"I am not certain that I shall ever see Mr. Walcott again; but if you ask me whether I will promise to insult him if I do see him, or to cut him because he has been accused of dishonorable acts, then I certainly say, No!"
"How you harp upon his honor! The honor of a married man who has introduced himself to you under a false name!"
"What do you mean?" said Lettice, starting and coloring. "Are there any more charges against him?"
"You seem to be so well prepared to defend him that perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that his name is not Walcott at all, but Bundlecombe, and that his mother kept a small sweet-stuff shop, or something of that kind, at Thorley. Bundlecombe! No wonder he was ashamed of it!"
This shaft took better than either of the others. Lettice was fairly taken aback. The last story did not sound as if it had been invented, and Sydney had evidently been making inquiries. Moreover, there flashed across her mind the remembrance of the book which Alan Walcott had given her--only yesterday morning. How long ago it seemed already! Alan Bundlecombe! What did the name signify, and why should any man care to change the name that he was born with? She recollected Mrs. Bundlecombe very well--the old woman who came and took her first twenty pounds of savings; the widow of the bookseller who had bought part of her father"s library. If he was her son, he might not have much to be proud of, but why need he have changed his name?
Decidedly this was a blow to her. She had no defence ready, and Sydney saw that she was uncomfortable.
"Well," he said, "I must not keep you any longer. I suppose, even now"--with a smile--"you will not give me your promise; but you will think over what I have told you, and I dare say it will all come right."
Her eyes were full of wistful yearning as she put her hand on his shoulder and kissed him.
"You believe that I _mean_ to do right, don"t you, Sydney?" she asked.
He laughed a little. "We all mean to do right, my dear. But we don"t all go the same way to work, I suppose. Yes, yes; I believe you mean well; but do, for heaven"s sake, try to act with common-sense. Then, as I said, everything will come right in the end."
He went back to his mother"s room, and Lettice stood for some minutes looking out of the window, and sighing for the weariness and disillusion which hung like a cloud upon her life.
"All will come right?" she murmured, re-echoing Sydney"s words with another meaning. "No. Trouble and sorrow, and pain may be lived down and forgotten; but without sincerity _nothing_ can come right!"
BOOK III.
AMBITION.
"I count life just a stuff To try the soul"s strength on, educe the man, Who keeps one end in view makes all things serve."
ROBERT BROWNING.
CHAPTER XII.
ALAN WALCOTT.
Alan Walcott knew perfectly well that he had done a mad, if not an unaccountable thing in writing his letter to Miss Campion. He knew it, that is to say, after the letter was gone, for when he was writing it, and his heart was breaking through the bonds of common-sense which generally restrained him, he did not feel the difficulty of accounting either for his emotions or for his action. The wild words, as he wrote them, had for him not only the impress of paramount truth, but also the sanction of his convictions and impulse at the moment. No stronger excuse has been forthcoming for heroic deeds which have shaken the world and lived in history.
Who amongst us all, when young and ardent, with the fire of generosity and imagination in the soul, has not written at least one such letter, casting reserve and prudence to the winds, and placing the writer absolutely at the mercy of the man or woman who received it?
This man was a poet by nature and by cultivation; but what is the culture of a poet save the fostering of a distempered imagination? I do not mean the culture of a prize poet, or a poet on a newspaper staff, or a gentleman who writes verses for society, or a professor of poetry, or an authority who knows the history and laws of prosody in every tongue, and can play the bard or the critic with equal facility. Alan Walcott had never ceased to work in distemper, because his nature was distempered to begin with, and his taste had not been modified to suit the conventional canons of his critics. Therefore it was not much to be wondered at if his prose poem to the woman he loved was a distempered composition.
The exaltation of the mood in which he had betrayed himself to Lettice was followed by a mood of terrible depression, and almost before it would have been possible for an answer to reach him, even if she had sat down and written to him without an hour"s delay, he began to a.s.sure himself that she intended to treat him with silent contempt--that his folly had cost him not only her sympathy but her consideration, and that there was no hope left for him.
He had indeed told her that he did not expect a reply; but now he tortured himself with the belief that silence on her part could have only one explanation. Either she pitied him, and would write to prevent his despair, or she was indignant, and would tell him so, or else she held him in such contempt that she would not trouble herself to take the slightest notice of his effusion. He craved for her indignation now as he had craved for her sympathy before; but he could not endure her indifference.
