark in the sky — and Warner, who liked to feel the freshness of the air after a summer rainfall, strolled on to the cliff, armed with an umbrella. Half Margate had turned out for the same purpose, and the streets were full. The painter cast an observant eye upon the crowd, and speedily recognised a face which he had seen before. Two women were just emerging from a shop as Paul Warner passed it. One of them he saw to be the plebeian chaperone of the girl he had noticed on the pier, but on this occasion the girl was not her companion. Nor was the person with her the husband of whose simple and easy happiness Warner had unavoidably heard. Another girl, less a lady than she who had been seen upon the jetty, was the second member of the party. Her face was turned for A SNAPT GOLD RING. 3 1 an instant to look at some object beyond Warner in the street. He glanced, and recog- nised at once Kate Lemon. It was evident, then, that the lady of the pier and the work-girl of Bond Street were in some way connected : at least through the medium of their common chaperone. It was strange ; for the lady looked so thoroughly a lady, the work-girl was confessedly a work-girl, and the companion belonged, quite palpably, to the lower middle class in London. Where was the explanation ? The problem was not an easy one, and it suited the present circum- stances of an idle man. " Cela m intrigue" thought Warner. Next day he visited a neighbouring village and its church, according to the plan he had designed, and in the evening he walked again upon the pier. There he beheld his casual acquaintance of Bond Street, unaccompanied on this occasion by her mother. The lady was with her instead. A lounger on the pier at Margate is not 32 A SNAPT GOLD RING. likely to be engrossed with thoughts of sur- passing value. Perhaps, too, when a man who lives by intellectual work is out for a holiday, his truest wisdom is to forget that he is wise. Warner, at all events, thought so, and was foolish upon principle. Therefore it was that from the moment he perceived the little corset-maker he had occupied himself with considering whether or not he should give her the opportunity to recognise him. Against it were the undoubted facts that he had never been presented to her, that she belonged to a " set " very different from his own, and that if any one who knew him noticed the meeting, people would " talk." For it were the facts that he saw no one whom he knew, that at the same time he had no par- ticular objection to people " talking," that the girl who was with Miss Lemon looked as distinctly a lady as he looked a gentleman, that this circumstance roused his curiosity, and in fine that he preferred to speak to her. Kate Lemon was too independent to be A SNAPT GOLD RING. 33 needlessly forward, and she was quite ready to ignore Mr. Warner, if she should see that he wished it. But as, in approaching, he did distinctly look at her, instead of becoming engrossed with anything in the opposite direction, she deemed it civil to nod and smile at him. He stopped to speak. 11 My cousin, Miss Greyling : Mr. " " Warner," said that gentleman, taking off his hat to the new acquaintance. " You are not more occupied than the rest of Mar- gate, I suppose ? We are all lazy together here." " I generally am," answered Miss Greyling. " No, no, Madeleine : you know you ain't idle," protested Kate Lemon, " though luckily you haven't got my work to do." 11 A queen-bee," said Paul Warner. " Your cousin and I are the working bees. But what do you really do here ? " " Very little, I'm afraid, but watch the sun- sets and read a novel now and then ; which is terrible waste of time, is it not ? " VOL. i. 3 34 A SNAPT GOLD RING. Paul Warner smiled, and asked Miss Grey- ling if she had read George Eliot ? " No." " Balzac ? " " No." 11 He is pumping me," thought Miss Grey- ling to herself — she had learned that word from Kate. And then she added aloud, as a little explanation, " It so happens that I have not had much opportunity of reading the books which I suppose are good, and what oppor- tunities I have had I have probably neglected — an unpardonable fault, perhaps, in the eyes of a Londoner, who may write books for all that I know." "He would be the exception if he wrote nothing," answered Warner. " We all have some kind of thoughts, and most of us like to express them." " Then you do write ? " " Not I, indeed. Leaving pens and ink to readier hands, I have taken to brushes. I am learning to paint." A SNAPT GOLD RING. 35 " You take lessons ? " said Kate Lemon. " I thought that was only for boys ? " " We must be middle-aged before we know how to paint, — yes, and how to draw. That is what I meant when I said I was learning. It is slow work with us who are not gifted men. . . . But have you been to see the sensa- tion play here ? — an affair of greater interest to most people." " No," said Miss Greyling, looking involun- tarily at her black dress. " I suppose when you go in London, you criticise everything ? " " For the papers ? " " No, I was not thinking of that. But Londoners see so much that they must, I should think, criticise more, and, perhaps, enjoy less than we do." " The very reverse, as to myself. I assure you I go to the theatre, comme le premier bourgeois venu, to see pretty actresses, and prettier scenery, to laugh a little if comic things are said, to be touched to the heart should the opportunity offer, and to drop a tear when necessary." 