Title: The Green Carnation
Author: Hichens, Robert Smythe, 1864-1950
Language: English
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THE GREEN CARNATION



New York
D. Appleton and Company
1894

Copyright, 1894,
by D. Appleton and Company.



I.


He slipped a green carnation into his evening coat, fixed it in its
place with a pin, and looked at himself in the glass, the long glass
that stood near the window of his London bedroom. The summer evening was
so bright that he could see his double clearly, even though it was just
upon seven o'clock. There he stood in his favourite and most
characteristic attitude, with his left knee slightly bent, and his arms
hanging at his sides, gazing, as a woman gazes at herself before she
starts for a party. The low and continuous murmur of Piccadilly, like
the murmur of a flowing tide on a smooth beach, stole to his ears
monotonously, and inclined him insensibly to a certain thoughtfulness.
Floating through the curtained window the soft lemon light sparkled on
the silver backs of the brushes that lay on the toilet-table, on the
dressing-gown of spun silk that hung from a hook behind the door, on
the great mass of gloire de Dijon roses, that dreamed in an ivory-white
bowl set on the writing-table of ruddy-brown wood. It caught the gilt of
the boy's fair hair and turned it into brightest gold, until, despite
the white weariness of his face, the pale fretfulness of his eyes, he
looked like some angel in a church window designed by Burne-Jones, some
angel a little blasé from the injudicious conduct of its life. He
frankly admired himself as he watched his reflection, occasionally
changing his pose, presenting himself to himself, now full face, now
three-quarters face, leaning backward or forward, advancing one foot in
its silk stocking and shining shoe, assuming a variety of interesting
expressions. In his own opinion he was very beautiful, and he thought it
right to appreciate his own qualities of mind and of body. He hated
those fantastic creatures who are humble even in their self-communings,
cowards who dare not acknowledge even to themselves how exquisite, how
delicately fashioned they are. Quite frankly he told other people that
he was very wonderful, quite frankly he avowed it to himself. There is a
nobility in fearless truthfulness, is there not? and about the magic of
his personality he could never be induced to tell a lie.

It is so interesting to be wonderful, to be young, with pale gilt hair
and blue eyes, and a face in which the shadows of fleeting expressions
come and go, and a mouth like the mouth of Narcissus. It is so
interesting to oneself. Surely one's beauty, one's attractiveness,
should be one's own greatest delight. It is only the stupid, and those
who still cling to Exeter Hall as to a Rock of Ages, who are afraid, or
ashamed, to love themselves, and to express that love, if need be.
Reggie Hastings, at least, was not ashamed. The mantel-piece in his
sitting-room bore only photographs of himself, and he explained this
fact to inquirers by saying that he worshipped beauty. Reggie was very
frank. When he could not be witty, he often told the naked truth; and
truth, without any clothes on, frequently passes for epigram. It is
daring, and so it seems clever. Reggie was considered very clever by his
friends, but more clever by himself. He knew that he was great, and he
said so often in Society. And Society smiled and murmured that it was a
pose. Everything is a pose nowadays, especially genius.

This evening Reggie stood before the mirror till the Sèvres clock on the
chimneypiece gently chimed seven. Then he drew out of their tissue paper
a pair of lavender gloves, and pressed the electric bell.

"Call me a hansom, Flynn," he said to his valet.

He threw a long buff-coloured overcoat across his arm, and went slowly
downstairs. A cab was at the door, and he entered it and told the man to
drive to Belgrave Square. As they turned the corner of Half Moon Street
into Piccadilly, he leant forward over the wooden apron and lazily
surveyed the crowd. Every second cab he passed contained an immaculate
man going out to dinner, sitting bolt upright, with a severe expression
of countenance, and surveying the world with steady eyes over an
unyielding rampart of starched collar. Reggie exchanged nods with
various acquaintances. Presently he passed an elderly gentleman with a
red face and small side whiskers. The elderly gentleman stared him in
the face, and sniffed ostentatiously.

"What a pity my poor father is so plain," Reggie said to himself with a
quiet smile. Only that morning he had received a long and vehement
diatribe from his parent, showering abuse upon him, and exhorting him to
lead a more reputable life. He had replied by wire--

"What a funny little man you are.--Reggie."

The funny little man had evidently received his message.

As his cab drew up for a moment at Hyde Park corner to allow a stream
of pedestrians to cross from the Park, he saw several people pointing
him out. Two well-dressed women looked at him and laughed, and he heard
one murmur his name to the other. He let his blue eyes rest upon them
calmly as they peacocked across to St. George's Hospital, still
laughing, and evidently discussing him. He did not know them, but he was
accustomed to being known. His life had never been a cautious one. He
was too modern to be very reticent, and he liked to be wicked in the eye
of the crowd. Secret wickedness held little charm for him. He preferred
to preface his failings with an overture on the orchestra, to draw up
the curtain, and to act his drama of life to a crowded audience of smart
people in the stalls. When they hissed him, he only pitied them, and
wondered at their ignorance. His social position kept him in Society,
however much Society murmured against him; and, far from fearing
scandal, he loved it. He chose his friends partly for their charm, and
partly for their bad reputations; and the white flower of a blameless
life was much too inartistic to have any attraction for him. He believed
that Art showed the way to Nature, and worshipped the abnormal with all
the passion of his impure and subtle youth.

"Lord Reginald Hastings," cried Mrs. Windsor's impressive butler, and
Reggie entered the big drawing-room in Belgrave Square with the delicate
walk that had led certain Philistines to christen him Agag. There were
only two ladies present, and one tall and largely built man, with a
closely shaved, clever face, and rather rippling brown hair.

"So sweet of you to come, dear Lord Reggie," said Mrs. Windsor, a very
pretty woman of the preserved type, with young cheeks and a middle-aged
mouth, hair that was scarcely out of its teens, and eyes full of a weary
sparkle. "But I knew that Mr. Amarinth would prove a magnet. Let me
introduce you to my cousin, Lady Locke--Lord Reginald Hastings."

Reggie bowed to a lady dressed in black, and shook hands affectionately
with the big man, whom he addressed as Esmé. Five minutes later dinner
was announced, and they sat down at a small oval table covered with pale
pink roses.

"The opera to-night is 'Faust,'" said Mrs. Windsor. "Ancona is
Valentine, and Melba is Marguerite. I forget who else is singing, but it
is one of Harris' combination casts, a constellation of stars."

"The evening stars sang together!" said Mr. Amarinth, in a gently
elaborate voice, and with a sweet smile. "I wonder Harris does not
start morning opera; from twelve till three for instance. One could drop
in after breakfast at eleven, and one might arrange to have luncheon
parties between the acts."

"But surely it would spoil one for the rest of the day," said Lady
Locke, a fresh-looking woman of about twenty-eight, with the sort of
face that is generally called sensible, calm observant eyes, and a
steady and simple manner. "One would be fit for nothing afterwards."

"Quite so," said Mr. Amarinth, with extreme gentleness. "That would be
the object of the performance, to unfit one for the duties of the day.
How beautiful! What a glorious sight it would be to see a great audience
flocking out into the orange-coloured sunshine, each unit of which was
thoroughly unfitted for any duties whatsoever. It makes me perpetually
sorrowful in London to meet with people doing their duty. I find them
everywhere. It is impossible to escape from them. A sense of duty is
like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues of the mind, as
certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The catechism has a
great deal to answer for."

"Ah! now you are laughing at me," said Lady Locke calmly.

"Mr. Amarinth never laughs at any one, Emily," said Mrs. Windsor. "He
makes others laugh. I wish I could say clever things. I would rather be
able to talk in epigrams, and hear Society repeating what I said, than
be the greatest author or artist that ever lived. You are luckier than
I, Lord Reggie. I heard a _bon mot_ of yours at the Foreign Office last
night."

"Indeed. What was it?"

"Er--really I--oh! it was something about life, you know, with a sort of
general application, one of your best. It made me smile, not laugh. I
always think that is such a test of merit. We smile at wit; we laugh at
buffoonery."

"The highest humour often moves me to tears," said Mr. Amarinth
musingly. "There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine
paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well turned paradox is
the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just
as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our
minds are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our
moods often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is
inappropriate."

Lady Locke ate her salmon calmly. She had not been in London for ten
years. Her husband had had a military appointment in the Straits
Settlements, and she had been with him. Two years ago he had died at
his post of duty, and since then she had been living quietly in a German
town. Now she was entering the world again, and it seemed to her odd and
altered. She was interested in all she saw and heard. To-night she found
herself studying a certain phase of modernity. That it sometimes struck
her as maniacal did not detract from its interest. The mad often
fascinate the sane.

"I know," said Reggie Hastings, holding his fair head slightly on one
side, and crumbling his bread with a soft, white hand--"I know. That is
why I laughed at my brother's funeral. My grief expressed itself in that
way. People were shocked, of course, but when are they not shocked?
There is nothing so touching as the inappropriate. I thought my laughter
was very beautiful. Anybody can cry. That was what I felt. I forced my
grief beyond tears, and then my relations said that I was heartless."

"But surely tears are the natural expression of sad feelings," said Lady
Locke. "We do not weep at a circus or at a pantomime; why should we
laugh at a funeral?"

"I think a pantomime is very touching," said Reggie. "The pantaloon is
one of the most luridly tragic figures in art or in life. If I were a
great actor, I would as soon play the pantaloon as 'King Lear.'"

"Perhaps his mournful possibilities have been increased since I have
been out of England," said Lady Locke. "Ten years ago he was merely a
shadowy absurdity."

"Oh! he has not changed," said Mr. Amarinth. "That is so wonderful. He
never develops at all. He alone understands the beauty of rigidity, the
exquisite serenity of the statuesque nature. Men always fall into the
absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently
forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a
harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a
bustling busybody, forever trotting about on the pavement looking for a
new bun shop. It should not deliberately run to seek sensations, but it
should never avoid one; it should never be afraid of one; it should
never put one aside from an absurd sense of right and wrong. Every
sensation is valuable. Sensations are the details that build up the
stories of our lives."

"But if we do not choose our sensations carefully, the stories may be
sad, may even end tragically," said Lady Locke.

"Oh! I don't think that matters at all; do you, Mrs. Windsor?" said
Reggie. "If we choose carefully, we become deliberate at once; and
nothing is so fatal to personality as deliberation. When I am good, it
is my mood to be good; when I am what is called wicked, it is my mood to
be evil. I never know what I shall be at a particular moment. Sometimes
I like to sit at home after dinner and read 'The dream of Gerontius.' I
love lentils and cold water. At other times I must drink absinthe, and
hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries. I must have music, and
the sins that march to music. There are moments when I desire squalor,
sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness, and misery. The great unwashed
mood is upon me. Then I go out from luxury. The mind has its West End
and its Whitechapel. The thoughts sit in the Park sometimes, but
sometimes they go slumming. They enter narrow courts and rookeries. They
rest in unimaginable dens seeking contrast, and they like the ruffians
whom they meet there, and they hate the notion of policemen keeping
order. The mind governs the body. I never know how I shall spend an
evening till the evening has come. I wait for my mood."

Lady Locke looked at him quite gravely while he was speaking. He always
talked with great vivacity, and as if he meant what he was saying. She
wondered if he did mean it. Like most other people, she felt the charm
that always emanated from him. His face was tired and white, but not
wicked, and there was an almost girlish beauty about it. He flushed
easily, and was obviously sensitive to impressions. As he spoke now, he
seemed to be elucidating some fantastic gospel, giving forth some
whimsical revelation; yet she felt that he was talking the most
dangerous nonsense, and she rather wanted to say so. Most of her life
had been passed among soldiers. Her father had been a general in the
Artillery. Her two brothers were serving in India. Her husband had been
a bluff and straightforward man of action, full of hard commonsense, and
the sterling virtues that so often belong to the martinet. Mr. Amarinth
and Lord Reggie were specimens of manhood totally strange to her--until
now she had not realised that such people existed. All the opinions
which she had hitherto believed herself to hold in common with the rest
of sane people, seemed suddenly to become ridiculous in this
environment. Her point of view was evidently remarkably different from
that attained by her companions. On the whole, she decided not to
dispute the doctrine of moods. So she said nothing, and allowed Mrs.
Windsor to break in airily--

"Yes, moods are delightful. I have as many as I have dresses, and they
cost me nearly as much. I suppose they cost Jimmy a good deal too," she
added, with a desultory pensiveness; "but fortunately he is well off, so
it doesn't matter. I never go into the slums, though. It is so tiring,
and then there is so much infection. Microbes generally flourish most in
shabby places, don't they, Mr. Amarinth? A mood that cost one typhoid or
smallpox would be really silly, wouldn't it? Shall we go into the
drawing-room, Emily? the carriage will be round directly. Yes; do smoke,
Mr. Amarinth. You shall have your coffee in here while we put on our
cloaks."

She rustled out of the room with her cousin. When she had gone, Esmé
Amarinth lit a gold-tipped cigarette, and leaned back lazily in his
chair.

"How tiring women are," he said. "They always let one know that they are
trying to be up to the mark. Isn't it so, Reggie?"

"Yes, unless they have convictions which lead them to hate one's mark.
Lady Locke has convictions, I should fancy."

"Probably. But she has a great deal besides."

"Comment?"

"Don't you know why Mrs. Windsor specially wanted you to-night?"

"To polish your wit with mine," said the boy, with his pretty, quick
smile.

"No, Reggie. Lady Locke has come into an immense fortune lately. They
say she has over twenty thousand a year. Mrs. Windsor is trying to do
you a good turn. And I dare say she would not be averse to uniting her
first cousin with a future marquis."

"H'm!" said Reggie, helping himself to coffee with a rather abstracted
air.

"It is a pity I am already married," added Amarinth, sipping his coffee
with a deliberate grace. "I am paying for my matrimonial mood now."

"But I thought Mrs. Amarinth lived entirely upon Cross and Blackwell's
potted meats and stale bread," said Reggie seriously.

"Unfortunately that is only a _canard_ invented by my dearest enemies."



II.


"Jim won't be back till very late, I expect," said Mrs. Windsor to her
cousin, as they passed through the hall that night about twelve o'clock,
after their return from the opera. "I am tired, and cannot go to my
parties. Come to my room, Emily, and we will drink some Bovril, and have
a talk. I love drinking Bovril in secret. It seems like a vice. And then
it is wholesome, and vices always do something to one--make one's nose
red, or bring out wrinkles, or spots, or some horror. Two cups of
Bovril, Henderson," she added to the butler, in a parenthesis. "Take off
your cloak, Emily, and lie down on this sofa. What a pity we can't have
a fire. That is the chief charm of the English summer. It nearly always
necessitates fires. But to-night it is really warm."

Lady Locke took off her cloak quietly, and laid it down on a chair. She
looked fresh and healthy, but rather emotional. She had not been to
"Faust" for such a long time, that to-night she had been deeply moved,
despite the intercepting chatter of her companions. Mr. Amarinth's
epigrams had been especially voluble during the garden scene.

"It has been a delightful evening," she said.

"Do you think so? I thought you would like Lord Reggie."

"I meant the music."

"The music! Oh! I see. Yes, 'Faust' is always nice; a little threadbare
though, now. Old operas are like old bonnets, I always think. They ought
to be remodelled, retrimmed from time to time. If we could keep Gounod's
melodies now, and get them reharmonised by Saint-Saëns or Bruneau, it
would be charming."

"I think it is a mercy something stands still nowadays," said Lady
Locke, lying down easily on the sofa, and leaning her dark head against
the cushions. "If all the old-fashioned operas and pictures and books
were swept away, like the old-fashioned people, we should have no
landmarks at all. London is not the same London it was ten years ago."

Mrs. Windsor lifted her eyebrows.

"The same London! I should hope not. Why, Aubrey Beardsley and Mr.
Amarinth had not been invented then, and 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' had
never been written, and women hardly ever smoked, and----"

"And men did not wear green carnations," Lady Locke said.

Mrs. Windsor turned towards her cousin, and lifted her darkened eyebrows
to her fair fringe.

"Emily, what do you mean? Ah! here is our Bovril! I feel so delightfully
vicious when I drink it, so unconventional! You speak as if you disliked
our times."

"I hardly know them yet. I have been a country cousin for ten years, you
see. I am quite colonial."

"Poor dear child. How horrid. I suppose you have hardly seen chiffon. It
must have been like death. But do you really object to the green
carnation?"

"That depends. Is it a badge?"

"How do you mean?"

"I only saw about a dozen in the Opera House to-night, and all the men
who wore them looked the same. They had the same walk, or rather waggle,
the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head.
When they spoke to each other, they called each other by Christian
names. Is it a badge of some club or some society, and is Mr. Amarinth
their high priest? They all spoke to him, and seemed to revolve round
him like satellites around the sun."

"My dear Emily, it is not a badge at all. They wear it merely to be
original."

"And can they only be original in a buttonhole way? Poor fellows."

"You don't understand. They like to draw attention to themselves."

"By their dress? I thought that was the prerogative of women."

"Really, Emily, you _are_ colonial. Men may have women's minds,
just as women may have the minds of men."

"I hope not."

"Dear yes. It is quite common nowadays."

"And has Lord Reginald Hastings got a woman's mind?"

"My dear, he has a very beautiful mind. He is poetic, imaginative, and
perfectly fearless."

"That's better."

"He dares do anything. He is not afraid of Society, or of what the
clergy and such unfashionable and limited people say. For instance, if
he wished to commit what copy-books call a sin, he would commit it, even
if Society stood aghast at him. That is what I call having real moral
courage."

Lady Locke sipped her Bovril methodically.

"I see," she said rather drily; "he is not afraid to be wicked."

"Not in the least; and how many of us can say as much? Mr. Amarinth is
quite right. He declares that goodness is merely another name for
cowardice, and that we all have a certain disease of tendencies that
inclines us to certain things labelled sins. If we check our tendencies,
we drive the disease inwards; but if we sin, we throw it off. Suppressed
measles are far more dangerous than measles that come out."

"I see; we are to aim at inducing a violent rash that all the world may
stare at."

Her cousin glanced at her for a moment with a tinge of uneasy inquiry.
She was not very sharp, although she was very receptive of modern
philosophy.

"Well," she said, a little doubtfully, "not quite that, I suppose."

"We are to sin on the house-top and in the street, instead of in the
privacy of a room with the door locked. But what will the London County
Council say?"

"Oh, they have nothing to do with our class. They only concern
themselves with acrobats, and respectable elderly women who are fired
from cannons. That is so right. Respectable elderly women do so much
harm. Mr. Amarinth said to-night--in the garden scene, if you
remember--that prolonged purity wrinkled the mind as much as prolonged
impurity wrinkled the face. Nature forces us to choose whether we will
spoil our faces with our sins, or our minds with our virtues. How true."

"And how original. This Bovril is very comforting, Betty; as reviving
as--an epigram."

"Yes, my cook understands it. That must be so sweet for the Bovril--to
be understood! Do you like Lord Reggie?"

"He has a beautiful face. How old is he? Twenty?"

"Oh no, nearly twenty-five. Three years younger than you are. That is
all."

"He looks astonishingly young."

"Yes. He says that his sins keep him fresh. A sinner with a young lamb's
heart among the full grown flocks of saints, you know. Such a quaint
idea, so original."

"I want you to tell me which is original, Mr. Amarinth or Lord Reggie?"

"Oh! they both are."

"No, they are too much alike. When we meet with the Tweedledum and
Tweedledee in mind, one of them is always a copy, an echo of the other."

"Do you think so? Well, of course Mr. Amarinth has been original longer
than Lord Reggie, because he is nearly twenty years older."

"Then Lord Reggie is the echo. What a pity he is not merely vocal."

"What do you mean, dear?"

"Oh! nothing. And who started the fashion of the green carnation?"

"That was Mr. Amarinth's idea. He calls it the arsenic flower of an
exquisite life. He wore it, in the first instance, because it blended so
well with the colour of absinthe. Lord Reggie and he are great friends.
They are quite inseparable."

"Yes."

"They are both coming down to stay with me in Surrey next week, and I
want you to come too. I always spend a week in the country in June, a
week of perfect rusticity. It is like a dear little desert in the oasis,
you know. We do nothing, and we eat a great deal. Nobody calls upon us,
and we call upon no one. We go to a country church on Sunday once, just
for the novelty of it; and this year Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie are
going to have a school treat. Last year they got up a mothers' meeting
instead, and Mr. Amarinth read his last essay on 'The Wickedness of
Virtue' aloud to the mothers. They so enjoyed it. One of them said to me
afterwards, 'I never knew what religion really was before, ma'am.' They
are so deliciously simple, you know. I call my stay in the desert 'the
Surrey week.' It is such fun. You will come, won't you?"

Lady Locke was laughing almost against her will.

"Is Jim to be there?" she asked, putting the china bowl, that had held
her Bovril, down upon the tiny table, covered with absurd silver
knickknacks, at her side.

"Dear no. Jim stays in town, and has his annual rowdy-dowdy week. He
looks forward to it immensely. Will you come?"

"If I may bring Tommy? I don't like to part from him. I am an
old-fashioned mother, and quite fond of my boy."

"But that's not old-fashioned. It is our girls we dislike. We always
take the boys everywhere. You must not mind close quarters. We live in a
sort of big cottage that I have built near Leith Hill. We walk up the
hill nearly every day after lunch. Tommy can play about with the
curate's little boys. They all wear spectacles; but I believe they are
quite nice-minded, so that will be all right, as you are so particular."

"And do green carnations bloom on the cottage walls?"

"My dear Emily, green carnations never bloom on walls at all. Of course
they are dyed. That is why they are original. Mr. Amarinth says Nature
will soon begin to imitate them, as she always imitates everything,
being naturally uninventive. However, she has not started this summer
yet."

"That is lazy of her."

"Yes. Well, good-night, dear. I am so glad you will come. Breakfast in
your room at any time you like of course. Will you have tea or hock and
seltzer?"

"Tea, please."

They kissed.



III.


Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie did not go to bed so early. After the
performance of "Faust" was over they strolled arm in arm towards a
certain small club that they much affected, a little house tucked into a
corner not far from Covent Garden, with a narrow passage instead of a
hall, and a long supper-room filled with tiny tables. They made their
way gracefully to their own particular table at the end of the room,
where they could converse unheard, and see all that was to be seen. An
obsequious waiter--one of the restaurant race that has no native
language--relieved them of their coats, and they sat down opposite to
each other, mechanically touching their hair to feel if their hats had
ruffled its smooth surface.

"What do you think about it, Reggie?" Amarinth said, as they began to
discuss their oysters. "Could you commit the madness of matrimony with
Lady Locke? You are so wonderful as you are, so complete in yourself,
that I scarcely dare to wish it, or anything else for you: and you live
so comfortably upon debts, that it might be unwise to risk the possible
discomfort of having money. Still, if you ever intend to possess it, you
had better not waste time. You know my theory about money."

"No; what is it, Esmé?"

"I believe that money is gradually becoming extinct, like the Dodo or
'Dodo.' It is vanishing off the face of the earth. Soon we shall have
people writing to the papers to say that money has been seen at
Richmond, or the man who always announces the premature advent of the
cuckoo to his neighbourhood will communicate the fact that one Spring
day he heard two capitalists singing in a wood near Esher. One hears now
that money is tight--a most vulgar condition to be in by the way; one
will hear in the future that money is not. Then we shall barter, offer
glass beads for a lunch, or sell our virtue for a good dinner. Do you
want money?"

Reggie was eating delicately, with his fair head drooping on one side,
and his blue eyes wandering in a fidgety way about the room.

"I suppose I do," he said. "But, as you say, I am afraid of spoiling
myself, of altering myself. And yet marriage has not changed you."