A man of five-and-thirty whose youth has been spent amongst the prodigal sons and daughters of the world"s great family, who has wasted his moral patrimony, and served masters and mistresses whom he despised, is not easily brought to believe that he can be happy again in the love of a pure woman. He has lost confidence in his own romantic feelings, and in his power to satisfy the higher needs of a woman"s delicate and exacting heart. Usually, as was once the case with Walcott, he is a cynic and a professed despiser of women, affecting to judge them all by the few whom he has met, in spite of the fact that he has put himself in the way of knowing only the weakest and giddiest of the s.e.x. But when such a man, gradually and with difficulty, has found a pearl among women, gentle and true, intellectual yet tenderly human, with whom his instinct tells him he might spend the rest of his life in honor and peace, he is ready in the truest sense to go and sell all that he has in order to secure the prize. Nothing has any further value for him in comparison with her, and all the roots of his nature lay firm hold upon her. Alas for this man if his mature love is given in vain, or if, like Alan Walcott, he is debarred from happiness by self-imposed fetters which no effort can shake off!
For four-and-twenty hours he struggled with his misery. Then, to his indescribable joy, there came a message from Lettice.
It was very short, and it brought him bad news; but at any rate it proved that she took an interest in his welfare, and made him comparatively happy.
"I think you should hear"--so it began, without any introductory phrase--"that the story you told me of what happened at Aix-les-Bains is known to men in this country who cannot be your friends, since they relate it in their own fashion at their clubs, and add their own ill-natured comments. Perhaps if you are forewarned you will be fore-armed.
"Lettice Campion."
Not a word as to his letter; but he was not much troubled on this score.
That she had written to him at all, and written evidently because she felt some concern for his safety, was enough to console him at the moment.
When he began to consider the contents of her note it disturbed him more than a little. He had not imagined that his secret, such as it was, had pa.s.sed into the keeping of any other man, still less that it had become club-talk in London. He saw at once what evil construction might be put upon it by malicious gossip-mongers, and he knew that henceforth he was face to face with a danger which he could do little or nothing to avert.
What should he attempt in his defence? How should he use the weapon which Lettice had put into his hand by forewarning him? One reasonable idea suggested itself, and this was that he should tell the true story to those who knew him best, in order that they might at any rate have the power to meet inventions and exaggerations by his own version of the facts. He busied himself during the next few days in this melancholy task, calling at the house of his friends, and making the best pretext he could for introducing his chapter of autobiography.
He called on the Grahams, amongst others, and was astonished to find that they knew the story already.
"I have told the facts to one or two," he said, "for the reason that I have just mentioned to you, but I think they understood that it would do me no good to talk about it, except in contradiction of unfriendly versions. How did you hear it?"
Graham took out of his pocket a copy of _The Gadabout_ and said,
"I"m afraid you have made enemies, Walcott, and if you have not seen this precious concoction it would be no kindness to you to conceal it.
Here--you will see at a glance how much they have embellished it."
Walcott took the paper, and read as follows:--
"It is probable that before long the public may be startled by a judicial inquiry into the truth of a story which has been told with much circ.u.mstantiality concerning the remarkable disappearance of the wife of a well-known poet some three or four years ago."
Then came the details, without any mention of persons or places, and the paragraph concluded in this fashion. "It is not certain how the matter will come into court, but rumor states that there is another lady in the case, that the buried secret came to light in a most dramatic way, and that evidence is forthcoming from very unexpected quarters."
The victim of this sorry piece of scandal gazed at the paper in a state of stupefaction.
"Of course," said Graham, "it is not worth while to notice that rag.
Half of what it says is clearly a downright invention. If only you could get hold of the writer and thrash him, it might do some good; but these liars are very hard to catch. As to the "other lady," there is nothing in that, is there?"
Both Graham and his wife looked anxiously at Walcott. They knew of his attentions to Lettice, and were jealous of him on that account; and they had been discussing with each other the possibility of their friend"s name being dragged into a scandal.
Walcott was livid with rage.
"The cur!" he cried; "the lying hound! He has entirely fabricated the beginning and the end of this paragraph. There is no ground whatever for saying that a case may come into court. There is no "lady in the case"
at all. He has simply put on that tag to make his sc.r.a.p of gossip worth another half-crown. Is it not abominable, Graham?"
"It is something more than abominable. To my mind this sort of thing is one of the worst scandals of the present day. But I felt sure there was nothing in it, and the few who guess that it refers to you will draw the same conclusion. Don"t think any more about it!"
"A lie sticks when it is well told," said Walcott, gloomily. "There are plenty of men who would rather believe it than the uninteresting truth."