36 A SNAPT GOLD RING. " It's very seldom that I go," said Kate Lemon. " When I do, I like to be amused ; not made to cry." " And I never go at all," confessed Miss Greyling. " Look at that sunset, — do ! " " How very fond she is of light and colour ! " thought Paul Warner. " Such a genuine admiration, too ! It's quite refreshing after the common pretence of admiring scenery. So few women really care for it." He took the subject up, and asked Miss Greyling : " How is it so few women care about scenery ? I am sure yoit do." 11 Yes ; very much." " Well, how is it you are an exception ? Miss Lemon, can you explain ? " " I never thought about it," answered that young person, who was watching intently the dragging of a boat upon the shore. Warner from that moment addressed him- self to Madeleine. " I have heard a friend of mine give an explanation, and as you are quite apart from A SNAPT GOLD RING. 3/ the mass of ladies in this respect, I may repeat it without fear of being rude. He says that women are the realists, men the idealists, in this world. 'Tis the young men who write verses and live in the seventh Heaven of the imagina- tion : the young women occupy themselves with bonnets, and if they dream, they dream of balls. For a lone time he wondered what could be the cause of this — wondered why men are imaginative and women materialist. At last he remembered that Woman is herself Poetry per- sonified, and that therefore she suggests to Man the poetical ideas of which she is scarcely ever conscious." Warner looked at Miss Greyling, and thought she understood. " I love scenery," she said, thinking she must say something ; " but I never considered about it in that way. Up in the north, on the Cleveland Hills, I could look at it for ever." The answer was characteristic, though War- ner did not know it. Hers was a brooding nature. She had scarcely any definiteness or 38 A SNAPT GOLD RING. sharpness of conception. She reasoned little, and felt much. But this girl noticed the smaller beauties of an every-day landscape ; for though not quick, she had the great gift of receptiveness. She loved the wild scenery of coast, and hill, and moorland, with the intensity of an imaginative nature ; but the sensitiveness of her mind, the fineness of her spirit, made her value a sim- plicity of beauty unregarded by the crowd. If she had felt and remembered from her early childhood what is to some the almost inspiring influence of her northern hills — where grey rock pierces through purple heather, and limestone boulders lie scattered over a world of moor — she felt also the tranquil brightness of green cow-pastures in the freshness of morning, and grew graver before the quietest of sunset skies. A SNAPT GOLD RING. 39 CHAPTER IV. The problem of the apparent difference in the position of these two girls who were com- panions at Margate was a very simple one, though Warner did not know it. Madeleine Greyling was the daughter of a naval officer who had married beneath him. His family had never forgiven the wrong he had done them by " importuning with love, in honourable fashion," a young woman who ought surely to have become anything rather than a relative of theirs. The writer has not been able to discover how it was that Archibald Greyling met with Harriet Moggridge — the daughter of a cheesemonger in Lambeth — in days before idle young officers and the daughters of tradespeople danced together at the North 40 A SNAPT GOLD RING. Woolwich Gardens. But the meeting some- how took place, and a secret marriage quickly followed it. Greyling went to sea : having settled his wife in a pretty little cottage on the East Cliff at Folkestone. There she remained alone. When he returned, the probability of a child's birth led him to think it best to tell his family of the marriage. The couple journeyed to Yorkshire ; and when the husband broke the news to his remaining friends, the result was not that which he had anticipated. He was thenceforth in disgrace. A month after they arrived in the north, Madeleine was born : in a grey stone cottage, near the foot of Danby Moor, in Eskdale. She passed her early childhood there, and there, when she was ten years old, her mother died. Then her father brought her to the south. He had a fancy to see again the seaport town where the first months of his married life had been passed : so they returned to Folkestone. Lieutenant Greyling left the service, and A SNAPT GOLD RING. 4 1 devoted himself to his child. At Folkestone, only five or six months before there occurred the incidents of the last chapter, he had died. His daughter was just past one-and-twenty, and she was quite alone. The only sister of Harriet Moggridge had also married ; but instead of marrying out of her station, she had remained in it. She was first the wife of one Lemon : a linen- draper's shop -walker in the Borough ; and Kate was the child of their union. A rail- way accident bereaved her of her husband, and two years afterwards — when Kate was fourteen — Mrs. Lemon sought consolation in marriage with a childless widower, named Hassell ; who was a saddler at Notting Hill. But enough, for the present, of family histories. When Warner bade his sea-side friends good evening, he said he hoped that he and they might " fall in " with each other again. Next morning he took proper precautions to 42 A SNAPT GOLD RING. secure the realization of his hope, by remaining in the part of Margate in which they lodged, and accordingly he did " fall in " with them during the forenoon. Kate Lemon expected it — knowing some- thing of the ways of masculine humanity — but to Madeleine Greyling it was a surprise. " How has he happened to come upon us again ? So soon too ! " she asked herself in thought, as he stood, smiling his pleasure at the meeting. His was a striking face, undoubtedly, and Madeleine knew it to be so, and looked at it, when unobserved, with something of that naivet6 of admiration with which Miranda gazed on Ferdinand. I might call him A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble. That, of course, was but the result of the girl's untutored thought, of her extreme sim- plicity, and of her little knowledge. But Warner's was an unusual countenance, and its A SNAPT GOLD RING. 43 manly beauty was heightened by contrast with the commoner faces around. A