"I have not allowed it to. My wife began by trying to influence me, she
has ended by trying not to be influenced by me. She is a good woman,
Reggie, and wears large hats. Why do good women invariably wear large
hats? To show they have large hearts? No, I am unchanged. That is really
the secret of my pre-eminence. I never develop. I was born epigrammatic,
and my dying remark will be a paradox. How splendid to die with a
paradox upon one's lips! Most people depart in a cloud of blessings and
farewells, or give up the ghost arranging their affairs like a huckster,
or endeavouring to cut somebody off with a shilling. I at least cannot
be so vulgar as to do that, for I have not a shilling in the world. Some
one told me the other day that the Narcissus Club had failed, and
attributed the failure to the fact that it did not go on paying. Nothing
does go on paying. I know I don't."

"I hate offering payment to anybody," said Reggie. "Even when I have the
money. There is something so sordid about it. To give is beautiful. I
said so to my tailor yesterday. He answered, 'I differ from you, sir,
_in toto_.' How horrible this spread of education is! We shall have
our valets quoting Horace at us soon. I am told there is a Scotch
hairdresser in Bond Street who speaks French like a native."

"Of Scotland or France?"

"Oh! France."

"Then he must have a bad pronunciation. A native's pronunciation of his
language is invariably incorrect. That is why the average Parisian is
totally unintelligible to the intelligent foreigner. All foreigners are
intelligent. Ah! here are our devilled kidneys. I suppose you and I are
devilled, Reggie. People say we are so wicked. I wish one could feel
wicked; but it is only good people who can manage to do that. It is the
one prerogative of virtue that I really envy. The saint always feel like
a sinner, and the poor sinner, try as he will, can only feel like a
saint. The stars are so unjust. These kidneys are delicious. They are as
poetic as one of Turner's later sunsets, or as the curving mouth of La
Gioconda. How Walter Pater would love them."

Reggie helped himself to a glass of champagne. A bright spot of red had
appeared on each of his cheeks, and his blue eyes began to sparkle.

"Are you going to get drunk to-night, Esmé?" he asked. "You are so
splendid when you are drunk."

"I have not decided either way. I never do. I let it come if it will.
To get drunk deliberately is as foolish as to get sober by accident. Do
you know my brother? When he is not tipsy, he is invariably blind sober.
I often wonder the police do not run him in."

"Do they ever run any one in? I thought they were always dismissed the
force if they did."

"Probably that is so. The expected always happens, and people in
authority are very expected. One always knows that they will act in
defiance of the law. Laws are made in order that people in authority may
not remember them, just as marriages are made in order that the divorce
court may not play about idly. Reggie, are you going to make this
marriage?"

"I don't know," said the boy, rather fretfully. "Do you want me to?"

"I never want any one to do anything. And I should be delighted to
continue not paying for your suppers. Besides, I am afraid that marriage
might cause you to develop, and then I should lose you. Marriage is a
sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit, and sometimes
strange renunciations. The renunciations of marriage are like white
lilies--bloodless, impurely pure, as anæmic as the soul of a virgin, as
cold as the face of a corpse. I should be afraid for you to marry,
Reggie! So few people have sufficient strength to resist the
preposterous claims of orthodoxy. They promise and vow three things--is
it three things you promise and vow in matrimony, Reggie?--and they keep
their promise. Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of
promises, unless it be telling the truth. To lie finely is an Art, to
tell the truth is to act according to Nature, and Nature is the first of
Philistines. Nothing on earth is so absolutely middle-class as Nature.
She always reminds me of Clement Scott's articles in the _Daily
Telegraph_. No, Reggie, do not marry unless you have the strength to
be a bad husband."

"I have no intention of being a good one," Reggie said earnestly.

His blue eyes looked strangely poetic under the frosty gleam of the
electric light, and his straight pale yellow hair shone like an aureole
round the head of some modern saint. He was eating strawberries rather
petulantly, as a child eats pills, and his cheeks were now violently
flushed. He looked younger than ever, and it was difficult to believe
that he was nearly twenty-five.

"I have no intention of being a good one. It is only people without
brains who make good husbands. Virtue is generally merely a form of
deficiency, just as vice is an assertion of intellect. Shelley showed
the poetry that was in his soul more by his treatment of Harriet than by
his writing of 'Adonais;' and if Byron had never broken his wife's
heart, he would have been forgotten even sooner than he has been. No,
Esmé; I shall not make a good husband."

"Lady Locke would make a good wife."

"Yes, it is written in her face. That is the worst of virtues. They
show. One cannot conceal them."

"Yes. When I was a boy at school, I remember so well I had a virtue, and
I was terribly ashamed of it. I was fond of going to church. I can't
tell why. I think it was the music, or the painted windows, or the
precentor. He had a face like the face of seven devils, so exquisitely
chiselled. He looked as if he were always seeking rest and finding none.
He was really a clergyman of some importance, the only one I ever met. I
was fond of going to church, and I was in agony lest some strange
expression should come into my face and tell my horrible secret. I
dreaded above all lest my mother should ever get to know it. It would
have made her so happy."

"Did she?"

"No, never. The precentor died, and my virtue died with him. But you are
quite right, Reggie; a virtue is like a city set upon a hill, it cannot
be hid. We can conceal our vices if we care to, for a time at least. We
can take our beautiful purple sin like a candle and hide it under a
bushel. But a virtue will out. Virtuous people always have odd noses,
or holy mouths, or a religious walk. Nothing in the world is so painful
as to see a good man masquerading in the company of sinners. He may
drink and blaspheme, he may robe himself in scarlet, and dance the
_can-can_, but he is always virtuous. The mind of the _moulin
rouge_ is not his. Wickedness does not sit easily upon him. It looks
like a coat that has been paid for."

"Esmé, you are getting drunk!"

"What makes you think so, Reggie?"

"Because you are so brilliant. Go on. The night is growing late. Soon
the silver dawn will steal along the river, and touch with radiance
those monstrosities upon the Thames Embankment. John Stuart Mill's badly
fitting frockcoat will glow like the golden fleece, and the absurd
needle of Cleopatra will be barred with scarlet and with orange. The
flagstaff in the Victoria Tower will glitter like an angel's ladder, and
the murmur of Covent Garden will be as the murmur of the flowing tide.
Oh! Esmé, when you are drunk, I could listen to you for ever. Go on--go
on!"

"Remember my epigrams then, dear boy, and repeat them to me to-morrow. I
am dining out with Oscar Wilde, and that is only to be done with prayer
and fasting. Waiter, open another bottle of champagne, and bring some
more strawberries. Yes, it is not easy to be wicked, although stupid
people think so. To sin beautifully, as you sin, Reggie, and as I have
sinned for years, is one of the most complicated of the arts. There are
hardly six people in a century who can master it. Sin has its technique,
just as painting has its technique. Sin has its harmonies and its
dissonances, as music has its harmonies and its dissonances. The amateur
sinner, the mere bungler whom we meet with, alas! so frequently, is
perpetually introducing consecutive fifths and octaves into his music,
perpetually bringing wrong colour notes into his painting. His sins are
daubs or pot boilers, not masterpieces that will defy the insidious
action of time. To commit a perfect sin is to be great, Reggie, just as
to produce a perfect picture, or to compose a perfect symphony, is to be
great. Francesco Cenci should have been worshipped instead of murdered.
But the world can no more understand the beauty of sin, than it can
understand the preface to 'The Egoist,' or the simplicity of 'Sordello.'
Sin puzzles it; and all that puzzles the world frightens the world; for
the world is a child, without a child's charm, or a child's innocent
blue eyes. How exquisitely coloured these strawberries are, yet if
Sargent painted them he would idealise them, would give to them a beauty
such as Nature never yet gave to anything. So it is with the artist in
sinning. He improves upon the sins that Nature has put, as it were,
ready to his hand. He idealises, he invents, he develops. No trouble is
too great for him to take, no day is too long for him to work in. The
still and black-robed night hours find him toiling to perfect his sin;
the weary white dawn, looking into his weary white face through the
shimmering window panes, is greeted by a smile that leaps from sleepless
eyes. The passion of the creator is upon him. The man who invents a new
sin is greater than the man who invents a new religion, Reggie. No Mrs.
Humphrey Ward can snatch his glory from him. Religions are the Aunt
Sallies that men provide for elderly female venturists to throw missiles
at and to demolish. What sin that has ever been invented has ever been
demolished? There are always new human beings springing into life to
commit it, and to find pleasure in it. Reggie, some day I will write a
gospel of strange sins, and I will persuade the S. P. C. K. Society to
publish it in dull, misty scarlet, powdered with golden devils."

"Oh, Esmé, you are great!"

"How true that is! And how seldom people tell the truths that are worth
telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our
lies, and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon
the selection of our enemies. Conceit is one of the greatest of the
virtues, yet how few people recognise it as a thing to aim at and to
strive after. In conceit many a man and woman has found salvation, yet
the average person goes on all fours grovelling after modesty. You and
I, Reggie, at least have found that salvation. We know ourselves as we
are, and understand our own greatness. We do not hoodwink ourselves into
the blind belief that we are ordinary men, with the intellects of
Cabinet Ministers, or the passions of the proletariat. No, we--closing
time, Waiter! How absurd! Why, is it forbidden in England to eat
strawberries after midnight, or to go to bed at one o'clock in the day?
Come, Reggie! It is useless to protest, as Mr. Max Beerbohm once said in
his delicious 'Defence of Cosmetics.' Come, the larks will soon be
singing in the clear sky above Wardour Street. I am tired of tirades.
How sweet the chilly air is! Let us go to Covent Garden. I love the
pale, tender green of the cabbage stalks, and the voices of the
costermongers are musical in the dawning. Give me your arm, and, as we
go, we will talk of Albert Chevalier and of the mimetic art."



IV.


During the few days that elapsed before the advent of the Surrey week,
Lady Locke saw a great deal of Lord Reggie, and became a good deal
troubled in her mind about him. He was strangely different from all the
men and boys whom she had ever known, almost monstrously different, and
yet he attracted her. There was something so young about him, and so
sensitive, despite the apparent indifference to the opinion of the
world, of which he spoke so often, and with such unguarded emphasis.
Sometimes she tried to think that he was masquerading, and that a
travesty of evil really concealed sound principles, possibly even
evangelical tendencies, or a bias towards religious mania. But she was
quickly undeceived. Lord Reggie was really as black as he painted
himself, or Society told many lies concerning him. Of course Lady Locke
heard nothing definite about him. Women seldom do hear much that is
definite about men unrelated to them; but all the world agreed in saying
that he was a scamp, that he was one of the wildest young men in
London, and that he was ruining his career with both hands. Lady Locke
hardly knew why she should mind, and yet she did mind. She found herself
thinking often of him, and in a queer sort of motherly way that the
slight difference in their ages did not certainly justify. After all, he
was nearly twenty-five and she was only twenty-eight, but then he looked
twenty, and she felt--well, a considerable age. She had married at
seventeen. She had travelled, had seen something of rough life, had been
in an important position officially owing to her dead husband's military
rank. Then, too, she had suffered a bereavement, had seen a strong man,
who had been her strong man, die in her arms. Life had given to her more
of its realities than of its shams; and it is the realities that mark
the passage of the years, and number for us the throbs in the great
heart of time. Lady Locke knew that she felt much older than Lord Reggie
would feel when he was twenty-eight, if he went on living at least as he
was living now.

"Has he a mother?" she asked her cousin, Betty Windsor, one day as they
were driving slowly down the long line of staring faces that filled the
Park at five o'clock on warm afternoons in summer.

Mrs. Windsor, who was almost lost in the passion of the gazer, and who
was bowing about twice a minute to passing acquaintances, or to friends
rigid upon tiny green chairs, gave a quarter of her mind violently to
her companion, and answered hurriedly--

"Two, dear, practically."

"Two!"

"Yes. His own mother divorced his father, and the latter has married
again. The second Marchioness of Hedfield wrote to Lord Reggie the other
day, and said she was prepared to be a second mother to him. So you see
he has two. So nice for the dear boy."

"Do you think so? But his own mother--what is she like?"

"I don't know her. Nobody does. She never comes to town or stays in
country houses. But I believe she is very tall, and very religious--if
you notice, it is generally short, squat people who are atheists--and
she lives at Canterbury, where she does a great deal of good among the
rich. They say she actually converted one of the canons to a belief in
the Thirty-Nine Articles after he had preached against them, and
miracles, in the Cathedral. And canons are very difficult to convert, I
am told."

"Then she is a good woman. And is Lord Reggie fond of her?"

"Oh yes, very. He spent a week with her last year, and I think he
intends to spend another this year. She is very pleased about it. He and
Mr. Amarinth are going down for the hop-picking."

"What a strange idea!"

"Yes, deliciously original. They say that hop-picking is quite Arcadian.
Mr. Amarinth is having a little pipe made for him at Chappell's or
somewhere, and he is going to sit under a tree and play old tunes by
Scarlatti to the hop-pickers while they are at work. He says that more
good can be done in that sort of way, than by all the missionaries who
were ever eaten by savages. I don't believe much in missionaries."

"Do you believe in Mr. Amarinth?"

"Certainly. He is so witty. He gives one thoughts too, and that saves
one such a lot of trouble. People who keep looking about in their own
minds for thoughts are always so stupid. Mr. Amarinth gives you enough
thoughts in an hour to last you for a couple of days."

"I doubt if they are worth very much. I suppose he gives Lord Reggie all
his thoughts?"

"Yes, I dare say. He supplies half London, I believe. There is always
some one of that kind going about. And as to his epigrams, they are in
every one's mouth."

"That must make them rather monotonous," said Lady Locke, as the horses'
heads were turned homewards, and they rolled smoothly towards Belgrave
Square.

In the drawing-room they found a very thin, short-sighted looking woman
sitting quietly, apparently engaged in examining the pictures and
ornaments through a double eyeglass with a slender tortoise shell stalk,
which she held in her hand. She had a curious face, with a long rather
Jewish nose, and a thin-lipped mouth, a face wrinkled about the small
eyes, above which was pasted a thick fringe of light brown hair covered
with a visible "invisible" net.

"Madame Valtesi!" exclaimed Mrs. Windsor. "You have come in person to
give me your answer about my week? That is charming. Are you coming out
into the desert with us? Let me introduce my cousin, Lady Locke--Madame
Valtesi."

The thin lady bowed peeringly. She seemed very blind indeed. Then she
said, in a voice perhaps twenty years older than her middle-aged face,
"How do you do? Yes, I will play the hermit with pleasure. I came to say
so. You go down next Tuesday, or is it Wednesday?"

"On Wednesday. We shall be a charming little party, and so witty. Lord
Reginald Hastings and Mr. Amarinth are both coming, and Mr. Tyler. My
cousin and I complete the sextet. Oh! I had forgotten Tommy. But he does
not count, not as a wit, I mean. He is my cousin's little boy. He is to
play about with the curate's children. That will be so elevating for
him."

"Delightful," said Madame Valtesi, with a face of stone. "No tea, thank
you. I only stopped to tell you. I have three parties this afternoon.
Good-bye. To-morrow morning I am going to get my trousseau for the
desert, a shady garden hat, and gloves with gauntlets, and a
walking-cane."

She gave a little croaking laugh with a cleverly taken girlish note at
the end of it, and walked very slowly and quietly out of the room.

"I am so glad she can come," said Mrs. Windsor. "She makes our rustic
party complete."

"We shall certainly be very rustic," said Lady Locke, with a smile, as
she leaned back in her chair and took a cup of tea.

"Yes, deliciously so. Madame Valtesi goes everywhere. She is one of the
most entertaining people in London. Nobody knows who she is. I have
heard that she is a Russian spy, and that her husband was a courier, or
a chef, or perhaps both. She has got some marvellous diamond earrings
that were given to her by a Grand Duke, and she has lots of money. She
runs a theatre, because she likes a certain actor, and she pays Mr.
Amarinth's younger brother to go about with her and converse. He is very
fat, and very uncouth, but he talks well. Madame Valtesi has a great
deal of influence."

"In what department of life?"

"Oh--er--in every department, I believe. I really think my week will be
a success this year. Last year it was rather a failure. I took down
Professor Smith, and he had a fit. So inconsiderate of him. In the
country, too, where it is so difficult to get a doctor. We had in the
veterinary surgeon in a hurry, but all he could say was 'Fire him!' and
as I was not very intimate with the Professor, I hardly liked to do
that. He has such a very violent temper. This year we shall have a good
deal of music. Lord Reggie and Mr. Amarinth both play, and they are
arranging a little programme. All old music, you know. They hate Wagner
and the moderns. They prefer the ancient church music, Mozart and Haydn
and Paganini, or is it Palestrina? I never can remember--and that sort
of thing, so refining. Mr. Amarinth says that nothing has been done in
music for the last hundred years. Personally, I prefer the Intermezzo
out of 'Cavalleria' to anything I ever heard, but of course I am wrong.
You have finished? Then I think I shall go and lie down before dressing
for dinner. It is so hot. A breath of country air will be delicious."

"Yes, I confess I am looking forward with interest to the Surrey week,"
said Lady Locke, still smiling.



V.


Mrs. Windsor's cottage in Surrey stood on the outskirts of a perfectly
charming village called Chenecote, a village just like those so often
described in novels of the day. The homes of the poor people were model
homes, with lattice windows, and modern improvements. The church was
very small, but very trim. The windows were filled with stained glass,
designed by Burne-Jones and executed by Morris, and there was a lovely
little organ built by Willis, with a _vox humana_ stop in it, that
was like the most pathetic sheep that ever bleated to its lamb. The
church and the red tiled schoolhouse stood upon a delightful green
common, covered with gorse bushes. There were trees all over the place,
and the birds always sang in them. Roses bloomed in the neat little
cottage gardens, and cheery, rosy children played happily about in the
light sandy roads. Nothing, in fact, was wanting to make up a pretty
picture of complete and English rusticity.

But Mrs. Windsor's cottage was the most charming picture of all. It was
really a rambling thatched bungalow, with wide verandas trellised with
dog roses, and a demure cosy garden full of velvet lawns and yew hedges
cut into monstrous shapes. A tiny drive led up to the wide porch, and a
neat green gate guarded the drive from the country road, beyond which
there stood a regular George Morland village pond, a pond with muddy
water, and fat geese, and ducks standing on their heads, and great sleek
cart-horses pausing knee-deep to drink, with velvety distended nostrils,
and, in fact, all the proper pond accessories. A little way up the road
stood the curate's neat red house, and beyond that the village
post-office and grocery store. Further away still were the substantial
rectory, the model cottages, the common, the church, and schoolhouse.
Behind the bungalow, which was called "The Retreat," there was a
farmyard in which hens laid eggs for the bungalow breakfast table, and
black Berkshire pigs slowly ripened and matured in the bright June
sunshine. A stone sun-dial stood upon one of the velvet lawns, engraved
with the legend "Tempus fugit," and various creaking basket and beehive
chairs stood about, while no tennis net was permitted to desecrate the
appearance of complete repose that the green garden presented to the
tired town eye.

Mrs. Windsor declared that her guests must be content to rough it during
the Surrey week; but as she took down with her from London a French chef
and a couple of tall footmen, a carriage and pair, a governess cart, a
fat white pony, a coachman and various housemaids, the guests regarded
that dismal prospect with a fair amount of equanimity, and were assailed
by none of those fears that appal the wanderer who arrives at a country
inn or at a small lodging by the seaside. It may be pleasant to have
roughed it, but it is always tiresome to be plunged in a frightful
present instead of living gloriously upon a frightful past. If Mrs.
Windsor's guests were deprived of the latter triumph, they at least were
saved from the endurance of the former purgatory, and being for the most
part entirely unheroic, they were not ill content. Rusticity in the
rough they would decidedly not have approved of; rusticity in the smooth
they liked very well. Mrs. Windsor was wise in her generation. She was
distinctly not a clever woman, but she distinctly knew her world. The
two tall footmen were the motto of her social life. She and Lady Locke,
and the latter's little boy Tommy, came down from London by train in the
morning of the Wednesday on which the Surrey week was to begin. The
rest of the party was to assemble in the afternoon in time for tea.
Tommy was in a state of almost painful excitement, as the train ran very
slowly indeed through the pleasant country towards Dorking. He was a
plump little boy, with rosy cheeks, big brown eyes, and a very round
head, covered with exceedingly short brown hair. His age was nine, and
he wore dark blue knickerbockers and a loose, bulgy sort of white shirt,
trimmed with blue, and ornamented with a wide and flapping collar. His
black stockings covered frisky legs, and his mind at present was mainly
occupied with surmises as to the curate's little boys, with whom Mrs.
Windsor had promised that he should play. He was a sharp child,
interrogative in mind, and extremely loquacious. Mrs. Windsor found him
rather trying. But then she was not accustomed to children, possessing,
as she often boasted, none of her own.

"What are their names?" said Tommy, bounding suddenly from the window
and squatting down before Mrs. Windsor, with his elbows on his blue
serge knees, his firm white chin resting on his upturned palms, and his
brown eyes fixed steadily upon her carefully arranged face, which always
puzzled him very much; it was so unlike his mother's. "What are their
names? Are any of them called Tommy?"

"I don't think so," she replied. "One of them is called Athanasius, I
believe. I forget about the others."

"Why is he called Athanasius?"

"After the great Athanasius, I suppose."

"And who was the great Athanasius?"

"Oh--the well--well, he wrote a creed, Tommy; but you couldn't
understand about that yet. You are too young."

"I don't think you know who the great Athanasius was much, Cousin
Betty," said the boy, scrutinising her very closely, and trying to
discover why her hair was so very light and her eyebrows were so very
dark. "And you say they all wear spectacles. Can't they see without?"

Mrs. Windsor looked rather distractedly towards Lady Locke, who was
reading a military article in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ with deep
attention.

"They can see a little without, I suppose, but not very much."

"Then are they blind?"

"No, only short-sighted. And then their father is a clergyman, you know,
and clergymen generally wear spectacles. So perhaps they inherit it."

"What! the spectacles?"

"No, the--I mean they may require to wear spectacles because their
father did before them. It is often so. But you are too young to
understand heredity."

"I _can_ understand things, Cousin Betty," said the boy rather
severely.

"That's right. Well now, go and look out of the window. Look, there is a
mill with the wheel turning, and a pond with a boat on it. What a dear
little boat!"

Tommy went, obediently, but a little disdainfully, and Mrs. Windsor sank
back in her seat feeling quite worn out. She could cope better with the
wits of a wit than with the wits of a child. She began to wish that
Tommy was not going to make a part of the Surrey week. If he did not
take a fancy to the curate's children after all, he would be thrown upon
her hands. The prospect was rather terrible. However, she determined not
to dwell upon it. It was no use to meet a possible trouble half way. She
closed her eyes, and wondered vaguely who the great Athanasius had
really been till the train slowed down--it seemed to have been slowing
down steadily all the way from Waterloo--and they drew up beside the
platform at Dorking. Then Tommy was packed with his mother's maid into
the governess cart with the fat white pony, which enchanted him to
madness, and Lady Locke and Mrs. Windsor were driven away in the landau
towards "The Retreat."

The day was radiantly fine, and very hot. The hedgerows were rather
dusty, and the air was dim with a delicious haze that threw an
atmosphere of enchantment round even the most commonplace objects.
Dorking looked, as it always does, solid, serene, and cheerful, the
beau-ideal of a prosperous country town, well-fed, well-groomed,
well-favoured. Some of the shopkeepers were standing at their doors in
their shirt-sleeves taking the air. The errand-boys whistled
boisterously as they went about their business, and the butcher carts
dashed hither and thither with their usual spanking irresponsibility.
Lady Locke looked about her with supreme contentment. She loved the
English flavour of the place. It came upon her with all the charm of old
time recollections. Ten years had elapsed since she had strolled about
an English village, or driven through an English country town. Her eyes
suddenly filled with tears, and yet she was not unhappy. It was, on the
contrary, the subtlety of her happiness that made her heart throb, and
brought a choky feeling into her throat. Her tears were the idle ones,
that are the sweetest tears of all.

Mrs. Windsor was not subtly happy. She never was. Sometimes she was
irresponsibly cheerful, and generally she was lively, especially when
there were any men about; but though she read much minor poetry, and
knew all the minor poets, she was not poetic, and she honestly thought
that John Gray's "Silver Points" were far finer literature than
Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality," or Rossetti's "Blessed Damosel." She
liked sugar and water, especially when the sugar was very sweet, and the
water very cloudy. As they drove through the High Street, she
exclaimed--

"Look, Emily, there goes George Meredith into the post-office. How like
he is to Watts' portrait of him! I never can get him to come near me,
although I have read all his books. Mr. Amarinth says that he is going
to bring out a new edition of them, 'done into English' by himself. It
is such a good idea, and would help the readers so much. I believe he
could make a lot of money by it, but it would be very difficult to do, I
suppose. However, Mr. Amarinth is so clever that he might manage it. We
shall soon be there now. Just look at Tommy! I do believe they are
letting him drive."

Loud shouts of boyish triumph from in front in fact announced this
divine consummation of happiness, and Tommy's face, wreathed in excited
smiles, was turned round towards them, to attract their attention to his
deeds of prowess. The fat white pony, evidently under the horrified
impression that the son of Nimshi had suddenly mounted behind him, broke
into a laborious and sprawling gallop, and, amid clouds of dust, the
governess cart vanished down the hill, Lady Locke's maid striking
attitudes of terror, and the smart groom shaking his slim and belted
sides with laughter.

Lady Locke winked her tears away, and smiled.

"He is in the seventh heaven," she said.

"I only hope he won't be in the road directly," rejoined her cousin.
"Ah! here is the village at last."

That afternoon, at four o'clock, a telegram arrived. It was from Mr.
Tyler, and stated that he had caught the influenza, and could not come.
Mrs. Windsor was much annoyed.

"Oh dear, I do hope my week is not going all wrong again this year!" she
exclaimed plaintively. "I cannot fill his place now. Everybody is so
full of engagements at this time of the year. We shall be a man short."

"Never mind, Betty," said her cousin. "Tommy is quite a man in his own
eyes, and I rather like being a little neglected sometimes. It is
restful."

"Do you think so? Well, perhaps you are right. Men are not always
soothing. Let us go out into the garden. The others ought to be here
directly, unless they have got the influenza too. I am thankful Mr.
Tyler did not have it here. It would be worse than a fit. A fit only
lasts for a few minutes after all, and then it is not catching, which is
such a consolation. Really, when one comes to think of it, a fit is one
of the best things one can have, if one is to have anything. We are
going to take tea here under the cedar tree."

Lady Locke opened her well-formed rather ample mouth, and drew in a deep
breath of country air. She had no sort of feeling about the absence of
Mr. Tyler, whom she had never seen. The country, and the warmth, and the
summer were quite enough for her. Still, she looked forward to studying
Lord Reggie with an eagerness that she hardly acknowledged even to
herself. She hoped vaguely that he would be different in the country,
that he would put on a country mind with his country clothes, that his
brain would work more naturally under a straw hat, and that in canvas
shoes he might find a certain amount of salvation. At any rate, he would
look delightfully cool and young on the velvet lawn under the great
cedar. That was certain. And his whimsicalities were generally amusing,
and sometimes original. As to Mr. Amarinth, she could not imagine him in
the country at all. He smacked essentially of cities. What he would do
in this _galère_ she knew not. She leaned back in her basket-chair
and enjoyed herself quietly. The green peace, after London, was
absolutely delicious. She could hear a hen clucking intermittently from
the farmyard hard by, the twitter of birds from the yew-trees, the
chirping voices of Tommy and the curate's little boys, who had been
formally introduced to each other, and had retired to play in a paddock
that was part of the rector's glebe. The rector himself was away on a
holiday, and the curate was doing all the work for the time. Big golden
bees buzzed slowly and pertinaciously in and out of the sweet flowers in
the formal rose garden, chaunting a note that was like the diapason of
some distant organ. Mrs. Windsor's pug, "Bung," lay on his fat side in
the sun with half-closed eyes, snoring loudly to indicate the fact that
he seriously meditated dropping into a doze. All the air was full of
mingled magical scents, hanging on the tiny breeze that stole softly
about among the leaves and flowers. There was a clink of china and
silver in the cottage, for the tall footmen were preparing to bring out
the tea. How pleasant it all was! Lady Locke felt half inclined to
snore with her eyes opened, like Bung. It seemed such a singularly
appropriate tribute to the influence of place and weather. However, she
restrained herself, and merely folded her hands in her lap and fell into
a waking dream.

She was roused by the scrunch of carriage wheels on the gravel drive.

"There they are!" said Mrs. Windsor, springing from her chair with
vivacious alacrity. "The train has been punctual for once in its life.
How shocked the directors would be if they knew it, but, of course, it
will be kept from them. Ah! Madame Valtesi, so glad to see you! How do,
Lord Reggie? How do, Mr. Amarinth? So you all came together! This is
such a mercy, as I have only one carriage down here except the cart,
which doesn't count. I told you we should have to rough it, didn't I?
That is part of the attraction of the week. Simplicity in all things,
you know, especially carriages. Mr. Tyler can't come. Isn't it shocking?
Influenza. London is so full of microbes. Do microbes go to parties, Mr.
Amarinth? because Mr. Tyler lives entirely at parties. He must have
caught it in Society. Will you have tea before you go to your rooms?
Yes, do. Here it comes. We are going to have country strawberries and
penny buns made in the village, and quite hot! So rustic and wholesome!
After all, it is nice to eat something wholesome just once in a while,
isn't it?"

Her guests settled into the arm-chairs, and Bung, who had risen in some
pardonable fury, lay down again and prepared to resume his interrupted
meditations.

Madame Valtesi was already attired in her trousseau. She had travelled
down from London in a shady straw hat trimmed with pink roses. A white
veil swept loosely round her face; she carried in her hand an attenuated
mottled cane, with an elaborate silver top. A black fan hung from her
waist by a thin silver chain, and, as usual, she was peering through her
eyeglasses at her surroundings. Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie were
dressed very much alike in loosely fitting very light suits, with high
turn-down collars, all round collars that somehow suggested babyhood and
innocence, and loosely knotted ties. They wore straw hats, suède gloves,
and brown boots, and in their buttonholes large green carnations bloomed
savagely. They looked very cool, very much at their ease, and very well
inclined for tea. Reggie's face was rather white, and the look in his
blue eyes suggested that London was getting altogether the better of
him.

"Wholesome things almost always disagree with me," said Madame Valtesi,
in her croaky voice, "unless I eat them at the wrong time. Now, a hot
bun before breakfast in the morning, or in bed at night, might suit me
admirably; but if I ate one now, I should feel miserable. Your
strawberries look most original, quite the real thing. Do not be angry
with me for discarding the buns. If I ate one, I should really
infallibly lose my temper."

"How curious," said Mr. Amarinth, taking a bun delicately between his
plump white fingers. "My temper and my heart are the only two things I
never lose! Everything else vanishes. I think the art of losing things
is a very subtle art. So few people can lose anything really
beautifully. Anybody can find a thing. That is so simple. A crossing
sweeper can discover a sixpence lying in the road. It is the crossing
sweeper who loses a sixpence who shows real originality."

"I wish I could find a few sixpences," said Madame Valtesi slowly, and
sipping her tea with her usual air of stony gravity. "Times are so very
bad. Do you know, Mr. Amarinth, I am almost afraid I shall have to put
down my carriage, or your brother. I cannot keep them both up, and pay
my dressmaker's bill too. I told him so yesterday. He was very much cut
up."

"Poor Teddy! Have his conversational powers gone off? I never see him.
The world is so very large, isn't it?"

"No, he still talks rather well." Then she added, turning to Lady Locke,
"You know I always give him five shillings an hour, in generous moments
ten, to take me about and talk to me. He is a superb _raconteur_. I
shall miss him very much."

"The profession of a conversationalist is so delightful," said Mrs.
Windsor, "I wonder more people don't follow it. You are too generous,
Esmé; you took it up out of pure love of the thing."

"The true artist will always be an amateur," said Lord Reggie, dreamily,
and gazing towards Lady Locke with abstracted blue eyes, "just as the
true martyr will always live for his faith. Esmé is like the thrush. He
always tells us his epigrams twice over, lest we should fail to capture
their first fine careful rapture. Repetition is one of the secrets of
success nowadays. Esmé was the first conversationalist in England to
discover that fact, and so he won his present unrivalled position, and has
known how to keep it."

"Conversational powers are sometimes very distressing," said Madame
Valtesi. "Last winter I was having my house in Cromwell Road painted
and papered. I went to live at a hotel, but the men were so slow, that
at last I took possession again, hoping to turn them out. It was a most
fatal step. They liked me so much, and found me so entertaining, that
they have never gone away. They are still painting, and I suppose always
will be. Whenever I say anything witty they scream with laughter, and I
believe that my name has become a household word in Whitechapel or
Wapping, or wherever the British workman lives? What am I to do?"

"Read them Jerome K. Jerome's last comic book," said Amarinth, "and they
will go at once. I find his works most useful. I always begin to quote
from them when I wish to rid myself of a bore."

"But surely he is a very entertaining writer," said Lady Locke.

"My dear lady, if you read him you will find that he is the reverse of
Beerbohm Tree as Hamlet. Tree's Hamlet was funny without being vulgar.
Jerome's writings are vulgar without being funny. His books are like
Academy pictures. They are all deserving of a place on the line."

"I think he means well," said Mrs. Windsor, taking some strawberries.

"I am afraid so," Amarinth answered. "People who mean well always do
badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don't fit them in
order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably
ungrammatical."

"Good intentions have been the ruin of the world," said Reggie
fervently. "The only people who have achieved anything have been those
who have had no intentions at all. I have no intentions."

"You will at least never be involved in an action for breach of promise
if you always state that fact," said Lady Locke, laughing.

"To be intentional is to be middle class," remarked Amarinth. "Herkomer
has become intentional, and so he has taken to painting the directors of
railway companies. The great picture of this year's exhibition is
intentional. The great picture of the year always is. It presents to us
a pretty milkmaid milking her cow. A gallant, riding by, has dismounted,
and is kissing the milkmaid."

Madame Valtesi blinked at him for a moment in silence. Then she said
with an air of indescribable virtue--

"What a bad example for the cow!"

"Ah! I never thought of that!" cried Mrs. Windsor.

"One seldom does think how easily proper cows--and people--are put to
confusion. That is why they so often flee from the plays of London to
those of Paris. They can be confused there without their relations
knowing it."

"Why are old men who have seen the world always so proper?" asked Lord
Reggie. "The other day I was staying with an old general at Malta, and
he took Catulle Mendez' charming and delicate romance, 'Mephistophela,'
out of my bedroom and burnt it. Yet his language on parade was really
quite artistically blasphemous. I think it is fatal to one's personality
to see the world at all."

"Then I must be quite hopeless," said Lady Locke, "for I have spent
eight years in the Straits Settlements."

"Dear me!" murmured Madame Valtesi. "Where is that? It sounds like one
of the places where that geographical little Henry Arthur Jones sends
the heroes of his plays to expiate their virtues."

"It is quite a mistake to imagine that the author or the artist should
stuff his beautiful, empty mind with knowledge, with impressions, with
facts of any kind," said Amarinth. "I have written a great novel upon
Iceland, full of colour, of passion, of the most subtle impurity, yet I
could not point you out Iceland upon the map. I do not know where it
is, or what it is. I only know that it has a beautiful name, and that I
have written a beautiful thing about it. This age is an age of
identification, in which our god is the Encyclopædia Britannica, and our
devil the fairy tale that teaches nothing. We go to the British Museum
for culture, and to Archdeacon Farrar for guidance. And then we think
that we are advancing. We might as well return to the myths of Darwin,
or to the delicious fantasies of John Stuart Mill. They at least were
entertaining, and no one attempted to believe in them."

"We always return to our first hates," said Lord Reggie, rather
languidly.

"Do have some more tea, Madame Valtesi," pleaded Mrs. Windsor.

"No, thank you. I never take more than one cup on principle--the
principle being that the first cup is the best, like the last word. I
want to take a stroll round the rose garden, if I may. Mr. Amarinth,
will you come with me?"

She added in an undertone to him, as they walked slowly away together--

"I always hate to see people drinking when I have finished. It makes me
feel like a barmaid."



VI.


Lady Locke and Lord Reggie were left alone together for the time. Mrs.
Windsor had gone into the cottage to write a note, asking the curate of
Chenecote to dine the next day. She always asked the curate to dine
during the Surrey week. She thought it made things so deliciously
rustic. Lord Reggie was still looking very tired, and eating a great
many strawberries. He did both mechanically, and as if he didn't know he
was doing them. As Lady Locke glanced at him, she felt that he certainly
fulfilled her expectations, so far as being cool and young went. His
round baby collar seemed to take off quite five years from his age, and
his straw hat, with its black riband, suited him very well. Only the
glaring green carnation offended her sight. She longed to ask him why he
wore it. But she felt she had no right to. So she watched him looking
tired and eating strawberries, until he glanced up at her with his
pretty blue eyes.

"These strawberries are very good," he said. "I should finish them,
only I hate finishing anything. There is something so commonplace about
it. Don't you think so? Commonplace people are always finishing off
things, and getting through things. They map out their days, and have
special hours for everything. I should like to have special hours for
nothing. That would be much more original."

"You are very fond of originality?"

"Are not you?"

"I don't quite know. Perhaps I have not met many original people in my
life. You see I have been out of England a great deal, and out of
cities. I have lived almost entirely among soldiers."

"Soldiers are never original. They think it is unmanly. I once spent a
week with the commander of one of our armies of occupation, and I never
heard the same remarks so often in all my life. They thought everything
was an affectation. Once, when I mentioned Matthew Arnold at the mess,
they thought he was an affectation."

"Oh, surely not."

"They did, really. I explained that he had been a school-inspector. I
thought that might reassure them. But they evidently did not believe me.
They knew nothing about anything or anybody. That would have been
rather charming, only they thought they knew everything."

"I think you must have been unfortunate in your experience."

"Perhaps I was. I know I tried to be manly. I talked about Wilson
Barrett. What more could I do? To talk about Wilson Barrett is generally
supposed to show your appreciation of the heroic age. Of course nobody
thinks about him now. But I was quite a failure. I went to five
dinner-parties, I remember, during that week, and we all conversed about
machine-guns at each of them. I felt as if the whole of life was a
machine-gun, and men and women were all quick-firing parties."

"I suppose we are most of us a little inclined to talk shop, as it is
called."

"But we ought to talk general shop, the shop in which everything is sold
from Bibles to cheap cheese. Only we might leave out the Bibles. Mrs.
Humphrey Ward has created a corner in them."

"You have finished the strawberries after all."

Reggie burst into an almost boyish laugh.

"So I have. We none of us live up to our ideals, I suppose. But really I
have none. I agree with Esmé that nothing is so limited as to have an
ideal."

"And yet you look sometimes as if you might have many," she said, as if
half to herself. The curious motherly feeling had come upon her again, a
kind of tenderness that often leads to preaching.

Reggie glanced up at her quickly, and with a pleased expression. A
veiled tribute to his good looks delighted him, whether it came from man
or woman. Only an unveiled one surpassed it in his estimation.

"Ah! but that means nothing," he said. "It is quite a mistake to
believe, as many people do, that the mind shows itself in the face. Vice
may sometimes write itself in lines and changes of contour, but that is
all. Our faces are really masks given to us to conceal our minds with.
Of course occasionally the mask slips partly off, generally when we are
stupid and emotional. But that is an inartistic accident. Outward
revelations of what is going on inside of us take place far more seldom
than silly people suppose. No more preposterous theory has ever been put
forward than that of the artist revealing himself in his art. The
writer, for instance, has at least three minds--his Society mind, his
writing mind, and his real mind. They are all quite separate and
distinct, or they ought to be. When his writing mind and his real mind
get mixed up together, he ceases to be an artist. That is why Swinburne
has gone off so much. If you want to write really fine erotic poetry,
you must live an absolutely rigid and entirely respectable life. The
'Laus Veneris' could only have been produced by a man who had a
Nonconformist conscience. I am certain that Mrs. Humphrey Ward is the
most strictly orthodox Christian whom we have. Otherwise, her books
against the accepted Christianity could never have brought her in so
many thousands of pounds. I never read her, of course. Life is far too
long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that
she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she
would rival George Eliot. Dickens had probably no sense of humour. That
is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was
utterly mistaken when he wrote the 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' After
Dorian's act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet,
more saintly, more angelic in expression."

"I never read that book."

"Then you have gained a great deal. Poor Oscar! He is terribly truthful.
He reminds me so much of George Washington."

"Shall we walk round the garden if you have really finished tea?" said
Lady Locke, rising. "What a delicious afternoon it is, so quiet, so
detached from the rest of the year, as Mr. Amarinth might say. I am glad
to be away from London. It is only habit that makes London endurable."

"But surely habit makes nothing endurable. Otherwise we should like
politics, and get accustomed to the presence of solicitors in Society."

"I do like politics," Lady Locke said, laughing. "How beautiful these
roses are! Ah, there is Tommy. You don't know my little boy, do you?"
Tommy, in fact, now came bounding towards them along a rose alley. His
cheeks were flushed with excitement, and, as he drew nearer, they saw
that his brown eyes were sparkling with a dimmed lustre behind a large
pair of spectacles, that were set rakishly upon his straight little
nose.

"My dear boy," exclaimed his mother, "what on earth are you doing? How
hideous you are!"

"Harry Smith has lent them to me," cried Tommy exultantly. "He says I
look splendid in them."

"That is all very fine, but Harry Smith requires them, and you don't.
His father won't like it. You must give them back, Tommy. Shake hands
with Lord Reginald Hastings. He has come to stay here."

Tommy shook hands scrutinisingly, and at once broke conversational
ground with--

"Do you know who the great Athanasius was?"

"He was an excellent person, who will always be widely known to fame for
his omissions. He did not write the Athanasian creed. For that reason he
will always be deserving of our respect."

Tommy listened to these remarks with profound attention, and expressed
himself very well satisfied with this addition to his youthful
knowledge. He thrust his hot hand into Lord Reggie's with the artless
remark--

"You are more clever than Cousin Betty!" and invited him to join
forthwith in a game of ball upon the bowling-green. To Lady Locke's
surprise, Lord Reggie did not resist the alluring temptation, but ran
off with the boy quite light-heartedly. She stood watching them as they
disappeared across the smooth, green lawn.

"I can't understand him," she thought to herself. "He seems to be
talented, and yet an echo of another man, naturally good-hearted, full
of horrible absurdities, a gentleman, and yet not a man at all. He says
himself that he commits every sin that attracts him, but he does not
look wicked. What is he? Is he being himself, or is he being Mr.
Amarinth, or is he merely posing, or is he really hateful, or is he only
whimsical, and clever, and absurd? What would he have been if he had
never seen Mr. Amarinth?"

She began vaguely to dislike Mr. Amarinth, vaguely to like Lord Reggie.
Her boy had taken a fancy to him, and she was an unreasonably motherly
mother. People who are unreasonably motherly like by impulse wholly very
often, and hate by impulse. Their mind has no why or wherefore with
which to bolster up their heart. She went slowly towards the cottage to
dress for dinner, and all the time that she was walking, she continued,
rather strenuously, to like Lord Reggie.

That evening, after dinner, there was music in the small drawing-room,
which was exquisitely done up in Eastern style, with an arched roof,
screens of wonderfully carved wood brought from Upper Egypt, Persian
hangings and embroideries, divans and prayer rugs, on which nobody ever
prayed. Lord Reggie and Mr. Amarinth both played the piano in an easy,
tentative sort of way, making excess of expression do duty for
deficiencies of execution, and covering occasional mistakes with the
soft rather than with the loud pedal. Lord Reggie played a hymn of his
own, which he frankly acknowledged was very beautiful. He described it
as a hymn without words, which, he said softly, all hymns should be.
There was archaic simplicity, not to say baldness, about it which sent
Mrs. Windsor into exotic raptures, and, as it was exceedingly short, it
made its definite mark.

There was a moon in the night, full, round, and serene, and the French
windows stood open to the quiet garden. The drawing-room was very dimly
lighted, and as Reggie played, he was in shadow. His white, sensitive
face was only faintly to be seen. It looked pure and young, Lady Locke
thought, as she watched him. He was so enamoured of his hymn that he
played it over and over again, and, from his touch, it seemed as if he
were trying to make the Steinway grand sound as much like a spinet as
possible.

Madame Valtesi sat on a sofa with her long, slim feet supported upon an
embroidered cushion. She was smoking a cigarette with all the complete
mastery of custom. Mrs. Windsor stood near the window, idly following
with her eyes the perambulations of Bung, who was flitting about the
garden like a ghost with a curled tail and a turned-up nose. Mr.
Amarinth leaned largely upon the piano, in an attitude of rapt
attention. His clever, clean-shaved face wore an expression of seraphic
sensuality.

Lady Locke listened quietly. She had never heard any hymn so often
before, and yet she did not feel bored.

At last Lord Reggie stopped, and said, "Esmé, the curate comes to dine
to-morrow. Remember to be very sweet to him. I want to play the organ on
Sunday morning, and he must let us do an anthem. I will compose one. We
can get up a choir practice on Friday night, if Mrs. Windsor does not
mind."

"Oh, charming!" Mrs. Windsor cried from the window. "I love a choir
practice above all things. Choir boys are so pretty. They must come to
the practice in their nightgowns, of course. I am sure Mr. Smith will be
delighted. But you must remember to be very high church to-morrow night.
Mr. Smith is terribly particular about that."

"I don't think I know how to be High Church," said Madame Valtesi very
gravely. "Does one assume any special posture of body, or are one's
convictions to be shown only in attitude of mind?"

"Oh, there is no difficulty," said Lord Reggie. "All one has to do is to
abuse the Evangelical party. Speak disrespectfully of the Bishop of
Liverpool, and say that Father Staunton and the Bishop of Lincoln are
the only preachers of true doctrine in England. The Ritualists are very
easily pleased. They put their faith in preachers and in postures. If I
were anything, I would be a Roman Catholic."

"Should you like to confess all your sins?" asked Lady Locke, in some
surprise.

"Immensely. There is nothing so interesting as telling a good man or
woman how bad one has been. It is intellectually fascinating. One of the
greatest pleasures of having been what is called wicked is, that one has
so much to say to the good. Good people love hearing about sin. Haven't
you noticed that although the sinner takes no sort of interest in the
saint, the saint has always an uneasy curiosity about the doings of the
sinner? It is a case of the County Council and Zaeo's back over and over
again."

"Yes, we love examining each other's backs," said Madame Valtesi.

Esmé Amarinth sighed musically and very loudly, and remarked--

"Faith is the most plural thing I know. We are all supposed to believe
in the same thing in different ways. It is like eating out of the same
dish with different coloured spoons. And we beat each other with the
spoons, like children."