figure of the middle height, erect, slight, and lithe — con- spicuous neither for the muscle of an athlete nor for the flabbiness of a recluse — offered nothing to attract attention from the well- shaped head with its short dark brown curls matting the forehead. The full grey eyes, under dark lashes, the massive brows, the aquiline nose, the firmly set yet plastic mouth, were sure to be remarked ; and no muddi- ness or redness or paleness of complexion spoilt a fine living picture. Warners skin was smooth and soft : of a lustrous healthy olive-brown. He had its warmth of beauty from his mother, who was born at Angouleme, and reared in a bountiful land, nearer the sun than England. Commonplace women vaguely called him " handsome ; " but he was more than that, for an ever-changing expression, thoughtful or vivacious, played on features which of them- selves were noticeable. When he slouched 44 A SNAPT GOLD RING. about the country in a shabby hat and loose old jacket, working-people saw at once that he was a gentleman, and treated him with the respect not bought with money ; and in London society prudent mammas were wont to with- draw their daughters from him — as from a younger son — until they were told that his talent was recognised, and that he had a future. Of course he was not an Adonis for whom Venus would vainly have sighed ; but there was in his look, and bearing all that was required to prepossess a simple girl like Madeleine, who was accustomed to think well of every one, who had no thought and no ambition to see " a goodlier man," and who was likely enough to believe, on innocently admiring such superficial graces, There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple : If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with't." Warner, for his part, was struck by the young woman's simplicity of beauty, and by A SNAPT GOLD RING. 45 her inborn grace and ease of manner — an ease as far removed from the artificial coolness of some amongst society's idols as from the flippant self-confidence of second-rate actresses. He thought, besides, that he saw in her many virtues that were strange to him : unobtru- sive cheerfulness and a passionate love of Nature, as well as the germs of a capacity to appreciate the things which made his own life worth the living. Thus it was that a few meetings and sea- side talks — from which Kate Lemon pru- dently escaped — established just sufficient friendship between the two to make still further intimacy a difficult thing to resist. Warner ceased to find Margate so insuffer- ably dull, and accordingly gave up his visits to the neighbouring villages and churches ; and with these excursions, the architectural studies which were their professed object. Out-of-doors during the genial days of autumn he read to Miss Greyling from the Idylls of the King and from Adam Bede, or talked to 46 A SNAPT GOLD RING. her of foreign cities and varied scenes of travel. These things, the record of his own experience, charmed her, as a fairy tale charms children with its strange novel wonders. And he was pleased to please her. A SNAPT GOLD RING. 47 CHAPTER V. A week or so before the end of September, Madeleine left Margate. The aunt with whom she had been staying went back with her husband and Kate Lemon to Notting Hill. The Folkestone cottage was to be occupied another month, after which Madeleine would probably move to London, where she might live near her mother's relatives. Mr. and Mrs. Hassell were certainly not very delightful associates ; but Madeleine's connection was small, and her choice, if she had a choice, very limited. There would, at all events, be Kate Lemon, who was young, kind-hearted, bright, and lively. Yet to the pleasure of that inter- course there would be one drawback — the want of complete sympathy between a woman who 48 A SNAPT GOLD RING. possesses a lady's sensitiveness, and a woman who is supposed to be without it. This is a want which, in intimate association, must always be felt to exist, even when, as in this case, there is no pride upon the one side and no restraint upon the other. It is felt, of course, in the little things of daily life : not in the supreme moments when all humanity is one. When Madeleine left Margate, Margate became dull to the person with whom this history is chiefly concerned. But he was free to leave it, and he used his freedom. Madeleine had exercised over Warner a singular fascination, and had done so through qualities which not every man would have been able to appreciate. A countryman, unac- customed to society and ignorant of women, would not have perceived the simplicity and the freshness which were among the most potent of her charms. A Londoner, with no ideal beyond a larger establishment and successful competition with his fellows, would have seen the qualities, but would not have seen that A SNAPT GOLD RING. 49 they were charms at all. Another, of blase life and vitiated tastes, would have thought the girl colourless and tame. Warner thought differently. Sufficiently acquainted with women to assign to beauty — in a life-long connection — no more than its proper value, he had not, at six-and-twenty, decided that all was vanity, and was willing to let romance play some part in his career. Moved at intervals by aspirations pure and high, Warner could respect simplicity of character apart from intellectual attainments. Idealist, by reason of his temperament, the moment he perceived one virtue very clearly he assumed the existence of the rest. Thus it was that a few weeks' acquaintance with Madeleine Greyling sufficed to turn a casual admirer into a serious lover ; and did so, too, in such a way that had Paul Warner been asked by any prudent friend to show some cause for his faith concerning her he could have established — at least, to his own satisfaction — that it was perfectly reasonable, and, indeed, VOL. I. 4 5