"And the dish gives us indigestion," said Madame Valtesi. "I once spent
a week with an aunt who had taken to Litany, as other people take to
dram-drinking, you know. We went to Litany every day, and I never had so
much dyspepsia before in my life. Litany, taken often, is more
indigestible than lobster at midnight."

"How exquisite the moon is!" said Lady Locke, rising and going towards
the window.

"The moon is the religion of the night," said Esmé. "Go out into the
garden all of you, and I will sing to you a song of the moon. It is very
beautiful. I shall give it to Jean de Reszke, I think. My voice will
sound better from a distance. Good voices always do."

He sat down at the piano, and they strolled out through the French
windows into the green and silent pleasaunce.

His voice was clear and open, and he spoke rather than sang the
following verses, while they stood listening till the rippling
accompaniment trickled away into silence:--

    Oh! beautiful moon with the ghostly face,
      Oh! moon with the brows of snow,
    Rise up, rise up from your slumbering place,
      And draw from your eyes the veil,
    Lest my wayward heart should fail
      In the homage it fain would bestow--
    Oh! beautiful moon with the ghostly face,
      Oh! moon with the brows of snow.

    Oh! beautiful mouth like a scarlet flow'r,
      Oh! mouth with the wild, soft breath,
    Kiss close, kiss close in the dream-stricken bow'r,
      And whisper away the world;
    Till the wayward wings are furled,
      And the shadow is lifted from death--
    Oh! beautiful mouth like a scarlet flow'r,
      Oh! mouth with the wild, soft breath!

    Oh! beautiful soul with the outstretched hands,
      Oh! soul with the yearning eyes,
    Lie still, lie still in the fairy lands
      Where never a tear may fall;
    Where no voices ever call
      Any passion-act, strange or unwise--
    Oh! beautiful soul with the outstretched hands,
      Oh! soul with the yearning eyes!

The song was uttered with so much apparent passion that Lady Locke felt
tears standing in her eyes when the last words ceased on the cool air of
the night.

"How beautiful," she said involuntarily to Lord Reggie, who happened to
be standing beside her. "And how wrong!"

"Surely that is a contradiction in terms," the boy said. "Nothing that
is beautiful can possibly be wrong."

"Then how exquisitely right some women have been whom Society has
hounded out of its good graces," Madame Valtesi remarked.

"Yes," said Reggie. "And how exquisitely happy in their rectitude."

"But not in their punishment," said Mrs. Windsor. "I think it is so
silly to give people the chance of whipping you for what they do
themselves."

"Society only loves one thing more than sinning," said Madame Valtesi,
examining the moon magisterially through her tortoise shell eyeglass.

"And what is that?" said Lady Locke.

"Administering injustice."



VII.


"Well, what would you all like to do with yourselves to-day?" asked Mrs.
Windsor on the following morning after breakfast, which was over at
half-past ten, for they all got up early as a mark of respect to the
country air; and indeed, Mr. Amarinth declared that he had been awake
before five, revelling in the flame-coloured music of the farmyard
cocks.

"I should like to go out shopping," remarked Madame Valtesi, who was
dressed in a white serge dress, figured with innocent pink flowers.

"But, my dear, there are no shops!"

"There is always a linen-draper's in every village," said Madame
Valtesi; "and a grocer's."

"But what would you buy there?"

"That is just what I wish to know. May I have the governess cart? I want
to try and feel like a governess."

"Of course. I will order it. Will you drive yourself?"

"Oh no, I am too blind. Lady Locke, won't you come with me? I am sure
you can drive. I can always tell by looking at people what they can do.
I could pick you out a dentist from a crowd of a hundred people."

"Or a driver?" said Lady Locke. "I think I can manage the white pony.
Yes, I will come with pleasure."

"I shall go into the drawing-room and compose my anthem for Sunday,"
said Lord Reggie. "I am unlike Saint Saëns. I always compose at the
piano."

"And I will go into the rose-garden," said Esmé, "and eat pink roses.
There is nothing more delicious than a ripe La France. May I, Mrs.
Windsor? Please don't say 'this is liberty hall,' or I shall think of
Mr. Alexander, the good young manager who never dies--but may I?"

"Do. And compose some Ritualistic epigrams to say to Mr. Smith to-night.
How delightfully rustic we all are! So naïve! I am going to order
dinner, and add up the household accounts for yesterday."

She rustled away with weary grace, rattling delicately a large bunch of
keys that didn't open any thing in particular. They were a part of her
get up as a country hostess.

A few moments later some simple chords, and the sound of a rather
obvious sequence, followed by intensely Handelian runs, announced that
Lord Reggie had begun to compose his anthem, and Madame Valtesi and Lady
Locke were mounting into the governess cart, which was rather like a
large hip bath on wheels. They sat opposite to each other upon two low
seats, and Lady Locke drove sideways.

As they jogged along down the dusty country road, between the sweet
smelling flowery banks, Madame Valtesi said--

"Do governesses always drive in tubs? Is it part of the system?"

"I don't know," answered Lady Locke, looking at the hunched white figure
facing her, and at the little shrewd eyes peering from beneath the shade
of the big and aggressively garden hat. "What system do you mean?"

"The English governess system; simple clothes, no friends, no society,
no money, no late dinner, supper at nine, all the talents, and bed at
ten whether you are inclined to sleep or not. Do they invariably go
about in tubs as well?"

"I suppose very often. These carts are always called governess carts."

Madame Valtesi nodded enigmatically.

"I am glad I have never had to be a governess," said Lady Locke
thoughtfully. "From a worldly point of view, I suppose I have been born
under a lucky star."

"There is no such thing as luck in the world," Madame Valtesi remarked,
putting up a huge white parasol that abruptly extinguished the view for
miles. "There is only capability."

"But some capable people are surely unlucky."

"They are incapable in one direction or another. Have you not noticed
that whenever a man is a failure his friends say he is an able man. No
man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who
can't succeed in obtaining that worst, and most necessary, of evils--a
husband."

"You are very cynical," said Lady Locke, flicking the pony's fat white
back with the whip.

"All intelligent people are. Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things
as they are instead of as they ought to be. If one says that
Christianity has never converted the Christians, or that love has ruined
more women than hate, or that virtue is an accident of environment, one
is sure to be dubbed a cynic. And yet all these remarks are true to
absolute absurdity."

"I scarcely think so."

"But, then, you have been in the Straits Settlements for eight years.
They are true in London. And there are practically not more than about
five universal truths in the world. One must always locate a truth if
one wishes to be understood. What is true in London is often a lie in
the country. I believe that there are still many good Christians in the
country, but they are only good Christians because they are in the
country--most of them. Our virtues are generally a fortunate, or
unfortunate, accident, and the same may be said of our vices. Now, think
of Lord Reggie. He is one of the most utterly vicious young men of the
day. Why? Because, like the chameleon, he takes his colour from whatever
he rests upon, or is put near. And he has been put near scarlet instead
of white."

Lady Locke felt a strange thrill of pain at her heart.

"I am sure Lord Reggie has a great deal of good in him!" she exclaimed.

"Not enough to spoil his charm," said Madame Valtesi. "He has no real
intention of being either bad or good. He lives like Esmé Amarinth,
merely to be artistic."

"But what in Heaven's name does that word mean?" asked Lady Locke. "It
seems almost the only modern word. I hear it everywhere like a sort of
refrain."

"I cannot tell you. I am too old. Ask Lord Reggie. He would tell you
anything."

The last words were spoken with slow intention.

"What do you mean?" said Lady Locke hastily.

"Here we are at the post-office. Would it not be the proper thing to do
to get some stamps? No? Then let us stop at the linen-draper's. I feel a
strong desire to buy some village frilling. And there are some
deliciously coarse-looking pocket-handkerchiefs in the window, about a
yard square. I must get a dozen of those."

At lunch that day Lord Reggie announced that he had composed a beautiful
anthem on the words--

"Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy
temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks."

"They sound exactly like something of Esmé's," he said, "but really they
are taken from the 'Song of Solomon.' I had no idea that the Bible was
so intensely artistic. There are passages in the Book of Job that I
should not be ashamed to have written."

"You remind me of a certain lady writer who is very popular in kitchen
circles," said Esmé, "and whose husband once told me that she had
founded her style upon Mr. Ruskin and the better parts of the Bible. She
brings out about seven books every year, I am told, and they are all
about sailors, of whom she knows absolutely nothing. I am perpetually
meeting her, and she always asks me to lunch, and says she knows my
brother. She seems to connect my poor brother with lunch in some curious
way. I shall never lunch with her, but she will always ask me."

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast," Mrs. Windsor said, with a
little air of aptness.

"That is one of the greatest fallacies of a melancholy age," Esmé
answered, arranging the huge moonstone in his tie with a plump hand;
"suicide would be the better word. 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' has made
suicide quite the rage. A number of most respectable ladies, without the
vestige of a past among them, have put an end to themselves lately, I am
told. To die naturally has become most unfashionable, but no doubt the
tide will turn presently."

"I wonder if people realise how dangerous they may be in their
writings," said Lady Locke.

"One has to choose between being dangerous and being dull. Society loves
to feel itself upon the edge of a precipice, I assure you. To be
harmless is the most deadly enemy to social salvation. Strict
respectability would even handicap a rich American nowadays, and rich
Americans are terribly respectable by nature. That is why they are
always so anxious to get into the Prince of Wales' set."

"I suppose Ibsen is responsible for a good deal," Mrs. Windsor said
rather vaguely. Luncheon always rendered her rather vague, and after
food her intellect struggled for egress, as the sun struggles to emerge
from behind intercepting clouds.

"I believe Mr. Clement Scott thinks so," said Amarinth; "but then it
does not matter very much what Mr. Clement Scott thinks, does it? The
position of the critics always strikes me as very comic. They are for
ever running at the back of public opinion, and shouting 'come on!' or
'go back!' to those who are in front of them. If half of them had their
way, our young actors and actresses would play in Pinero's pieces as
Mrs. Siddons or Charles Kean played in the pieces of Shakespeare long
ago. A good many of them found their claims to attention on the horrible
fact that they once knew Charles Dickens, a circumstance of which they
ought rather to be ashamed. They are monotonous dwellers in an
unenlightened past like Mr. Sala, who is even more commonplace than the
books of which he is for ever talking. Mr. Joseph Knight is their oracle
at first nights, and some of them even labour under the wild impression
that Mr. Robert Buchanan can write good English, and that Mr. George R.
Sims--what would he be without the initial?--is a minor poet."

"Dear me! I am afraid we are all wrong," said Mrs. Windsor, still rather
vaguely; "but do you know, we ought really to be thinking of our walk up
Leith Hill. It is a lovely afternoon. Will you attempt it, Madame
Valtesi?"

"No, thank you. I think I must have been constructed, like Providence,
with a view to sitting down. Whoever thinks of the Deity as standing? I
will stay at home and read the last number of 'The Yellow Disaster.' I
want to see Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's idea of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He has drawn him sitting in a wheelbarrow in the gardens of Lambeth
Palace, with underneath him the motto, 'J'y suis, j'y reste.' I believe
he has on a black mask. Perhaps that is to conceal the likeness."

"I have seen it," Mrs. Windsor said; "it is very clever. There are only
three lines in the whole picture, two for the wheelbarrow and one for
the Archbishop."

"What exquisite simplicity!" said Lord Reggie, going out into the hall
to get his straw hat.

In the evening, when they assembled in the drawing-room for dinner, it
was found that both Mrs. Windsor and Madame Valtesi had put on simple
black dresses in honour of the curate. Lady Locke, although she never
wore widow's weeds, had given up colours since her husband's death. As
they waited for Mr. Smith's advent there was an air of decent
expectation about the party. Mr. Amarinth looked serious to heaviness.
Lord Reggie was pale, and seemed abstracted. Probably he was thinking of
his anthem, whose tonic and dominant chords, and diatonic progressions,
he considered most subtly artistic. He would like to have written in the
Lydian mode, only he could not remember what the Lydian mode was, and he
had forgotten to bring any harmony book with him. He glanced into the
mirror over the fireplace, smoothed his pale gold hair with his hand,
and prepared to be very sweet to the curate in order to obtain
possession of the organ on the ensuing Sunday.

"Mr. Smith," said one of the tall footmen, throwing open the
drawing-room, and a tall, thin, ascetic looking man, with a shaved,
dark face, and an incipient tonsure, entered the room very seriously.

"Dinner is served."

The two announcements followed one upon the other almost without a
pause. Mrs. Windsor requested the curate to take her in, after
introducing him to her guests in the usual rather muddled and
perfunctory manner. When they were all seated, and Mr. Amarinth was
beginning to hold forth over the clear soup, she murmured confidentially
to her companion--

"So good of you to take pity upon us. You will not find us very gay. We
are really down here to have a quiet, serious week--a sort of retreat,
you know. Mr. Amarinth is holding it. I hope nobody will have a fit this
time. Ah! of course you did not come last year. Do you like Chenecote? A
sweet village, isn't it?"

"Very sweet indeed, outwardly. But I fear there is a good deal to be
done inwardly; much sweeping and scouring of minds before the savour of
the place will be quite acceptable on high."

"Dear me! I am sorry to hear that. One can never tell, of course."

"I have put a stop to a good deal already, I am thankful to say. I have
broken up the idle corners permanently, and checked the Sunday evening
rowdyism upon the common."

"Indeed! I am so glad. Mr. Smith has broken up the idle corners, Madame
Valtesi. Is it not a mercy?"

Madame Valtesi looked enigmatical, as indeed she always did when she was
ignorant. She had not the smallest idea what an idle corner might be,
nor how it could be broken up. She therefore peered through her
eyeglasses and said nothing. Mr. Amarinth was less discreet.

"An idle corner," he said. "What a delicious name. It might have been
invented by Izaac Walton. It suggests a picture by George Morland. I
love his canvases, rustics carousing----"

But before he could get any further, Reggie caught his eye and formed
silently with his lips the words, "Remember my anthem."

"He idealises so much," Amarinth went on easily. "Of course a real
carouse is horribly inartistic. Excess always is, although Oscar Wilde
has said that nothing succeeds like it."

"Excess is very evil," Mr. Smith said rather rigidly. "Excess in
everything seems to be characteristic of our age. I could wish that
many would return to the ascetic life. No wine, thank you."

"Indeed, yes," said Mrs. Windsor, "that is what I always think. There is
something so beautiful in not eating and drinking, and not marrying, and
all that; but at least we must acknowledge that celibacy is quite coming
into fashion. Our young men altogether refuse to marry nowadays. Let us
hope that is a step in the right direction."

"If they married more and drank less, I don't fancy their morals would
suffer much," Madame Valtesi remarked with exceeding dryness, looking at
Mr. Smith's budding tonsure through her tortoise-shell eyeglass.

"The monastic life is very beautiful," said Lord Reggie. "I always find
when I go to a monastery, that the monks give me very excellent wine. I
suppose they keep all their hair shirts for their own private use."

"That is the truest hospitality, isn't it," said Lady Locke.

"The high church party are showing us the right way," Mr. Amarinth
remarked impressively, with a side-anthem glance at Lord Reggie which
spoke volumes. "They understand the value of æstheticism in religion.
They recognise the fact that a beautiful vestment uplifts the soul far
more than a dozen bad chants by Stainer, or Barnby, or any other
unmusical Christian. The average Anglican chant is one of the most
unimaginative, unpoetical things in the world. It always reminds me of
the cart-horse parade on Whit Monday. A brown Gregorian is so much more
devotional."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Smith, who had been listening to these
remarks with acquiescence, but who now manifested some obvious
confusion.

"A brown Gregorian," Mr. Amarinth repeated. "All combinations of sounds
convey a sense of colour to the mind. Gregorians are obviously of a rich
and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent magenta."

"I think the Bishops are beginning to understand Gregorian music a
little better. No plover's eggs, thank you," said Mr. Smith, who was
totally without a sense of melody, but who assumed a complete musical
authority, based on the fact that he intoned in church.

"The Bishops never go on understanding anything," said Mr. Amarinth.
"They conceal their intelligence, if they have any, up their lawn
sleeves. I once met a Bishop. It was at a garden party at Lambeth
Palace. He took me aside into a small shrubbery, and informed me that
he was really a Buddhist. He added that nearly all the Bishops were."

"Is it true that Mr. Haweis introduced his congregation to a Mahatma in
the vestry after service last Sunday?" said Madame Valtesi. "I heard so,
and that he has persuaded Little Tich to read the lessons for the rest
of the season. I think it is rather hard upon the music halls. There is
really so much competition nowadays!"

"I know nothing about Mr. Haweis," said Mr. Smith, drinking some water
from a wineglass. "I understood he was a conjurer, or an entertainer, or
something of that kind."

"Oh no, he is quite a clergyman," exclaimed Mrs. Windsor. "Quite; except
when he is in the pulpit, of course. And then I suppose he thinks it
more religious to drop it."

"Since I have been away there has been a great change in services," said
Lady Locke. "They are so much brighter and more cheerful."

"Yes, Christians are getting very lively," said Madame Valtesi, helping
herself to a cutlet in aspic. "They demand plenty of variety in their
devotional exercises, and what Arthur Roberts, or somebody, calls 'short
turns.' The most popular of all the London clergymen invariably has an
anthem that lasts half-an-hour, and preaches for five minutes by a stop
watch."

"I scarcely think that music should entirely oust doctrine," began Mr.
Smith, refusing an entrée with a gentle wave of his hand.

"The clergyman I sit under," said Mrs. Windsor, "always stops for
several minutes before his sermon, so that the people can go out if they
want to."

"How inconsiderate," said Mr. Amarinth; "of course no one dares to move.
English people never dare to move, except at the wrong time. They think
it is less noticeable to go out at a concert during a song than during
an interval. The English labour under so many curious delusions. They
think they are respectable, for instance, if they are not noticed, and
that to be talked about is to be fast. Of course the really fast people
are never talked about at all. Half the young men in London, whose names
are by-words, are intensely and hopelessly virtuous. They know it, and
that is why they look so pale. The consciousness of virtue is a terrible
thing, is it not, Mr. Smith?"

"I am afraid I hardly caught what you were saying. No pudding, thank
you," said that gentleman.

"I was saying that we moderns are really all much better than we seem.
There is far more hypocrisy of vice nowadays than hypocrisy of virtue.
The amount of excellence going about is positively quite amazing, if one
only knows where to look for it; but good people in Society are so
terribly afraid of being found out."

"Really! Can that be the case?"

"Indeed, it can. Society is absolutely frank about its sins, but
absolutely secretive about its lapses into goodness, if I may so phrase
it. I once knew a young nobleman who went twice to church on Sunday--in
the morning and the afternoon. He managed to conceal it for nearly
five years, but one day, to his horror, he saw a paragraph in the
_Star_--the _Star_ is a small evening paper which circulates
chiefly among members of the Conservative party who desire to know what
the aristocracy are doing--revealing his exquisite secret. He fled the
country immediately, and is now living in retirement in Buenos Ayres,
which is, I am told, the modern equivalent of the old-fashioned
purgatory."

"Good gracious! London must be in a very sad condition," said Mr. Smith,
in considerable excitement. "No, thank you, I never touch fruit. Things
used to be very different, I imagine, although I have never been in town
except for the day, and then merely to call upon my dentist."

"Yes, this is an era of change," murmured Lord Reggie, who had spoken
little and eaten much. "Good women have taken to talking about vice,
and, in no long time, bad men will take to talking about virtue."

"I think you are wronging good women, Lord Reggie," said Lady Locke
rather gravely.

"It is almost impossible to wrong a woman now," he answered pensively.
"Women are so busy in wronging men, that they have no time for anything
else. Sarah Grand has inaugurated the Era of women's wrongs."

"I am so afraid that she will drive poor, dear Mrs. Lynn Linton mad,"
said Mrs. Windsor, drawing on her gloves--for she persisted in believing
that the presence of Mr. Smith constituted a dinner party. "Mrs.
Linton's articles are really getting so very noisy. Don't you think they
rather suggest Bedlam?"

"To me they suggest nothing whatever," said Amarinth wearily. "I cannot
distinguish one from another. They are all like sheep that have gone
astray."

"I must say I prefer them to Lady Jeune's," said Mrs. Windsor.

"Lady Jeune catches society by the throat and worries it," said Madame
Valtesi.

"She worries it very inartistically," added Lord Reggie.

"Ah!" said Amarinth, as the ladies rose to go into the drawing-room;
"she makes one great mistake. She judges of Society by her own parties,
and looks at life through the spectacles of a divorce court judge. No
wonder she is the bull terrier of modern London life."

Mrs. Windsor paused at the dining-room door and looked back.

"We are going to have coffee in the garden," she said. "Will you join us
there? Don't stay too long over your water, Mr. Smith," she added, with
pious archness.

"No; but I never take coffee, thank you," he answered solemnly.



VIII.


Esmé Amarinth was generally amusing and whimsical in conversation, but,
like other men, he had his special moments, and the half-hour after
dinner, when the ladies, longing to remain as invisible listeners, had
retired to the bald deserts of feminine society, was usually his time of
triumph. His mental stays were then unfastened. He could breathe forth
his stories freely. His wittiest jokes, nude, no longer clad in the
shadowy garments of more or less conventional propriety, danced like
bacchanals through the conversation, and kicked up heels to fire even
the weary men of society. He expanded into fantastic anecdote, and
mingled many a _bon mot_ with the blue spirals of his mounting
cigarette smoke. But to-night Mr. Smith's gentle, "I never smoke, thank
you," reminded him that the fate of Lord Reggie's anthem was hanging in
the balance. He resolved to tread warily among clerical prejudices, so,
lighting a cigarette, and pushing the claret away from him with one
plump hand, he drew his chair slowly towards Mr. Smith's, and a sweet
smile spread deliberately over his rather large and intelligent face.

"I was very much interested in your remark about doctrine and music at
dinner," he began in his most carefully modulated voice, "and I wanted
to pursue the subject a little farther, only the minds of ladies are so
curious and unexpected, that I thought it better to refrain. Have you
noticed that many women make a kind of profession of being shocked?"

"Surely no," said Mr. Smith, sipping his water with an inquiring air.

"Yes, positively it is so, especially if a truth about religion is
uttered. They are apt to think that all truths about religion are
blasphemous. It is wonderful how ready good women are to find blasphemy
where it is not, and to confuse reasoning with ribaldry."

"Ah!" said the curate, looking the more ascetic because he was slightly
confused in mind.

"Now you spoke of music ousting doctrine. Do you not think that the
truest, the most poignant doctrine, speaks, utters itself through the
arts. Music has its religion and its atheism, painting its holiness
and its sin. A statue, in its white and marble stillness, may suggest
to us dreams in which the angels walk, or visions that I will not
characterise in the presence of an ordained priest. Even architecture
may incline us to worship, and a few broken fragments of stone to faith.
Have you ever been in Greece?"

"I have never been out of my own country," said Mr. Smith, "except once,
when I spent a week in Wales."

"I have never made an exhaustive study of Welsh art," said Amarinth,
"but I believe Mr. Gladstone thinks it gallant, while others prefer to
call it little. But the point I wanted to suggest was merely this, that
we can draw doctrine from the music and the painting of men, as well as
from literature and sermons."

"I have never thought of it before," said Mr. Smith doubtfully.

"Mozart and Bach have given me belief that not even the subversive
impotencies of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the terribly obvious 'mysteries'
of Dr. A. C. Mackenzie, have been able to take from me," murmured Lord
Reggie.

"Ah! Reggie, each decade has its poet Bunn," remarked Amarinth. "We have
our Bunn in Mr. Joseph Bennett, but where are his plums? Religion dwells
in the arts, Mr. Smith, as irreligion so often, unhappily, lurks in the
sciences."

"Indeed I have no opinion of science," the curate said with
authoritative disapproval.

"Science is too often a thief. Art is a prodigal benefactor. She
provides for us an almshouse in which we can take refuge when we are old
and weary. And in music especially--in good music--all doctrine is
crystallised. The man who has genius gathers together all his highest
thoughts and aspirations, all his beliefs, his trust, his faith, and
gives them forth in his art, in his music, or in his picture. Lord
Reginald, for instance, would convert more men to Christianity by his
exquisite and purple anthem than most preachers by all their sermons."

"Indeed, has Lord Reginald composed an anthem?" asked the curate, gazing
upon Reggie with a priestly approval.

"He has, and one that Roman Catholics have delighted in. Forgive my
allusion to an alien faith, but the Romanists, with all their mistakes,
are not unmusical."

"I see much good in Rome," said Mr. Smith solemnly, "although it is
mingled with many errors. No, not any nuts, thank you; I never touch
nuts. I should like to hear this anthem."

"I could play it to you with pleasure," Reggie said, drooping his fair
head slightly, "but of course it is all wrong on a piano. It requires
the organ and sweet boys' voices."

"We have anthems in the church here," said Mr. Smith. "We have even done
masses."

"How exquisite!" said Amarinth. "A village mass. There is something
beautifully original in the notion. Ah! Mr. Smith, if your boys could
have done Lord Reggie's anthem they would have learnt the doctrine of
music."

"Perhaps they--would it be possible--on Sunday?" Mr. Smith said, glowing
gently.

Amarinth got up, dropping his cigarette end into his finger bowl.

"Reggie, we have found a true artist in Chenecote," he said. "Play Mr.
Smith your purple notes, and I will go and take my coffee on the lawn.
The moon washes the night with silver, and, thank Heaven! there are no
nightingales to ruin the music of the stillness with their well-meant
but ill-produced voices. Nature's songster is the worst sort of songster
I know."

He walked with an ample softness into the little hall, and passed out
through the French windows of the drawing room into the shadowy garden.

On the lawn he found Lady Locke sitting alone, sipping her coffee in a
basket chair. Madame Valtesi and Mrs. Windsor had strolled into the
scented rose garden to discuss the inner details of a forthcoming
divorce case. The murmur of their voices, uttering names of
co-respondents, was faintly heard now and then as they passed up and
down the tiny formal paths.

Esmé Amarinth sank down into a chair by Lady Locke and sighed heavily.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

"You have a beautiful soul," he said softly, "and I have a beautiful
soul too. Why should there not be a sympathy between us? Lady Locke, I
am the victim of depression. I am suffering from the malady of life. I
usually have an attack of it in the morning, but it flies when the stars
come out and leaves me brilliant. What can be the matter with me
to-night? I ask myself the question with the most poignant anxiety, I
can assure you."

She glanced at his large and solemn face, at his ample cheeks and loose
mouth, and smiled slightly.

"Some circumstances have been unkind to you, perhaps?" she said.

"That could not hurt me," he answered, "for, thank Heaven! I am no
philosopher, and never take facts seriously. Circumstances, my dear
Lady Locke, are the lashes laid into us by life. Some of us have to
receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on
a coat--that is the only difference."

"Are you a pessimist?" she asked.

"I hope so. I look upon optimism as a most quaint disease, an eruption
that breaks out upon the soul, and destroys all its interest, all its
beauty. The optimist dresses up the amazing figures of life like Dresden
shepherds and shepherdesses, and pipes a foolish tune--the Old Hundredth
or some such thing--for them to dance to. We cannot all refuse to see
anything but comic opera peasants around us."

"Yet we need not replace them with pantomime demons."

"Demons, as you call them, are much more interesting. Nothing is so
unattractive as goodness, except, perhaps, a sane mind in a sane body.
Even the children find the fairies monotonous, I believe. An eternal
smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away
all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand."

"Every one of them sinister."

"Why not? Where would be the drama without the crime? The clash of
swords is the music of the world. People talk so much to me about the
beauty of confidence. They seem to entirely ignore the much more subtle
beauty of doubt. To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely
engrossing. The Apostle Thomas was artistic up to a certain point. He
appreciated the value of shadows in a picture. To be on the alert is to
live. To be lulled in security is to die."

"But if you pushed that amusing theory to its limits you would arrive at
the contradiction in terms--to be happy is to be miserable."

"Certainly. To be what is commonly called happy is a mental complaint
demanding careful treatment. The happy people of the world have their
value, but only the negative value of foils. They throw up and emphasise
the beauty, and the fascination of the unhappy. Scarlet and black are
the finest of all the colours. And to cease to doubt is to despair--for
a really talented man or woman. That is why people become sceptics. They
desire to save themselves from intellectual annihilation."

"Yet the mental pleasure of proving a case may be keen."

"But it cannot be lasting. You do not see the delight that must attend
upon conjecture. Let me put it to you in another way. Can you conceive
loving a man whom you felt you understood?"

"Certainly. Especially if he were difficult for other people to
understand."

"Ah! you begin to appreciate the value of doubt. We often begin by
desiring others to enjoy what we shall eventually want for ourselves.
The moment we understand a human being, our love for that human being
spreads his wings preparatory to flying out of the window."

Lady Locke, who had begun to look earnest, seemed to recollect herself
with an effort, and dispelled the gravity that was settling over her
face with a smile.

"You go very far in your admirable desire to amuse," she said.

"I think not," he answered, putting down her cup with an elaborate
serenity. "One must perpetually doubt to be faithful. Perplexity and
mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about those beautiful
tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once felt this while
men did not, and so women once ruled the world. But men are awakening
from their mental slumber, and are becoming incomprehensible. Lord
Reggie is an instance of what I mean. The average person finds him
exquisitely difficult to comprehend. He fascinates by being sedulously
unexpected. Listen to his anthem. He is beginning to play it. How
unexpected it is. It always does what the ear wants, and all modern
music does what the ear does not want. Therefore the ear always expects
to be disappointed, and Lord Reggie astonishes it by never disappointing
it."

The faint music of the piano now tinkled out into the night, and
numerous simple harmonies and full closes fell melodiously upon their
hearing.

"Lord Reggie is certainly very unlike his anthem," said Lady Locke,
listening a little sadly.

"Reggie is unlike everything except himself. He is completely wonderful,
and, wonderfully complete. He lives for sensations, while other people
live for faiths, or for convictions, or for prejudices. He would make
any woman unhappy. How beautiful!"

"Is it always a sign of intelligence to be what others are not?"

But she received no direct answer to her question, for at this moment
Madame Valtesi and Mrs. Windsor came to them across the lawn. They had
finished trying the divorce case.

"What is that about intelligence?" Madame Valtesi asked croakily.

"Dear Lady!" said Esmé, getting up out of his chair slowly,
"intelligence is the demon of our age. Mine bores me horribly. I am
always trying to find a remedy for it. I have experimented with
absinthe, but gained no result. I have read the collected works of
Walter Besant. They are said to sap the mental powers. They did not sap
mine. Opium has proved useless, and green tea cigarettes leave me
positively brilliant. What am I to do? I so long for the lethargy, the
sweet peace of stupidity. If only I were Lewis Morris!"

"Unfortunate man! You should treat your complaint with the knife. Become
a popular author."

She laughed without smiling, an uncanny habit of hers, and turned to the
window.

"I hear Mr. Smith saying that he must go," she said.

Mrs. Windsor rustled forward to speed the parting guest.

That night Esmé said to Reggie in the smoking room--

"Reggie, Lady Locke will marry you if you ask her."

"I suppose so," the boy said.

"Shall you ask her?"

"I suppose so. Mr. Smith is going to do my anthem on Sunday."

They lit their cigarettes.



IX.


"Mother," said Tommy with exceeding great frankness, "I love Lord
Reggie."

"My dear boy," Lady Locke said, "what a sudden affection! Why, to-day is
only Friday, and you never met him until Wednesday. That is quick work."

"It's very easy," answered Tommy. "It doesn't take any time. Why should
it?"

"Well, we generally get to like people very much gradually. We find out
what they are by degrees, and consider whether they are worth caring
for."

"I don't," said Tommy. "Directly he came to play at ball with me I loved
him. Why shouldn't I?"

"Tommy, you are very direct," his mother cried, laughing. "Now you have
finished breakfast, run out into the garden. I heard Mr. Smith's boys
just now. I expect they are in the paddock."

"Athanasius doesn't play cricket badly," Tommy remarked meditatively,
"only he caught a ball once on his spectacles. Lord Reggie would never
have done that."

"Lord Reggie doesn't wear spectacles," said his mother.

Tommy looked at her seriously for a minute, as if he were taking in the
relevance of this contention. Then he said--

"No, he's not such a bunger," and dashed off towards the paddock.

"Where does he get those words?" thought Lady Locke to herself,
preparing to go to her own breakfast.

She found Lord Reggie alone in the room reading his letters. He was
dressed in loose white flannel, and in the buttonhole of his thin jacket
a big green carnation was stuck. It looked perfectly fresh.

"How do you manage to keep that flower alive so long?" asked Lady Locke,
as they sat down opposite to one another. For there was no formality at
this meal, and people began just when they felt inclined.

"I don't understand," Reggie answered, looking at her across his
mushrooms.

"Why, you have worn it for two days already."

"This? No. Esmé and I have some sent down every morning from a florist's
in Covent Garden."

"Really! Is it worth while?"

"I think that sort of thing is the only sort of thing that is worth
while. Most people are utterly wrong, they worship what they call great
things. I worship little details. This flower is a detail. I worship
it."

"Do you regard it as an emblem, then?"

"No. I hate emblems. The very word makes one think of mourning rings,
and everlasting flowers, and urns, and mementoes of all sorts. Why are
people so afraid of forgetting? There is nothing more beautiful than to
forget, except, perhaps, to be forgotten. I wear this flower because its
colour is exquisite. I have no other reason."

"But its colour is not natural."

"Not yet. Nature has not followed art so far. She always requires time.
Esmé invented this flower two months ago. Only a few people wear it,
those who are followers of the higher philosophy."

"The higher philosophy! What is that?"

"The philosophy to be afraid of nothing, to dare to live as one wishes
to live, not as the middle-classes wish one to live; to have the courage
of one's desires, instead of only the cowardice of other people's."

"Mr. Amarinth is the high priest of this philosophy, I suppose?"

"Esmé is the bravest man I know," said Reggie, taking some marmalade. "I
think sometimes that he sins even more perfectly than I do. He is so
varied. And he escapes those absurd things, consequences. His sin always
finds him out. He is never at home to it by any chance. Why do you look
at me so strangely?"

"Do I look at you strangely?" she asked, with a sudden curious
nervousness. "Perhaps it is because you are so strange, so unlike the
men whom I have been accustomed to. Your aims are different from
theirs."

"That is impossible, Lady Locke."

"Impossible! Why?"

"Because I have no aims; I have only emotions. If we live for aims we
blunt our emotions. If we live for aims, we live for one minute, for one
day, for one year, instead of for every minute, every day, every year.
The moods of one's life are life's beauties. To yield to all one's moods
is to really live."

Mrs. Windsor's voice was heard outside at this moment, and Lady Locke
put her napkin down upon the cloth and got up. In performing this action
she left her hand on the table for an instant. Lord Reggie touched it
with his. She immediately drew her hand away, and her face reddened
slightly. But she said nothing, and went quietly out of the room.

Mrs. Windsor was outside speaking to one of the tall footmen. When she
saw her cousin she jingled her keys languidly and smiled.

"Good morning, darling," she said. "I am arranging about the choir
practice to-night. We are going to entertain all the dear little choir
boys to supper afterwards, and they will sing catches, and so on, so
delicious by moonlight. Mr. Amarinth has invented a new catch for them.
And on Monday the schoolchildren are coming to tea on the lawn, and
games. Mr. Amarinth says that charity always begins abroad, but one
couldn't have a school treat in Belgrave Square, could one? It would be
quite sacrilege, or bad form, which is worse. We must try and invent
some new games. You and Lord Reggie must put your heads together."

"Thank you, Betty," Lady Locke said, moving rather hastily on toward the
garden. Mrs. Windsor looked after her with the sudden sly suspicion of a
stupid woman who fancies she is being discerning and clever.

"Something has happened," she thought. "Can Reggie have said anything
already?"

She walked into the breakfast-room, where she found Lord Reggie alone.

He was holding up a table-spoon filled with marmalade to catch the light
from a stray sunbeam that filtered in through the drawn blinds, and wore
a rapt look, a "caught up" look, as Mrs. Windsor would have expressed
it.

"Good morning," he said softly. "Is not this marmalade Godlike? This
marvellous, clear, amber glow, amber with a touch of red in it, almost
makes me believe in an after life. Surely, surely marmalade can never
die!"

"I must have been mistaken," Mrs. Windsor thought, as she expressed her
sense of the eternity of jams in general in suitable language.

Meanwhile Lady Locke had gone into the garden. The weather was quite
perfect. England seemed to have made a special effort, and to have
determined to show what she could do in the way of a summer. The sky had
been well swept of clouds, and shimmered in the heat almost as if it had
been varnished. The garden was revelling in the growing luxury of
warmth. It never looked parched; Mrs. Windsor's gardeners were too agile
with the hose for that. The hundreds of roses were letting out their
perfume shyly, as pretty children let out their secrets. The carnations
nodded to one another against the stone wall that was clothed with
Espalier pear trees. The great cedar tree spread its arms out to catch
the soft warm breeze in its embrace. Over the tree-tops the swallows
were circling with their little characteristic air of discreet and
graceful frivolity. Tennyson would doubtless have addressed them. Lady
Locke did not even notice them. She was thinking, and too deeply to sit
down.

She was in that strange condition of mind that is called being angry
with one's self. A miniature civil war was raging within her, in which
two mental voices abused one another, and asked one another the most
strangely impertinent and inappropriate questions.

One said, "What on earth are you about?"

The other, "You have no right to ask. Mind your own business."

"You are letting yourself go in a way that is humiliating."

"Indeed, I am doing nothing of the kind."

"Why did you blush, then, when he merely touched your hand? He is simply
a thoughtless, foolish boy."

"I shan't talk to you any more."

But still the urgent conversation went on within. Lady Locke was, in
fact, very angry with herself, and considerably surprised at her own
girlishness. For that was what she called it, for want of a better name.
She was half disgusted at finding herself so young. Had life done
nothing more for her than this? Was she still liable to become an easy
prey to emotions that were undignified and inappropriate? It seemed as
if her heart were clouded while her mind remained clear, for she saw
Lord Reggie quite as he was, and yet she began to like him quite
absurdly. Why she was attracted by him she could not conceive. Was it
the swing of a Nature's pendulum? She had loved a hard, brusque man, and
had found a certain satisfaction in his blunt and not too considerate
affection; now she found something interesting in a nature that seemed
boyish to softness, that was no doubt full of absurdity, that was, so
people said, and he himself boasted, given over to vice, to the tasting
of emotions that is unfortunately so dangerous, often so inhuman in its
humanity. Perhaps it was really Lord Reggie's personal beauty or
prettiness that attracted her, for, say what one will, a pretty boy
steps easily into the good graces of even a strong-natured woman.
Perhaps it was his fleeting air of weakness combined with daring that
drew her to him. She could not tell. She only knew, as she walked among
the shy roses, that the casual touch of his hand--a hand, too, that was
very like a girl's--had communicated to her quite a startlingly strong
emotion. Alas! the motherly feeling seemed to have had its little day,
and to have been swept off the stage on which her mental drama was being
acted. It had played a principal part, but now an understudy appeared,
more full-blooded, stronger, wilder. Lady Locke was very angry with
herself among the roses that morning.

She knew she was a fool, but she knew also that she had no intention of
making a fool of herself. She had too much character, too much
observation, both of others and of herself, to do that.

Madame Valtesi joined her presently, leaning on her cane and fanning
herself rather languidly.

"Nature has gone into quite a vulgar extreme to-day," she said. "It is
distinctly too hot for propriety. One wants to sit about in one's
skeleton. I wonder what Mr. Amarinth's skeleton would be like--not quite
nice, I fancy. I have had bad news by the post."

"Indeed! I am sorry."

"My dearest enemy has written to say that she is going to marry again. I
did not wish her so much ill as that. It is really curious. If some
people have been chastised with whips, they pine after scorpions. Women
have such an unwholesome craving to experience the keenest edge of pain,
that I believe many of them would cut themselves with knives, like the
priests of Baal, if they could not get a husband to perform the
operation for them."

"You speak rather bitterly of your sex."

"Do I? A nineteenth-century cynic minus vitriol would be like a goose
minus sage and onions. I prefer to be a goose with those alleviations of
the goose nature. My enemy married for money the first time, now she is
going in for celebrity. The chief drawback to celebrity is that it is
generally dressed in mourning; a kind of half mourning when it is
notoriety only, and absolute weeds when it is fame. Why should
cleverness and crape go together? People are so frightfully solemn when
they have made a name, that it is like doing a term of hard labour to be
with them for five minutes. Stupidity gives you a ticket-of-leave, and
sheer foolish ignorance is complete emancipation, without even police
supervision."

"I suppose it is always difficult not to take oneself seriously."

"I do not find it so. My mental proceedings generally strike me as the
best joke I know, a sort of Moore and Burgess' performance, with corner
men always asking riddles that nobody can ever answer. Mr. Amarinth is
taking himself seriously this morning. He is composing a catch for the
choir-boys to sing to-night after supper. It is to be parody, or, as he
calls it, an elevation of 'Three blind mice,' and is to be about youth
and life. It ought to be amusing."

"Mr. Amarinth is generally amusing."

"Yes, he has got hold of a good recipe for making the world laugh and
think him clever. The only mistake he makes is, that he sometimes serves
up only the recipe, and omits the dish that ought to be the result of it
altogether. One cannot dine off a recipe, however good and ingenious it
may be. It is like reading a guide-book at home instead of travelling.
Dear me, it is too hot! I shall go and lie down and read Oscar Wilde's
'Decay of Lying.' That always sends me to sleep. It is like himself, all
artfulness and no art."

She strolled languidly away, still fanning herself.

Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie were busy at the piano, inventing and
composing the elevation of "Three blind mice."

Lady Locke could hear an odd little primitive sort of tune, and then
their voices singing, one after the other, some words. She could only
catch a few.

    "Rose--white--youth,
     Rose--white--youth,
     Rose--white--youth,"

sang Lord Reggie's clear, but rather thin voice. Then Amarinth broke in
with a deeper note, and words were lost.

Lady Locke listened for a moment. Then she suddenly turned and went out
of the garden. She made her way to the paddock, and spent the rest of
the morning in playing cricket with her boy and the curate's children.
She caught three people out, made twenty-five runs, and began to feel
quite healthy-minded and cheerful again.



X.


Choir-boys at a distance in their surplices are generally charming.
Choir-boys close by in mundane suits, bought at a cheap tailor's, or
sewed together at home, are not always so attractive. The cherubs' wings
with which imagination has endowed them drop off, and they subside into
cheeky, and sometimes scrubby, little boys, with a tendency towards
peppermints, and a strong bias in favour of slang and tricks. The
choir-boys of Chenecote, however, had been well-trained under Mr.
Smith's ascetic eye; and though he had not drained the humanity entirely
out of them, he had persuaded them to perfect cleanliness, if not to
perfect godliness. They appeared at Mrs. Windsor's cottage that evening
in an amazing condition of shiny rosiness, with round cheeks that seemed
to focus the dying rays of the setting sun, and hair brushed perfectly
flat to their little bullet-shaped heads, in which the brains worked
with much excitement and anticipation. Their eyes were mostly blue and
innocent, and they were all afflicted with a sort of springy shyness
which led them at one moment to jumps of joy, and at another to blushes
and smiling speechlessness. They were altogether naïve and invigorating,
and even Madame Valtesi, peering at them through her tortoise shell
eyeglass, was moved to a dry approbation. She nodded her head at them
two or three times, and remarked--

"Boys are much nicer than girls. They giggle less, and smile more. In
surplices these would be quite fetching--quite."

Mrs. Windsor, too, was quite desolated by the fact that they had not
come in what she persisted in calling their little nightgowns. She
expressed her sorrow to the head boy, who occasionally sang "Oh! for the
wings of a dove!" as a solo at even-song, and was consequently looked up
to with deep respect by all the village.

"I thought you always wore them when you sang!" she said plaintively.
"It makes it so much more impressive. Couldn't you send for them?"

The head boy, who was just twelve, blushed violently, and said he was
afraid Mr. Smith would be angry. They were kept for the church. Mr.
Smith was very particular, he added.

"How absurd the clergy are!" murmured Mrs. Windsor aside to Esmé
Amarinth. "Making such a fuss about a few nightgowns. But perhaps they
are blessed, or consecrated, or something, and that makes them
different. Well, it can't be helped, but I did think they would look so
pretty standing in the moonlight after supper and singing catches in
them--like the angels, you know."

"Do the angels sing catches after supper?" Madame Valtesi asked of Lady
Locke, who was trying to restrain the pardonable excitement of Tommy. "I
am so ignorant about these things."

Lady Locke did not hear. She was watching the rather fussy movements of
Lord Reggie, who was darting about, sorting out the copies of his anthem
which the village organist had laboriously written out that day. His
face was pale, and his eyes shone with eagerness.

"After all," Lady Locke thought, "he is very young, and has a good deal
of freshness left in him. To-night, even among these boys, he looks like
a boy."

The choir were quite fascinated by him. Most of them had never seen a
lord before, and his curious fair beauty vaguely appealed to their
boyish hearts. Then the green carnation that he wore in his evening
coat created a great amazement in their minds. They stared upon it with
round eyes, scarcely certain that it could be a flower at all. Jimmy
Sands, the head boy, was specially magnetised by it. It appeared to
mesmerise him, and to render him unaware of outward things. Whenever it
moved his eyes moved too, and he even forgot to blush as he lost himself
in its astonishing green fascinations.

"How exquisite rose-coloured youth is," Amarinth said softly to Mrs.
Windsor, as Lord Reggie ranged the little boys before him, and prepared
to strike a chord upon the piano. "There is nothing in the world worth
having except youth, youth with its perfect sins, sins with the dew upon
them like red roses--youth with its purple passions and its wild and
wonderful tears. The world worships youth, for the world is very old and
grey and weary, and the world is becoming very respectable, like a man
who is too decrepit to sin. Ah, dear friend, let us sin while we may,
for the time will come when we shall be able to sin no more. Why, why do
the young neglect their passionate pulsating opportunities?"

He sighed, as the wind sighs through the golden strings of a harp,
musically, pathetically. These little chorister boys made him feel that
his youth had slipped from him, and left him alone with his intellect
and his epigrams. Sometimes he shivered with cold among those epigrams.
He was tired of them. He knew them so well, and then so many of them had
foreign blood in their veins, and were inclined to taunt him with being
English. Ah! youth with its simple puns and its full-blooded pleasures,
when there is no gold dust in the hair and no wrinkles about the eyes,
when the sources of an epigram, like the sources of the Nile, are
undiscoverable, and the joy of being led into sin has not lost its
pearly freshness! Ah! youth--youth! He sighed, and sighed again, for he
thought his sigh as beautiful as the face of a young Greek god!

"Sing it daintily!" cried Lord Reggie, playing the spinet-like prelude
with the soft pedal down. "Let it tinkle."

And the little rosy boys tried to let it, squeaking wrong notes with all
their might and main, and fixing their eyes upon Lord Reggie and his
carnation, rather than upon their sheets of music.

"Thy lips are like a thread, like a thre-eda o-of scar-let, and thy
speech, thy spee-eech i-is come-ly," they squealed at the top of their
village voices, strong in the possession of complete unmusicalness. And
Lord Reggie wandered about over the piano, holding his fair head on one
side, and smiling upon them with his pale blue eyes. He trusted rather
in repetition than in correction, and eliminated the wrong notes
gradually by dint of playing the right ones himself over and over again.

After hearing his anthem about five times, Mrs. Windsor and her guests
adjourned to the garden, leaving Tommy Locke seated on the music stool
by Lord Reggie's side, gazing at him with excited adoration, and joining
in the chorus with all his might.

Amarinth accompanied Lady Locke.

"Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet," he murmured, "like a thread of
scarlet. Solomon must have lived a very beautiful life. He understood
the art of life, the magic of moods. Why do we not all live for our own
sensations, instead of for other people? Why do we consider the world
at all? The world taken _en masse_ is a monster, crammed with
prejudices, packed with prepossessions, cankered with what it calls
virtues, a puritan, a prig. And the art of life is the art of defiance.
To defy. That is what we ought to live for, instead of living, as we do,
to acquiesce. The world divides actions into three classes: good
actions, bad actions that you may do, and bad actions that you may not
do. If you stick to the good actions, you are respected by the good. If
you stick to the bad actions that you may do, you are respected by the
bad. But if you perform the bad actions that no one may do, then the
good and the bad set upon you, and you are lost indeed. How I hate that
word natural."

"Why? I think it is one of the most beautiful of words."

"How strange! To me it means all that is middle-class, all that is of
the essence of jingoism, all that is colourless, and without form, and
void. It might be a beautiful word, but it is the most debased coin in
the currency of language. Certain things are classed as natural, and
certain things are classed as unnatural--for all the people born into
the world. Individualism is not allowed to enter into the matter. A
child is unnatural if it hates its mother. A mother is unnatural if she
does not wish to have children. A man is unnatural if he never falls in
love with a woman. A boy is unnatural if he prefers looking at pictures
to playing cricket, or dreaming over the white naked beauty of a Greek
statue to a game of football under Rugby rules. If our virtues are not
cut on a pattern, they are unnatural. If our vices are not according to
rule, they are unnatural. We must be good naturally. We must sin
naturally. We must live naturally, and die naturally. Branwell Brontë
died standing up, and the world has looked upon him as a blasphemer ever
since. Why must we stand up to live, and lie down to die? Byron had a
club foot in his mind, and so Byron is a by-word. Yet twisted minds are
as natural to some people as twisted bodies. It is natural to one man to
live like Charles Kingsley, to preach gentleness, and love sport; it is
natural to another to dream away his life on the narrow couch of an
opium den, with his head between a fellow-sinner's feet. I love what are
called warped minds, and deformed natures, just as I love the long necks
of Burne-Jones' women, and the faded rose-leaf beauty of Walter Pater's
unnatural prose. Nature is generally purely vulgar, just as many women
are vulgarly pure. There are only a few people in the world who dare to
defy the grotesque code of rules that has been drawn up by that
fashionable mother, Nature, and they defy--as many women drink, and many
men are vicious--in secret, with the door locked and the key in their
pockets. And what is life to them? They can always hear the footsteps of
the detective in the street outside."

"Society must have its police while Society has its criminals," said
Lady Locke, a little warmly.

"Yes. The person who is called a 'copper,' because you can only bribe
him with silver, or with gold."

"I think it is essentially a question of the preponderance of numbers,"
she added more quietly. "Warped and twisted minds are in the minority.
If more than half the world had club feet, we should not think the
club-footed man a cripple."

"Ah! that is just the mistake that every one makes nowadays. Unnatural
minds are far more common, and therefore, according to the middle-class
view, more natural than people choose to suppose. I believe that the
tyranny of minorities is the plague that we suffer under. How intensely
interesting it would be to take a census of vices. Why should we take
infinite trouble to find out how old we are. Age is a question of
temperament, just as youth is a question of health. We are not
interesting because of what we are, but because of what we do."

"But we reveal what we are by our acts."

Esmé Amarinth looked at her with surprised compassion.

"Forgive me," he said. "That is a curious old fallacy that lingers among
us like an old faith, unable to get away from people's minds because it
has literally not a leg to stand upon, or to walk with. We reveal what
we are not by our acts."

"How can that be? By our words. Surely that is what you mean?"

"No, we lie indeed perpetually. That is what makes life so curious, and
sometimes so interesting. We lie to the world in open deeds, to
ourselves in secret deeds. We have a beautiful passion for all that is
theatrical, and we have two kinds of plays in which we indulge our
desire of mumming, the plays that we act for others, and the plays that
we act for ourselves. Both are interesting, but the latter are
engrossing. Our secret virtues, our secret vices, are the plays that we
act for our own benefit. Both are equally selfish, and bizarre, and full
of imagination. We make vices of our virtues, and virtues of our vices.
The former we consider the duty that we owe to others, the latter the
duty that we owe to ourselves. If we practise the latter with the
greatest earnestness, are stricter about the rehearsals, in fact, it is
not wonderful."

"But then, if you explain everything away like that, there is no
residuum left. Where is the reality? Where is the real man?"

Mr. Amarinth smiled with a wide sweetness.

"The real man is a Mrs. Harris," he replied. "There is, believe me, 'no
sich a person.'"

"But really that is absurd," Lady Locke said. "There must be an ego
somewhere."

"If there were, should we not learn a permanent means of satisfying it?
We are always sending out actions to knock upon its door, and the answer
is always--not at home. Then we send out other actions of a different
kind. We knock in all sorts of various ways. Yet 'not at home' is always
the answer."

Lady Locke looked at him with a distaste that she could scarcely
conceal.

"You are very amusing," she said bluntly. "But you are not very
satisfactory. I wonder if you have a philosophy of life?"

"I have," he said, "a beautiful one."

"What is it?"

"Take everything--and nothing seriously. And in your career of deception
always, if possible, include yourself among those whom you deceive."

"Esmé! Esmé!" cried Lord Reggie's petulant boyish voice. "Where are you?
We have finished the practice, and Mrs. Windsor wants us to come in to
supper. Oh! here you are. Lady Locke, the boys say they like my anthem.
Jimmy thinks it is beautiful. Isn't he a dear boy?"

"Does _he_ include himself among those whom he deceives?" she
thought, as they walked towards the house.

The two tall footmen, more rigidly supercilious in their powdered hair
than ever, were already arranging the ecstatic and amazed little choir
boys in their seats. Tables had been placed in horse-shoe fashion, and
in the centre of the horse-shoe Mrs. Windsor took her seat, with Mr.
Smith, who had just arrived, Madame Valtesi, and Lady Locke. Lord Reggie
and Esmé Amarinth sat among the boys at the ends of the two sides of the
horse-shoe. Tommy was on Lord Reggie's right hand. The tall footmen
moved noiselessly about handing the various dishes, but at first a
difficulty presented itself. Jimmy Sands was far too nervous to accept
any food from the gorgeous flunkeys. He started violently and blushed
most prettily whenever they came near him. But he shook his head shyly
at the dishes, and as all the other boys followed his lead, the supper
at first threatened to be a failure. It was not until Mr. Smith went
round personally putting chicken and foie gras and other delights upon
their plates, that they found courage to fall to, and then they were
much too shy to talk. With their heads held well over their food they
gobbled mutely, occasionally shooting side glances at one another and
at their entertainers, and watching furtively with a view of discovering
whether they were doing the right thing.

Mrs. Windsor found them most refreshing.

"How sweet innocence is!" she languidly ejaculated, as she saw little
Tim Wright, a fair baby of eight, drop a large truffle head downwards
into his lap. "We Londoners pay for our pleasures, Mr. Smith, I can
assure you. We lose our freshness. We are not like happy choir-boys."

That Mrs. Windsor was quite unlike a happy choir boy was fairly obvious.
Her fringed yellow hair, her tired, got-up eyes, her powdered cheeks,
betrayed her _mondaine_. She was indeed an acute and bizarre
contrast to the troop of shyly enchanted children by whom she was
surrounded. But Mr. Amarinth looked even more out of place than she did,
although he was, as always, tremendously at his ease. His large and
sleek body towered up at the end of the long table. His carefully
crimped head was smilingly bowed to catch the whispered confidences of
Jimmy Sands, and the green carnation, staring from the lapel of his
evening coat, seemed to watch with a bristling amazement the homely
diversions of an unaccustomed rusticity.

The little boys were all hopelessly in love with Lord Reggie, to whom
they had learnt, over the anthem, to draw near with a certain
confidence, but they gazed upon Amarinth with an awe that made their
bosoms heave, and could not reply to his remarks without drawing in
their breath at the same time--a circumstance which rendered their
artless communications less lucidly audible than might have been
desired. Amarinth, however, was serenely gracious, and might be heard
conversing about rustic joys and the charms of the country in a way that
would have done every credit to Virgil. Lady Locke could not resist
listening to his rather loud voice, and the fragments she heard amused
her greatly. At one moment he was hymning the raptures of bee-keeping,
at another letting off epigrams on the fascinating subject of
hay-making.

"Ah! dear boy," she heard him saying to the ingenuous Jimmy, "cling to
your youth! Cling to the haytime of your life, ere the fields are bare,
and all the emotions are stacked away for fear of the rain. There is
nothing like rose-pure youth, Jimmy. One day your round cheeks will grow
raddled, the light will fade from your brown eyes, and the scarlet from
your lips. You will become feeble and bloated and inane--a shivering
satyr with a soul of lead. The sirens will sing to you, and you will
not hear them. The shepherds will pipe to you, and you will not dance.
The flocks will go forth to feed, and the harvests will be sown and
gathered in, and the voice of the green summer will chant among the red
and the yellow roses, and the serenades of the bees will make musical
the scented air. By the ruined, moss-clothed barn the owl will build her
nest, and the twilight will tread a measure with the night. And the
rustic maidens will gather the shell-pink honeysuckle with their lovers,
and the amorous clouds will slumber above the exquisite plough-boy with
his primrose locks, as he wanders, whistling, on his way. Nature,
inartistic, monotonous Nature, will renew the sap of her youth, and the
dewy freshness of her first pale springtime, but the sap of your youth
will have run dry for ever, and the voice of your springtime will be
mute and toneless. Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy! cling to your youth!"

Jimmy looked painfully embarrassed, and helped himself to some pickled
walnuts which one of the tall footmen handed to him at that moment. Mrs.
Windsor had a vague idea that all poor people lived upon pickles, and
she had commanded her housekeeper to lay in a large store of them for
this occasion. Having landed them safely upon his plate, Jimmy
proceeded to devour them, helping himself to some cold beef as a species
of condiment, and keeping an amazed eye all the time upon Amarinth, who
surveyed the horse-shoe table with a glance of comfortable and witty
superiority.

"I have composed a catch, Jimmy," he proceeded, "a beautiful rainbow
catch, which we will flute presently in the moonlight. Do you know
'Three Blind Mice'?"

"Yes, sir," answered Jimmy, with a sudden smile of radiant
understanding, while the little boys nearest leaned their round heads
forward, happy in hearing an expression which they could well
understand.

"How beautiful it is in its simplicity! My catch is even simpler and
more beautiful. We will sing it, Jimmy, as no nightingales could ever
sing it. Take some more of those walnuts. Their rich mahogany colour
reminds me of the background of a picture by Velasquez."

Jimmy took some more with wondering acquiescence, and Amarinth leaned
back negligently peeling a peach, and smiling--as if, having begun to
smile, he had fallen into a reverie and forgotten to stop.

Madame Valtesi was a little bored. Youth did not appeal to her at all,
except in young men, of whom she was pertinaciously fond. As to small
boys, she considered them an evil against which somebody ought to
legislate. These small boys, though they had been slow in beginning to
eat, were slower still in finishing. Their appetites seemed to grow
gradually but continuously, with what they fed upon, and it was
impossible for the tall footmen to take them unawares and remove their
plates, having regard to the fact that, as they never spoke, they were
always steadily eating. The feast seemed interminable.

"I am afraid they will all be very seedy to-morrow," she croaked to Mr.
Smith, whose asceticism seemed to have been left at home on this
occasion. "Surely they are bursting by this time."

"I trust not," he replied; "I sincerely trust not. Much food late at
night is certainly imprudent, but really I have not the heart to stop
them."

"But they will never stop. I believe they think it would be bad
manners."

Mr. Smith cast his eyes round, and, observing that the little boys'
faces were considerably flushed, and that an air of mere gourmandising
had decidedly set in, suddenly became ascetic again. After making
certain that all the people of the house had finished, he, therefore,
abruptly rose to his feet, knocked upon the table with the handle of a
knife, and muttered a rapid and unintelligible High Church grace. The
effect of this was astonishing. A tableau ensued, in which the mouths of
all the performers were seen to be wide open for at least half a minute,
while spoons full of pudding, or fruit, were lifted towards them, and
the round eyes above them were focussed with a concentration of complete
surprise and agitation upon the intermittent clergyman, who had sat down
again, and was speaking to Mrs. Windsor about chasubles. Then, as at a
signal, all the spoons, still full, were pensively returned to the
plates, and an audible sigh stole softly round the room. The gates of
Paradise were swinging to.

Mrs. Windsor rose, and said, as she went out, to Mr. Amarinth--

"Do teach them your catch now. We will go into the garden. If only they
had on their nightgowns? It is such a disappointment."

In the garden, which was rather dark, for the moon had not yet fully
risen, Lady Locke found Lord Reggie standing by her side with Tommy, who
had formed a passionate attachment to him, and showed it violently both
in words and deeds.

"Let us sit down here," he said, drawing forward a chair for her. "Esmé
wants me to hear his music from a distance. Tommy, you go in and sing.
We want to listen to you."

Tommy ran off excitedly.

Lady Locke and Lord Reggie sat down silently. A few yards away Mrs.
Windsor, Madame Valtesi, and Mr. Smith formed a heterogeneous and
singularly inappropriate group. Through the lighted windows of the
drawing-room a multitude of bobbing small heads might be discerned, and
the large form of Esmé Amarinth in the act of reciting the words of his
catch.

Lord Reggie looked at Lady Locke, and sighed softly.

"Why are beautiful things so sad?" he said. "This night is like some
exquisite dark youth full of sorrow. If you listen, you can hear the
murmur of his grief in the wind. It is as if he had shed tears, and
known renunciations."

"We all know renunciations," she answered. "And they are sad, but they
are great too. We are often greatest when we give something up."

"I think renunciations are foolish," he said. "I only once gave up a
pleasure, and the remembrance of it has haunted me like a grey ghost
ever since. Why do people think it an act of holiness to starve their
souls? We are here to express ourselves, not to fast twice in a week.
Yet how few men and women ever dare to express themselves fully?"

Lady Locke looked up, and seemed to come to a sudden resolution.

"Do you ever express your real self by what you say or do?" she asked.

"Yes, always nearly."

"Even by wearing that green carnation?"

There was a ring of earnestness in her voice that evidently surprised
him a little.

"Because," she went on, speaking more rapidly, "I take that as a symbol.
I cannot help it. It seems like the motto of your life, and it is a
tainted motto. Why----"

But at this moment a delicate sound of "Sh-sh!" came from Mrs. Windsor,
and the voice of Jimmie Sands, an uncertain treble with a quaver in it,
was heard singing Esmé Amarinth's catch. He sang it right through before
the other circling voices rippled in--

    "Rose-white youth,
     Pas-sionate, pale,
     A singing stream in a silent vale,
     A fairy prince in a prosy tale,
   Ah! there's nothing in life so finely frail
     As rose-white youth."

"Rose-white youth," chimed the other voices, one upon one, until the air
of the night throbbed with the words, and they seemed to wander away
among the sleeping pageant of the flowers, away to the burnished golden
disc of the slowly ascending moon.

Lord Reggie, with his fair head bent, listened with a smile on his lips,
a smile in his grey blue eyes, and Lady Locke watched him and listened
too, and thought of his youth and of all he was doing with it, as a
sensitive, deep-hearted woman will.

And the shrill voices wound on and on, and, at last, detaching
themselves one by one from the melodic fabric in which they were
enmeshed, slipped into silence.

Then Mrs. Windsor spoke aloud and plaintively--

"How exquisite!" she said. "If only they had had on their little
nightgowns!"

And Mr. Smith was shocked.



XI.


Lord Reggie had quite made up his mind to ask Lady Locke to marry him.
He didn't in the least wish to be married, and felt that he never
should. But he also felt that marriage did not matter much either way.
In modern days it is a contract of no importance, as Esmé Amarinth often
said, and therefore a contract that can be entered into without
searching of heart or loss of perfect liberty. To him it simply meant
that a good-natured woman, who liked to kiss him, would open an account
for him at her banker's, and let him live with her when he felt so
disposed. He considered that such an arrangement would not be a bad one,
especially as the good-natured woman would in course of time cease to
like kissing him, and so free him from the one awkwardness that walked
in the train of matrimony. He told Esmé Amarinth of his decision.

Esmé sighed.

"So you are to be a capitalist, Reggie," he said. "Will you sing in the
woods near Esher? Will you flute to the great god whom stockbrokers
vulgarly worship? I wonder what a stockbroker is like. I don't think I
have ever seen one. I go out in Society too much, I suppose. Society has
its drawbacks. You meet so few people in it nowadays, and Royalties are
of course strictly tabooed. I was dining with Lady Murray last week and
mentioned the Prince by mistake. She got quite red all down her neck and
snorted--you know how she snorts, as if she had been born a
Baroness!--'One must draw the line somewhere.' The old aristocracy draws
it at Princes now, and who can blame them? Vulgarity has become so
common that it has lost its charm, and I shall really not be surprised
if good manners and chivalry come into vogue again. How strange it will
feel being polite once more, like wearing a long curled wig, and making
a leg and carrying a sword. You would look perfectly charming in a wig,
Reggie, and a cloak of carnation velvet with rosy shadows in the folds.
You would wear it beautifully, as you wear your sins, floating
negligently over your shoulders. Yes, you will be a strange and unique
capitalist. The average capitalist has the face of a Gentile, and the
stupidity of a Jew. I wonder how the fallacy that the Jews are a clever
race grew up? It is not the man who makes money that is clever, it is
the man who spends it. The intelligent pauper is the real genius. I am
an intelligent pauper."

"You are marvellous, Esmé. You are like some heavy scent that hangs in
clouds upon the air. You make people aware of you, who have never seen
you, or read you. You are like a fifth element."

"What shall I give you for a wedding present, Reggie? I think I will
give you the book of Common Prayer in the vulgar tongue. One would think
it was something written by a realist. The adjectives would apply to the
productions of George Moore, which are boycotted by Smith on account of
their want of style or something of the sort. If George Moore could only
learn the subtle art of indecency he might be tolerable. As it is, he
is, like Miss Yonge, merely tedious and domesticated. He ought to
associate more with educated people, instead of going perpetually to the
dependent performances of the independent theatre, whose motto seems to
be, 'If I don't shock you, I'm a Dutchman!' How curiously archaic it
must feel to be a Dutchman. It must be like having been born in Iceland,
or educated in a Grammar School. I would give almost anything to feel
really Dutch for half-an-hour."

Reggie was looking a little pensive. The performance of his anthem on
the morrow weighed slightly upon his mind. He had an uneasy feeling that
Jimmy Sands and his followers would throw nuances to the winds when they
found themselves in the public eye. When the critical morning was over
he meant to propose to Lady Locke, and in the meanwhile he supposed that
he ought to woo her, or court her, or do something of the kind. He was
not in the least shy, but he had not the faintest idea how to woo a
woman. The very notion of such a proceeding struck him as highly
ridiculous and almost second-rate. It was like an old-fashioned notion.

"Esmé," he said, "what do people do before they propose? I suppose they
lead up to it in some absurd way. If I were a rustic I could go and sit
upon a stile with a straw in my mouth, and whistle at Lady Locke, while
she stood staring at me and giggling. But I am not a rustic--I am an
artist. Really, I don't see what I can do. Will she expect something?"

"My dear Reggie, women always expect something. Women are like minors,
they live upon their expectations."

"Well, then," Reggie said petulantly, "what am I to do? Shall I ask her
to take a walk, or what? I really can't put my arm round her waist. One
owes something to oneself in spite of all the nonsense that Ibsen
talks."

"One owes everything to oneself, and I also owe a great deal to other
people--a great deal that I hope to live long enough never to repay. A
debt of honour is one of the finest things in the world. The very name
recalls a speech out of 'Guy Livingstone.' By the way, I sometimes wish
that I had been born swart as he was. I should have pleased Miss Rhoda
Broughton, and she is so deliciously prosaic. Is she not the woman who
said that she was always inspired to a pun by the sight of a cancer
hospital? or am I thinking of Helen Mathers? I can never tell them
apart--their lack of style is so marvellously similar. Why do women
always write in the present tense, Reggie? Is it because they have no
past? To go about without a past, must be like going about without one's
trousers. I should feel positively indecent."

"There is no such thing as indecency, Esmé, just as there are no such
things as right and wrong. There are only art and imbecility. But how
shall I prepare for my proposal? What did you do?"

"I did nothing. My wife proposed to me, and I refused her. Then she
went and put up some things called banns, I believe. Afterwards she sent
me a white waistcoat in a brown paper parcel, and told me to meet her at
a certain church on a certain day. I declined. She came in a hired
carriage--a thing like a large deep bath, with two enormously fat
parti-coloured horses--to fetch me. To avoid a scene I went with her,
and I understand that we were married. But the colour of the window
behind the altar was so atrocious, and the design--of Herodias carrying
about the head of John the Baptist on a dish--so inartistically true to
life, that I could not possibly attend to the service."

"Poor Esmé," said Lord Reggie, in a tone charged with pathos, "I must
trust in my intuitions, then?"

"That is like trusting in one's convictions, Reggie. For the sake of the
stars do not be sensible. I would far rather see you lying in your
grave. Trust rather in your emotions."

"But I have none about Lady Locke. How could you suppose so?"

"I never suppose. I leave that to the heads of departments when they are
answering questions in the House. It is the privilege of incompetence to
suppose. The artist will always know. But there is Lady Locke, Reggie,
being sensible in the rose garden. What must the roses think of her? Go
to her, Reggie, tell her that you do not love her, and will marry her.
That is what a true woman loves to hear."

As Lord Reggie went away, walking very delicately, with his head
drooping towards his left shoulder, and his hands dangling in a
dilettante manner at his sides, Madame Valtesi appeared at the French
window of the drawing-room, refusing to join Tommy in some boyish game.
After a parleying, which she conducted in profile, she turned her full
face round, and having shaken her tormentor off, she proceeded slowly
towards Amarinth, with an expression of extreme and illimitable
irritability.

"Children are more lacking in discernment than the beasts of the field,"
she said, as she came up to him. "That boy is actually vexed because I
will not go and play at Tom Tiddler's Ground with him. He positively
expected that I would be Tiddler! Tiddler! Did you ever hear of such a
name? It sounds like one of Dickens' characters. He says that all you
have to do is to run about! Give me the long chair, please. He has
almost succeeded in making me feel like Tiddler. It is a dreadful
sensation."

She fanned herself slowly and looked round.

"Who is that in the rose garden?" she asked, putting up her eyeglass.
"Oh! Lady Locke and Lord Reggie--an ill-assorted couple. They ought to
marry."

"Why, dear lady?" said Esmé.

"Because they are ill-assorted. Affinities never marry nowadays. They
always run away together and live on the Continent, waiting for decrees
nisi. We repent of what we do so hastily nowadays. People divorce each
other almost on sight. Will Lady Locke accept him?"

"Do widows ever refuse?"

"I am a widow."

"Indeed! I did not know it, or, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten. You
are so delightfully married in your conduct."

"Was it Whistler who said that first?"

"No, I believe it comes originally from the Dutch. But it is my own
adaptation, and I am too modest to put my name on a programme. Ah!
Madame Valtesi, why have I never set the world in a blaze? I have plied
the bellows most industriously, and I have made the twigs crackle, yet
the fire splutters a good deal. Perhaps I have too much genius. Can it
be that? My good things are in everybody's mouth."

"That's just it. You ought to have swallowed a cork years and years
ago."

"Like Mr. Henry James. I always know when he has thought of a clever
thing at a party."

"How?"

"By his leaving it immediately, and in total silence. He rushes home to
write his thought down. His memory is treacherous."

"And does he often have to leave a party?"

"Pretty often. About once a year, I believe."

"It must be very trying socially to be so clever. So Lord Reggie is
actually serious?"

"I hope he is never that. He will marry, as he sins, prettily, with the
gaiety of a young Greek god."

"Marry and not settle down, as we all do now? We have improved upon the
old code."

"We have practically abolished codes in London. In the country I fancy
they continue to think of the commandments. How many commandments are
there?"

"I forget! Seven, I think, or is it seventeen? Probably seventeen. I
know there are a great many. I heard of a clergyman in a Northern parish
who took twenty minutes to read them, although he left out all the h's.
Lady Locke and Lord Reggie have wandered away. It is like the garden
scene of 'Faust.' Martha ought to come on now with Mephistopheles. Ah!
here are Mrs. Windsor and tea. They will have to do instead."

Although Lord Reggie was such a novice in wooing, and would very much
have preferred being wooed, he managed to convey to the mind of Lady
Locke the notion that he had some vague intentions towards her. And that
evening, as she dressed for dinner, she asked herself plainly what they
were. That he loved her, she did not even for a moment imagine. She was
not much given to self-deception. That he loved her money, a far more
reasonable supposition as she mentally allowed--she did not really and
honestly believe. For Lord Reggie, whatever were his faults, always
conveyed the impression of being entirely thoughtless and improvident
about worldly affairs. He had everything he wanted, naturally. Any other
condition would have been wholly impossible to him, and would have
seemed painfully out of place, and foreign to the scheme of the world,
to those who knew him. But he never appeared to bother about any means
for obtaining things, and Lady Locke thought him the last boy in the
universe to lay a plot for the obtaining of a fortune. Had he, then,
conceived a light passing fancy for her? She thought this possible,
though a little unlikely. He was so different from the other men whom
she had known, that she could never "place" him, or feel that she knew
at all what his mind was likely to do under given conditions, or in cut
and dried situations. Undoubtedly he had begun to think about her as
well as about himself, an unusual conjunction, which no one would have
anticipated. But exactly how he thought about her, Lady Locke could not
tell; nor could she precisely tell either how she thought about him. He
began to mean something to her. That was all she could say even to
herself. She dressed for dinner very slowly that evening. Her window was
open, and as she was pinning some yellow roses in the front of her gown,
having dismissed her maid, she heard the piping, excited voice of Tommy
asking a question of some hidden companion in the garden below.

"How does it get like that?" he exclaimed, with the penetrating squeak
of a very young child. "I don't see. Does it grow?"

"No, Tommy," replied the soft voice of Lord Reggie, "nothing grows like
that. It is too strange and beautiful to have grown."

"Well, then, Reggie, do they paint it?"

"Never mind how it is done. That is the mistake we continually make. If
the dolls dance exquisitely we should ignore the man who pulls the
wires. Results are everything. When we see you in that pretty
ivory-coloured suit we are content that you are pretty; we don't wish to
learn how every button is buttoned, how every string is tied."

"There aren't any strings," cried Tommy. "Boys don't have strings."

"We don't care to find out how the tailor cuts and fashions, how he sews
and stitches. He does all this in order that you may be beautiful. And
we have only to think of you. Do you love this carnation, Tommy, as I
love it? Do you worship its wonderful green? It is like some exquisite
painted creature with dyed hair and brilliant eyes. It has the supreme
merit of being perfectly unnatural. To be unnatural is often to be
great. To be natural is generally to be stupid. To-morrow I will give
you a carnation, Tommy, and you shall wear it at church when you go to
hear my beautiful anthem."

Tommy gave vent to ecstatic cries of joy.

Lady Locke, standing by the window, reddened all over her face, and a
fire flashed suddenly in her usually calm and gentle eyes. She threw the
yellow roses roughly down upon her dressing-table and went hastily out
of the room, leaving the door open behind her. When she reached the
drawing-room she called her boy in from the garden.

"Tommy," she said, "it is past eight. Run away to bed. You were very
late last night."

The child immediately began to protest; but she cut him short.

"Off with you," she cried. "Make haste. I can see you are looking
tired."

"I am not tired, mother," said the boy, preparing to whimper.

"Tired or not, you must go when I say it," answered Lady Locke, with a
harshness such as she had never displayed before. "Don't dispute about
the matter, but go straight off. My boy must be like a soldier and obey
the orders of his superior officer. I am your superior officer."

She pointed to the door, and Tommy departed reluctantly, with a very red
face, and the menacing expression of an angry, governed child.

Lord Reggie came in from the garden. He found Lady Locke apparently
immersed in the foreign intelligence of the _Times_ Supplement.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening, after dinner, Lady Locke said to Lord Reggie--

"I don't wish my little boy to wear flowers. He is too young. I heard
you promising him a carnation for to-morrow. You mustn't think me rude,
but, please, don't give him one."

Lord Reggie looked rather surprised.

"I am afraid he will be disappointed," he said.

"I cannot help that. And he will have forgotten it in five minutes.
Children are as volatile as--as----"

"As lovers," said Madame Valtesi, who was smoking a cigarette in a chair
by the window. "And forget as soon."

"Every one forgets," Esmé Amarinth said, with a gracious smile that
illuminated his large features with slow completeness. "It is only when
we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have learned the art of
living. I wish people would forget me; but somehow they never do. Long
after I have completely forgotten them they remember me. Then I have to
pretend that I remember them, and that is so fatiguing."

"Esmé," said Mrs. Windsor, "do sing us your song of the passer-by. That
is all about remembering and forgetting, and all that sort of thing. So
sweet. I remember it made me cry when I heard it--or was it laugh? Which
did you mean it to do?"

"I did not mean it to do anything. The poet who means much is little of
a poet. I will sing you the song; but it is dreadfully direct in
expression. I wrote it one night at Oxford when I was supremely drunk. I
remember I wept as I wrote, great, wonderful tears. Yes, I will sing it.
It is full of the sorrow, the white burnished sorrow of youth. How
divine the melancholies of youth are! With age comes folly, and with
folly comes the appalling merriment of experience. Experienced men are
always merry. They see things as they really are. How terrible! until we
can see things as they really are not we never truly live."

He went slowly to the piano, sat down, and played a plaintive, fleeting
air--an air that was like a wandering moonbeam, the veritable phantom of
a melody. Then he sang this song, in a low and almost toneless voice,
uttering the notes rather than vocalising them.


THE SONG OF THE PASSER-BY.

    Passing, passing--ah! sad heart, sing;
      But you cannot keep me beyond to-day,
    For I am a wayward bird on the wing--
      A wayward waif, who will never stay.
    The ivory morn, and the primrose eve,
      And the twilight, whispering late and low,
    They kiss the hem of the spell I weave;
      They tremble, and ask me where I go.

    Passing, passing--ah! sweet soul, sigh;
      But you cannot keep me beyond to-night,
    For I am a wilful wanderer by--
      A wilful waif on a fanciful flight.
    The shadowy moon, and the crimson star,
      And the wind that steals from the Western wave,
    They watch the ways where my wild wings are;
      They murmur and marvel what I crave.

    Passing, passing--ah! passion glow;
      But you cannot light me a lasting flame,
    By which I may linger, linger and know
      My spark and yours from one furnace came.
    You whisper and weep, and your words are tears,
      And your tears are words I remember yet;
    But the flame dies down with the dying years,
      And nothing lives that forgets to forget.

    Passing, passing--ah! whither? Why?
      Does the heart know why? Can the soul say where?
    I pass, but I pause to catch ev'ry cry,
      To watch ev'ry face, be it foul or fair.
    I must hear all the notes of the nightingales--
      Do they sing to a God or to graven things--
    And not till the last faint flute-note fails
      Will I stay my flight, will I fold my wings.

When the last chord died away, Mrs. Windsor's voice was heard saying--

"I remember now, it made me cry. How dismal it is."

"Yes," said Madame Valtesi, "as dismal as a wet Derby or a day at the
seaside. I hope your anthem will be more lively, Lord Reggie. But of
course it will. We always keep our sorrows for the drawing-room, and our
chirpiness for church. For sheer godless merriment commend me to the
grand chant. It always reminds me of the conspirators' chorus in the
'Huguenots.' I used to hear it as a child. One hears so many things as a
child, doesn't one? Childhood is one long career of innocent
eavesdropping, of hearing what one ought not to hear."

"Yes," said Esmé, getting up from the piano. "And maturity is one long
career of saying what one ought not to say. That is the art of
conversation. Only one must always say it with intention, otherwise
people think one grossly improper. Intention is everything. Artless
impropriety is quite played out. Yvette Guilbert gave it its death-blow.
It only lingers now in the writings of Ouida and the poems of Arthur
Symonds. Why are minor poets so artless, and why do they fancy they are
so wicked? What curious fancies even unintelligent people have. No minor
poet has ever been wicked, just as no real artist has ever been good. If
one intends to be good, one must take it up as a profession. It is quite
the most engrossing one in the world. Have you ever been with a good
person who is taking a holiday from being good? It is like falling into
the Maelstrom. They carry you off your feet. Their enjoyment terrifies
the imagination. They are like a Sunday school let loose in the Moulin
Rouge, or Mr. Toole when he has made a pun! Sometimes I wish that I
could be good too, in order to have such a holiday. Are you really going
to bed, Lady Locke? Eleven! I had no idea it was so early. I am going to
sit up all night with Reggie, saying mad scarlet things, such as Walter
Pater loves, and waking the night with silver silences. Good-night.
Come, Reggie, let us go to the smoking-room, since we are left alone. I
will be brilliant for you as I have never been brilliant for my
publishers. I will talk to you as no character in my plays has ever
talked. Come! The young Endymion stirs in his dreams, and the pale-soul
Selene watches him from her pearly car. The shadows on the lawns are
violet, and the stars wash the spaces of the sky with primrose and with
crimson. The night is old yet. Let me be brilliant, dear boy, or I feel
that I shall weep for sheer wittiness, and die, as so many have died,
with all my epigrams still in me."



XII.


The cottage was full of the curious suppressed rustling that seems to be
inseparable from church-going in England. Good people invariably rustle,
and so bad people, trying to be good, are inclined to rustle too. At
least that was what Madame Valtesi said as she stood in the tiny,
sage-green hall hung with fans, and finished buttoning her long Suede
gloves. She still wore her big and shady hat. She declared it made her
feel religious, and nobody was prepared to dispute the assertion. Tommy
was clamouring for his promised green carnation; but Lord Reggie, in
obedience to Lady Locke's request, told him that the one he had intended
for him had faded away in the night, had faded exquisitely, as the
wicked fade after flourishing like green bay trees; and Tommy, though
inclined to tears, was soothed by a promise that he should sit on the
organ seat and turn over in the anthem. Lady Locke looked rather
serious, and Mrs. Windsor strangely dissipated. She always did look
particularly dissipated on Sunday mornings, although she was not aware
of it; and to-day she was intent on being decisively rustic, and as
countrified in her piety as possible. She wore an innocent gown powdered
with pimpernels, and a little bonnet that she thought holiness itself,
consisting as it did of a very small bow and a very large spike. Lord
Reggie and Esmé Amarinth honoured the day with frock coats and tall
hats; and the former was in a state of considerable excitement about his
anthem.

Through the drowsy summer air the five bells of Chenecote Church chimed
delicately, and prayer-books were at a premium. Everybody except Lady
Locke had come down without one, and Mrs. Windsor was in despair.

"We must have them," she said piteously, "or the congregation will be
dreadfully shocked. Congregations are so easily shocked in the country.
I wonder if the servants have any? Servants always have prayer-books and
that kind of thing, don't they? I will ask."

She rang the bell, and one of the tall footmen appeared.

"Simpson, we want four prayer-books," she said. "Are there any in the
house?"

Simpson looked exceedingly doubtful, but said he would go and see.
Eventually he returned with three.

"There is one more, ma'am--the upper housemaid's," he said, handing them
on a salver. "But she wrote comments in it when she belonged to the
Salvation Army, and she can't rub them out, ma'am, so she don't like to
show it."

"Really!" said Mrs. Windsor, looking mystified. "Well, never mind, we
must try and manage with these. Oh! Lord Reggie, you won't want one, of
course, because you will be behind the curtain. I forgot that. We are
going to walk. It is only ten minutes or so, and I thought it would be
more rustic, especially as the roads are dusty. Now, I think we ought to
start. If we are late it will create a scandal, and Mr. Smith will be
horrified."

"How dutiful the atmosphere is!" Madame Valtesi said to Amarinth as they
set forth. "We are so frightfully punctual that I feel quite like an
early Christian. I wonder why the Christians were always so early before
we were born? They are generally very late now."

"I suppose they have grown tired," he answered, arranging the carnation
in his buttonhole meditatively. "Probably we suffer from the activity of
our forefathers. When I feel fatigued I always think that my
grandfather must have been what is called an excellent walker. How very
Sabbath the morning is!"

There was, in fact, a Sunday air in the quiet country road. The geese
had ceased from their mundane proceedings in the pond, and were
meditating over their sins in some cloistered nook of the farmyard. The
fields looked greenly pious, emptied as they were of labourers. In the
flowery hedgerows the birds chirped with a chastened note; and even the
summer wind touched the walkers as a bishop touches the heads of
kneeling candidates at Confirmation. Or so, at least, Lady Locke thought
with a pleasant fancifulness that she kept entirely to herself. The
bells chimed on monotonously; and now and then, as they walked, they
caught sight of neatly-dressed rustics in front of them, strolling
mildly to the church, tricked out in all the black bravery of
broadcloth, or decked in sprigged muslins and chip hats.

Mrs. Windsor was quite delighted.

"Is not this novel?" she exclaimed, setting her white veil straight, and
spreading a huge parasol to the sun. "I feel so righteous. It is
pleasant to feel righteous, isn't it? So much pleasanter than to be
good. I hope Mr. Smith will not preach a long sermon; but he looks
rather like a man who would. People who have nothing to say always do
preach long sermons, don't they? They keep hoping they will have
something to say presently, I suppose."

"And they hope out loud," said Madame Valtesi. "People who hope out loud
are very trying. I know so many. Dear me, how dusty it is! I feel as if
I were drowning. Are we nearly there?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Windsor; "there is the common--that is the common where
Mr. Smith has checked the rowdyism. I wish he had not broken up all the
idle comers before we came. I should so like to have met one."

"Mr. Smith has decidedly been premature," Amarinth said gravely.
"Clergymen often are. They take away our sins before we have had time to
sit down with them. There go the school children, I suppose. They look
intensely clean. So many people look intensely clean, and nothing else.
That is all one can say about them. Half the men I know have absolutely
no other characteristic. Their only talent is that they know how to
wash. Perhaps that is why men of genius so seldom wash. They are afraid
of being mistaken for men of talent. What will happen when we come into
church. Will everybody stand up?"

"I hope you will all sit down to hear my anthem," Lord Reggie said
rather nervously. "It will be much better. Please, do! Lady Locke, will
you promise to sit down? People attend so much more closely when they
are sitting. If they stand up they always look about and think all the
time about sitting down."

"Just as when people are asking you to stay they are always wondering if
you will go," said Madame Valtesi, casting a vicious glance at Tommy,
who was delightedly stirring up the dust.

"I will sit down certainly," said Lady Locke, "if you wish it; but I
could listen equally well standing. I do hope Jimmy Sands will sing his
little bit of solo correctly; I shall feel quite nervous till it is
over."

Lord Reggie looked at her with earnest pleasure, and even with a
momentary affection. He had never liked her so much before.

"Don't any of you stare at him while he is singing," he said, "or he
will get sharp. He always does; I have noticed it."

"What a pity staring does not have that effect upon all of us," said
Madame Valtesi. "London would be quite brilliant. I have looked at
people for hours, but they have never got sharp."

"There goes the five minutes' bell," said Lady Locke; "we are just in
time."

When they reached the churchyard Lord Reggie and Tommy went round to the
vestry, and the rest of the party made their way to a front pew, amid
the suppressed excitement of the rest of the congregation. Mr. Amarinth
especially created a sensation; but he always expected to do that. Ever
since he had made a name for himself by declaring that he was pleased
with the Equator, and desired its further acquaintance, he had been
talked about. Whenever the public interest in him showed signs of
flagging he wrote an improper story, or published an epigram in one
volume, on hand-made paper, with immense margins, or produced a play
full of other people's wit, or said something scandalous about the North
Pole. He had ruined the reputation of more than one eminently
respectable ocean which had previously been received everywhere, and had
covered Nature with confusion by his open attacks upon her. Just now he
was living upon his green carnation, which had been freely paragraphed
in all the papers; and when that went out of vogue he had some intention
of producing a revised version of the Bible, with all the inartistic
passages cut out, and a rhymed dedication to Mr. Stead, whose _Review
of Reviews_ always struck him as only a degree less comic than the
books of that arch-humorist Miss Edna Lyall, or the bedroom imaginings
of Miss Olive Schreiner. The villagers of Chenecote gaped open-mouthed
at his green carnation and crimped hair; and the exhortation as
delivered in a _presto_ mumble by Mr. Smith was received with general
apathy, as the opera of "Faust" is received on an off night in the opera
season.

Lord Reggie and Tommy were completely hidden behind the curtain that
shielded the organ seat; but the presence and agitation of the former
were indicated by the confused perambulations of Jimmie Sands, who was
perpetually dodging to and fro in a flushed manner between his place and
the organ, receiving instructions, and conveying whispered directions to
his youthful colleagues in the choir. The village organist had been
deposed from his high estate for the time being, and Lord Reggie
commanded the organ entirely--this fact becoming apparent during the
service in the abrupt alternations of loud and soft, the general absence
of pedal notes, and the continued employment of the _vox humana_ as
a solo stop during the singing of the psalms, to the undoing of the men
in the choir, and the extreme astonishment of the unused congregation.
At the beginning of the second lesson, too, Lord Reggie made his
presence known by the performance of a tumultuous and unexpected
obligato, which completely drowned the opening verses of the fourth
chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and caused the painted
windows at the extreme end of the church to crackle in a manner that
suggested earthquakes and the last great day.

"What is he doing?" whispered Madame Valtesi to Amarinth. "Is it in the
thirty-nine articles?"

"No," replied Esmé; "he is only getting up from his seat. How wonderful
he is! I never heard anything more impressive in my life. After all,
unpremeditated art is the greatest art. Such an effect as that could
never have been produced except impromptu."

The anthem passed off fairly well, although Jimmy Sands went rather
flat, perhaps owing to the fact that none of the party from the cottage
so much as glanced at him during his performance.

"He evidently made allowance for our staring," Madame Valtesi said
afterwards. "However, it can't be helped; we shall know better another
time. I thought his singing flat gave a touch of real character to the
anthem."

Mrs. Windsor was congratulating Mr. Smith on his charming little
service, and condoling with him on having been unable to pronounce the
blessing. This formality had been rendered impossible by the ingenious
action of Lord Reggie, who had forgotten about it, and evoked continuous
music from the organ ever since the amen of the prayer preceding it,
finally bursting into a loud fugue by Bach, played without the pedal
part, just when the curate was venturing to meekly insert it into a
second's interstice of comparative silence, brought about by the solo
employment of the _vox humana_ without accompaniment.

"However," said Mrs. Windsor, "I daresay it won't much matter for once
in a way, will it? It is no good making ourselves miserable about
comparative trifles."

"He might leave out a curse or two when he next reads the Commination
Service, and balance matters in that way," said Madame Valtesi, aside to
Amarinth.

"The rusticity of the service was quite delicious," Mrs. Windsor went on
graciously. "So appropriate! Everything was so well chosen and in
character! Ah, Mr. Smith, although you are a clergyman, I am certain
you must have the artistic temperament."

"I trust not," Mr. Smith said very gravely--"I earnestly trust not. The
artistic temperament is a sin that should be sternly struggled against,
and, if possible, eliminated. In these modern days I notice that every
wickedness that is committed is excused on the ground of temperament."

They were walking home across the common as he said this, and Lady Locke
turned to Lord Reggie, who was by her side, still rather flushed by his
exertions.

"Are you one of those who make a god of their temperament?" she said.
"What Mr. Smith says seems to me rather true."

"I think one's temperament should be one's leader in life, certainly,"
he answered.

"The blind leading the blind."

"It is beautiful to be blind. Those who can see are always avoiding just
the very things that would give them most pleasure. Esmé says that to
know how to be led is a much greater art than to know how to lead."

"I don't care to hear the opinions of Mr. Amarinth," she answered in a
low voice. "His epigrams are his opinions. His actions are performed
vicariously in conversation. If he were to be silent he would cease to
live."

"You don't know Esmé at all, really," Reggie said.

"And you know him far too well," she answered.

He looked at her for a moment rather curiously.



XIII.


Sunday afternoon is always a characteristic time. Even irreligious
people, who have no principles to send them to sleep, or to cause them
to take a weekly walk, or to induce them to write an unnecessary letter
to New Zealand--why are unnecessary letters to New Zealand invariably
written on Sunday afternoons?--even irreligious people are generally in
an unusual frame of mind on the afternoon of the day of rest. They don't
feel week-day. There is a certain atmosphere of orthodoxy which affects
them. Possibly it causes them to feel peculiarly unorthodox. Still, it
affects them. In the country, in summer especially, Sunday afternoon
lays a certain spell upon everybody. It goes to their heads. They fall
under its strange influence, even against their will, and become, in a
measure, different from themselves. Solemn people are often unnaturally
flippant on Sunday afternoon, and flippant people frequently retire to
bed on the verge of tears. The hearty bow-wow girl is conscious of
being unpleasantly chastened by some invisible power; and the stupid
young man sinks into a strange apoplectic condition, with his chin sunk
on his waistcoat, and his mind drowned in the waters of forgetfulness.
Sloth is in the air, and a decorous desultoriness pervades humanity. It
is as if thunder was in the social atmosphere. The repose is not quite
natural. Those who are in high positions, and therefore have something
to live down to, long to imitate the hapless rustic, and wander forth
among the fields, sucking a straw, and putting their arm round a waist.
Unmelodious persons are almost throttled by a desire to whistle; but the
true singer feels as dumb as a tree. Lunch pervades the human
consciousness, and the prospect of tea engages the mind to an extent
which is neither quite normal nor entirely free from a suspicion of
greediness. Dogs snore much louder than usual, and the confirmed
sufferer from insomnia sleeps with an indecent soundness never attained
by the beauty in the fairy tale. Undoubtedly, Sunday throws the world
entirely out of gear, and that is one of its chief worldly charms. It is
well to be out of gear at least once in the week.

This particular Sunday afternoon had not left the party at the cottage
unscathed, as the acute observer would have immediately seen on
penetrating into the pretty shady garden, with its formal rose walks,
and its delightful misshapen yew trees. Madame Valtesi, for instance,
was knitting, a thing she had scarcely ever been noticed to do within
the memory of man. Mrs. Windsor was going about in garden gloves, with a
spud and a pair of clippers, damaging the flower-beds, with an air of
duty and almost sacred responsibility. Mr. Amarinth was reading the
newspaper like a married man; and Lord Reggie was lying in a hammock,
trying to kill flies by clapping his hands together. Lady Locke was
indoors, writing the unnecessary letter to New Zealand, which has
already been referred to; and Tommy, fatigued to tears by luncheon, had
gone to bed, and was dreaming in an angry manner about black beetles,
unable quite to attain the dignity of a nightmare, and yet deprived of
the sweet repose which is popularly believed to shut the door on the
nose of the doctor.

Yes, decidedly, it was Sunday afternoon!

The weather was very hot and languid, and the bees kept on buzzing all
the time. Bung was engaged in investigating the coal-hole, apparently
under the impression that hidden treasure was not foreign to its soil;
and conversation entirely languished. Madame Valtesi dropped her
stitches, Lord Reggie failed to kill his flies, and Mr. Amarinth
misunderstood the drift of leading articles. The Sabbath mind was very
much in evidence, and the Sabbath mind verges on imbecility. The bells
chiming for afternoon service rose on the still air, and died away; but
nobody moved. Evidently enthusiasm for rusticity combined with religion
was fading away. A silence reigned, and the hour for tea drew slowly on.
But presently Amarinth, after reading all the advertisements on the
cover of his newspaper, put it down slowly and glanced around, with the
puffy expression of a person suppressing a grown-up yawn.

His eyes wandered about, to Mrs. Windsor immersed in amateur gardening
of the destructive kind, to Lord Reggie in his hammock, to Madame
Valtesi dropping stitches in her low chair. He sighed and spoke--

"Newspapers are very enervating," he said. "I wonder what a journalist
is like? I always imagine him a person with a very large head--with the
particular sort of large head, you know, that is large because it
contains absolutely nothing."

"I thought journalists were the people who sell newspapers at the street
corners," said Lord Reggie.

"Oh! I don't fancy they are so picturesque as that," said Esmé, again
suppressing a yawn. "Madame Valtesi, you ought to know; you run a
theatre, and people who run theatres always know journalists. It seems
to be in the blood."

"How can I talk?" she replied. "Don't you see that I am knitting?"

"Are you doing a stitch in time, the sort of stitch that is supposed to
rhyme with nine? I wonder why it is that we always give ourselves up to
occupations that we dislike on Sunday. I have not read a newspaper for
years. One learns so much more about what is happening in the world if
one never opens a newspaper. I once wrote an article for a newspaper,
but that was before I had met Sala. Ever since then I have been haunted
by the fear that if I did it again I might grow like him. I believe he
has lived in Mexico. His style always strikes me as decidedly Mexican. I
met him at dinner, and he told me facts that I did not previously know,
all the time I was trying to eat. Afterwards in the drawing-room he gave
a lecture. I rather forget the subject, but I think it was, 'Eggs I have
known.' He knew a great many. It was very instructive and uninteresting.
I think he said he had patented it. How does one patent a lecture?"

"Esmé, you are talking nonsense!" Madame Valtesi said, dropping two more
stitches with an air of purpose.

"I hope I am. People who talk sense are like people who break stones in
the road: they cover one with dust and splinters. What is Mrs. Windsor
doing?"

"Looking for slugs," said Lord Reggie.

"Why?"

"To kill them."

"How dreadful! They live such gentle lives among the roses. Do let us
talk about religion. I want to try and feel appropriate. Ah! here is
Lady Locke. Lady Locke, we were just going to begin talking about
religion."

"Indeed!" she said, coming forward slowly, and looking a little colonial
after the completion of her task. "Do you know anything about the
subject?"

"No. That is why I want to talk about it. Vivacious ignorance is so
artistic."

"It is too common to be that," said Madame Valtesi. "Ignorant people are
always vivacious, just as really clever men never wear spectacles.
Wearing spectacles is the most played-out pose I know. I wonder the
Germans still keep it up."

"A nation that keeps up their army would keep up anything," said Esmé.
"Germans always talk about foreign politics and native beer. Oh! Mrs.
Windsor has just permitted a slug to live. I can see that by the way in
which she is taking off her gloves and trying not to look magnanimous.
Is it nearly tea-time, Mrs. Windsor?" he added, as she came up, a little
flushed with under exertion. "I only ask because I am not thirsty. Tea
is one of those delightful things that one takes because one does not
want it. That is why we are all so passionately fond of it. It is like
death, exquisitely unnecessary."

"I have found several slugs," she answered triumphantly; "but I can't
kill them. They move so fast, at least when they are frightened. You
would never believe it. I came upon one under a leaf just now, and it
started just like a person disturbed in a nap. It fell right off the
leaf, and I couldn't find it again."

"I suppose slugs have nerves, then," Reggie said, getting up out of his
hammock, "and get strung up like people who over-work. Just think of a
strung-up slug! There is something weird in the idea. A slug that
started at its own shadow. Here is tea! Oh, Mrs. Windsor, where are the
tents to be for the school treat to-morrow?"

"At the end of the croquet lawn. Mr. Smith says the children are
terribly excited about it. Esmé, you must address the children before
they sing their hymn on going away. They always end with a hymn. Mr.
Smith thinks it quiets them."

"I wonder if singing a hymn would quiet me when I am excited," said
Esmé, musing over his tea-cup.

"Are you ever excited?" asked Lady Locke.

"Sometimes, when I have invented a perfect paradox. A perfect paradox is
so terribly great. It makes one feel like a trustee. Can you understand
the sensation? Have you ever felt like a trustee?"

"I don't think I have," Lady Locke said, laughing.

"Then, dear lady, you have never yet really lived. To-morrow I shall
feel like a trustee, for I am going to invent some marvellous pale
paradoxes for the children--paradoxes like early dewdrops with the sun
upon them. Mrs. Windsor, I shall address the children upon the art of
folly, upon the wonderful art of being foolishly beautiful. After they
are tired with their games and their graceful Arcadian frolics, gather
them in an irregular group under that cedar tree, and while the absurd
sun goes down, endeavouring, as the sun nearly always does in country
places, to imitate Turner's later pictures, I will speak to them
wonderful words of strange and delicate meaning, words that they can
easily forget. The only things worth saying are those that we forget,
just as the only things worth doing are those that the world is
surprised at!"

"The world is surprised at nearly everything," said Lord Reggie. "It was
surprised when Miss Margot Tennant married only a Home Secretary! A
world that could be surprised at that could be surprised at anything.
The world is surprised at Esmé because he does not know how to make a
pun, and because he dares to show the French what can be done with their
drama. The world is surprised at me because I never go to Hurlingham,
and because I have never read Mrs. Humphrey Ward's treatises! The world
is even surprised when Mr. Gladstone is found to have been born in
several places at the same time--as if he would be born at different
times!--and M. Zola turns out to be crazily respectable. When is the
world not surprised?"

"Virtue in any form astonishes the world," Madame Valtesi said. "I once
did a good action. When I was very young I married the only man who did
not love me. I thought he ought to be converted. Every one who knew me
was astounded."

"If the world is surprised at good actions," Lady Locke said, "it is our
own fault. We have trained it."

"Nothing is more painful to me than to come across virtue in a person in
whom I have never previously suspected its existence," said Esmé,
putting down his tea-cup with a graceful gesture of abnegation. "It is
like finding a needle in a bundle of hay. It pricks you. If we have
virtue we should warn people of it. I once knew a woman who fell down
dead because she found a live mouse in the pocket of her gown. A live
virtue is like a live mouse. Indeed the surprises of virtue are far
greater than the surprises of vice. We are never surprised when we hear
that a man has gone to the bad; but who can fathom our wonderment when
we are obliged to believe that he is gone to the good?"

"I hate a good man," Madame Valtesi said, with a certain dignity.

"Then you ought to lead one about with you in a string," said Esmé. "It
is so splendid to have some one always near to hate. It is like spending
the day with a hurricane, or being born an orphan. I once knew a man who
had been born an orphan. He had been so fortunate as never to have
experienced the tender care of a mother, or the fostering anxiety of a
father. There was something great about him, the greatness of a man who
has never known trouble. Why are we not all born orphans?"

"I dare say it is a pity," Mrs. Windsor said rather sleepily. "It would
save our parents a lot of trouble."

"And our children a great deal of anxiety," said Esmé. "I have two boys,
and their uneasiness about my past is as keen as my uneasiness about
their future. I am afraid they will be good boys. They are fond of
cricket, and loathe reading poetry. That is what Englishmen consider
goodness in boys."

"And what do they consider goodness in girls?" asked Lady Locke.

"Oh, girls are always good till they are married," said Madame Valtesi.
"And after that it isn't supposed to matter."

"English girls are like country butter," said Esmé--"fresh. That is all
one can say about them."

"And that is saying a good deal," said Lady Locke.

"I don't think so," said Lord Reggie. "Nothing is really worth much till
it is a trifle stale. A soul that is fresh is hardly a soul at all.
Sensations give the grain to the wood, the depth and dignity to the
picture. No fruit is so worthless as the fruit with the bloom upon it."

"Yes," said Esmé. "The face must be young, but the soul must be old. The
face must know nothing, the soul everything. Then fascination is born."

"Perhaps merely an evil fascination," said Lady Locke.

"Fascination is art. I recognise no good or evil in art," Esmé answered.
"In England we have no art, just because we do recognise good and evil.
Glasgow thinks it is shameful to be naked; yet even the Bible declares
that the ideal condition is to be naked and unashamed; and Glasgow,
being in Scotland, naturally gives the lead to England. We have no art.
We have only the Royal Academy, which is remarkable merely for the
badness of its cuisine, and the coiffure of its well-meaning President.
Our artists, as they call themselves, are like Mr. Grant Allen: they say
that all their failures are 'pot-boilers.' They love that word. It
covers so many sins of commission. They set down their incompetence as
an assumption, which makes it almost graceful, and stick up the struggle
for life as a Moloch requiring the sacrifice of genius. And then people
believe in the travesty. Mr. Grant Allen could have been Darwin, no
doubt; but Darwin could never have been Mr. Grant Allen. But what is the
good of trying to talk about what does not exist. There is no such thing
as art in England."

"Shall we talk of the last new novel?" said Madame Valtesi.
"Unfortunately I have not read it. I am told it is full of improper
epigrams, and has not the vestige of a plot. So like life!"

"Some one said to me the other day that life was like a French farce,"
said Mrs. Windsor--"so full of surprises."

"Not the surprises of a French farce, I hope," said Madame Valtesi.
"Esmé, I am quite stiff from knitting so long. Take me to the
drawing-room and sing to me a song of France. Let us try to forget
England."

"Lady Locke, will you come for a stroll in the yew tree walk?" said
Reggie. "I see Mrs. Windsor is trying to read 'Monsieur, Madame, et
Bébé!' She always reads that on Sunday!"

Lady Locke assented.



XIV.


When Lord Reggie asked Lady Locke to come with him into the yew tree
walk that Sunday afternoon, he fully intended to tell her that he would
be glad to marry her. It seemed to him that Sunday was a very
appropriate day for such a confession, and would give to his remarks a
solemnity that they might otherwise lack. But somehow the conversation
became immediately unmanageable, as conversations have a knack of doing,
and turned into channels which had less than nothing to do with
marriage. By a series of ingenious modulations Lord Reggie might
doubtless have contrived eventually to arrive at the key in which he
wanted to breathe out his love song; but the afternoon was too sultry
for ingenuities, and so they talked about the influence of Art on
Nature, and his anthem, until it was time to dress for dinner.

Lady Locke was a woman, and so it may be taken for granted that she
divined her companion's original intention, and was perhaps a little
amused at his failure to carry it into an act. But she manifested no
consciousness, and disappeared to her bedroom without displaying either
disappointment or triumph. She did, however, in fact know that Lord
Reggie meant to ask her the fateful question, and she had quite decided
now how she meant to answer it.

She had fallen into a curious sort of fondness for this tired, unnatural
boy, whom she considered as twisted as if he had been an Egyptian
cripple, zigzagging along a sandy track on his hands with his legs tied
round his neck; and two or three days ago she had even thought seriously
what she would say to him if he asked her to join lives with him
permanently. The motherly feeling had verged on something else, very
different; and when one day he carelessly touched her hand she had felt
her heart beating with a violence that was painfully natural. But now,
more than one incident that had since occurred had forged links in a new
chain of resolution that held her back from a folly. Although possibly
she hardly knew it, the scrap of conversation that she had chanced to
overhear between Lord Reggie and Tommy had really decided her to meet
the former with a refusal if he asked her to be his wife. It had opened
her eyes, and shown her in a flash the influence that a mere pose may
have upon others who are not posing. Her mother's heart flushed with a
heat of anger at the idea of Tommy, her dead soldier's son, developing
into the sort of young man whom she chose to christen "Modern"; and as
her heart flushed, unknown to her her mind really decided. She still
fancied that Lord Reggie was nothing more than a whimsical _poseur_,
bitten by the tarantula of imitation that preys upon weak natures. She
still fancied what she hoped. But incertitude strengthened resolve, and
she never intended to be Lady Reggie Hastings. Yet she meant Lord Reggie
to propose to her. She liked him so well that, womanlike, she could not
quite forbear the pleasure of hearing him even pretend that he loved
her--she supposed he would feel bound to pretend so much; and his
proposal would give to her an opportunity of saying one or two things to
him--of preaching that affectionate sermon, in fact, that she had long
ago written in her thoughts.

Sweet women love to preach to those whom they like, and Lady Locke liked
Lord Reggie very much, and wished strongly to have the chance of telling
him so.

But he said nothing that night, and she had to wait for a while. The
weather, which had certainly shown the most graceful politeness to the
Surrey week, was still in a complaisant frame of mind when Monday
morning dawned, and the tents were put up for the school children, and
the Aunt Sallies and other instruments of amusement were posed in their
places about the garden, without any fear arising lest the rain should
prevent their being used. Esmé Amarinth spent the morning in reflecting
upon his address, and constructing pale paradoxes; and the rest of the
party at the "Retreat" did nothing with all the quiet ingenuity that
seems inbred in the English race.

At four o'clock the sound of lusty singing in the dusty distance
announced the approach of the expected guests, who, under the direction
of Mr. Smith, expressed their youthful feelings of anticipation and
excitement in a processional hymn, whose words dealt with certain
ritualistic doctrines in a spirit of serene but rather incompetent
piety, and whose tune was remarkable for the Gounod spirit that pervaded
its rather love-lorn harmonies. As Mr. Amarinth said, it sounded like a
French apostrophe to a Parisian Eros, and was tinged with the amorous
music colour of Covent Garden.

Mrs. Windsor received the party with weary grace, and a general salute
that might have included all the national schools in the kingdom, so
wide and so impersonal was its manner. She impressed the children as
much as Madame Valtesi frightened them by examining them with a stony
and sphinx-like gravity through her tortoise-shell eyeglass. The
teachers conducted the programme of games--in which, however, Lady
Locke, Tommy, and Lord Reggie fitfully took part; and after tea had been
munched with trembling delight in the largest of the tents, and more
games had been got through, Mr. Smith distributed small presents to all
the children, some of whom were quite unstrung by the effort they had to
make not to seem too happy in the presence of "the quality." The curate
then took his leave, as he was obliged to visit a sick parishioner, and,
as the sun was evidently on the point of beginning to imitate Turner's
later pictures, Mrs. Windsor directed that the children should be
assembled under the great cedar tree on the lawn, to hear Esmé
Amarinth's promised address.

The picture that the garden presented at this moment was quite a pretty
one. The sun, as I have said, was declining towards the West in a manner
strongly suggestive of a scene at the Lyceum Theatre after many
rehearsals with a competent lime-light man. The monstrous yew trees cast
gross misshapen shadows across the smooth, velvet lawns. The air was
heavy with the scents of flowers. Across the gleaming yellow of the sky
a black riband of homeward passing rooks streamed slowly towards the
trees they loved. Under the spreading branches of the cedar stood the
big motley group of flushed and receptive children, flanked by their
more staid teachers, and faced by Bung, who sat upon his tail before
them, and panted serenely, with his tongue hanging out sideways nearly
to the ground. Dotted about upon creaking garden chairs were Mrs.
Windsor, Madame Valtesi, Lady Locke, and Lord Reggie, while Tommy in a
loose white sailor suit scampered about from one place to another,
simmering in perfect enjoyment. And the central figure of all was Esmé
Amarinth, who stood leaning upon an ebony stick with a silver knob,
surveying his audience with the peculiar smile of humourous
self-satisfaction that was so characteristic of his large-featured face.

Just before he began his address Mrs. Windsor fluttered up to him, and
whispered in his ear--

"Don't make any classical allusions, will you, Esmé? I promised Mr.
Smith there should be nothing of that kind. He thinks classical
allusions corrupting. Of course he's wrong--good people always are--but
perhaps we ought to humour him, as he is the curate, you know."

Esmé assented with a graceful bend of his crimpled head, and in a clear
and deliberate voice began to speak.

"The art of folly," he said, "that is to say, the art of being
consciously foolish beautifully, has been practised to some extent in
all ages, and among all peoples, from the pale, clear dawn of creation,
when, as we are told, the man Adam, in glorious nudity, walked perfectly
among the perfect glades of Eden, down to the golden noontide of this
nineteenth century, in which we subtly live and subtly suffer. Always
throughout the circling ages the soul of man has to some slight extent
aspired after folly, as Nature aspires after Art, and as the old and
learned aspire after the wonderful ignorance that lies hidden between
the scarlet covers of the passionate book of youth. Always there have
been in the world earnest men and earnest women striving with a sacred
wisdom to compass the highest forms of folly, seeking with a manifold
persistence to sound the depths of that violet main in which the souls
of the elect rock to and fro eternally. But although, even in the
morning of the world, there were earnest seekers after lies, the pursuit
of ignorance has never been carried on with such unswerving fidelity and
with so much lovely unreason as is the case to-day. We are beginning,
only beginning, to understand some of the canons of the beautiful art of
folly."

Here Esmé changed his ebony stick into his other hand, and glanced round
at Lord Reggie, with a delicate smile of self-approbation. Then he
proceeded, without clearing his throat.

"The mind of man has, however, always clung with a poetic persistence to
certain fallacies which have greatly interfered with the proper progress
of folly, and have terribly hindered the evolution of disorder out of
order, and of unreason out of reason. To give only a few instances. For
centuries upon centuries we have been told by those unenlightened beings
called philosophers, sages, and thinkers, that children should obey
their parents, that the old should direct the young, that Nature is the
mother of beauty, and that wisdom is the parent of true greatness. For
centuries upon centuries we have had instilled into us the malign
conception that in renunciation we shall find peace, and in starvation
the most satisfying plenty. Men and women have lived to be dumb, instead
of living to speak; have stopped their ears to the alluring cries of
folly; have gone to the grave with all their sublime absurdities still
in them, unuttered, unexpressed, unimpressed upon the wildly sensible
people by whom they have been surrounded and environed. The art of folly
has been trampled in the dust by the majority; while poor reasonable
human beings have been offering up sacrifices to propriety,
respectability, common sense, and a thousand grotesque idols, whose very
names fall as unmelodiously upon the ear as the shrill and monotonous
discords of the nightingales that torture us with their murmurings
towards the latter end of May--whose very names, when written down upon
smooth paper, or, as formerly, graved upon tablets of wax with
instruments of ivory, are as disagreeable to the eye as the crude
colouring of the Atlantic Ocean, or the unimaginable ugliness of a fine
summer's day in the midland counties of England. But at last there seems
to be a prospect of better things, the flush of a wonderful dawn in the
hitherto shadowy sky. A star with a crimson mouth has arisen in the East
to guide wise men and women out of the straight and narrow way down
which they have been stumbling so long. I believe, I tremblingly dare to
believe, that a bright era of undisciplined folly is about to dawn over
the modern world, and therefore I speak to you, beautiful pink children,
and I ask you to recognise your youth, and your exquisite potentiality
for foolishness. For in youth, only in delicate, delicious youth, can we
acquire the rudiments of the beautiful art of folly. When we are old we
are so crusted with the hideous lichen of wisdom and experience, so
gnarled with thought, and weather-beaten with knowledge, that we can
only teach. We have lost the power to learn, as all teachers infallibly
do."

At this point in Esmé's address the face of the national schoolmaster, a
grey person, rather conceited in his own wisdom than wise in his own
conceit, began to present--as a magic lantern presents pictures upon a
sheet--various expressions, all of which partook of uneasiness and
indignation. He glanced furtively around, stared defiantly at the
children, and shifted from one foot to the other like a boy who is being
lectured. Esmé observed his disquietude with considerable satisfaction.

"People teach in order to conceal their ignorance, as people smile in
order to conceal their tears, or sin, too often, merely to draw away a
curious observation from the amplitude and endurance of their virtue.
The beautiful falling generation are learning to do things for their own
sake, and not for the sake of Mrs. Grundy, who will soon sit alone in
her dowdy disorder, a chaperon bereft of her débutante, the hopeless and
frowsy leader of a lost and discredited cause. Yes, wisdom has nearly
had its day, and the stars are beginning to twinkle in the violet skies
of folly.

"It is not, alas! given to all of us to be properly foolish. The custom
of succeeding ages has rendered wisdom a hereditary habit with thousands
upon thousands of us, and even the destructive influence of myself, of
Lord Reginald"--here he indicated Reggie, with one plump, white
hand--"and of a few, a very few others, among whom I can include Mr.
Oscar Wilde, has so far failed to uproot that pestilent plant from its
home in the retentive soil of humanity. What was bad enough for our
ridiculous fathers is still bad enough for too many of us. We are still
content with the old virtues, and still timorous of the new vices. We
still fear to clasp the radiant hands of folly, and drown our good
impulses in the depths of her enchanted eyes. But many of us are
comparatively elderly, and, believe me, the elderly quickly lose the
divine power of faculty of disobedience. If it were my first word to
you, children, I would say to you--learn to disobey. To know how to be
disobedient is to know how to live."

The national schoolmaster at this point planted his feet in the first
position with sudden violence, and gave vent to a hem that was a
revelation of keen though inarticulate emotion. Esmé indicated that he
had heard the sound by slightly elevating his voice.

"Learn," he said, "to disobey the cold dictates of reason; for reason
acts upon life as the breath of frost acts upon water, and binds the
leaping streams of the abnormal in the congealing and icy band of the
normal. All that is normal is to be sedulously avoided. That is what the
modern pupil will teach in the future his old-fashioned masters. That is
what you may, if you will have the courage, impress upon the pastors and
masters, who must learn to look to you for guidance."

Extreme disorder of mind was now made manifest in the fantastic postures
assumed by the entire staff of teachers, who began to turn their feet
in, to construct strange patterns with their fingers, and in all other
known ways to mutely express the dire forebodings of those who feel that
their empire is passing away from them.

"It has hitherto been the privilege of age to rule the world. In the
blessed era of folly that privilege will be transferred to youth. Never
forget, therefore, to be young, to be young, and, if possible,
consciously foolish."

The expressions of the children at this point indicated intelligent
acquiescence, and Esmé's face was irradiated with a tranquil smile.

"It is very difficult to be young, especially up to the age of thirty,"
he continued, "and very difficult to be properly foolish up to any age
at all; but we must not despair. Genius is the art of not taking pains,
and genius is more common than is generally supposed. If we do not take
proper pains, there is no reason why even the cleverest among us should
not in time learn to practise beautifully the beautiful art of folly. It
is always well to be personal, and as egoism is scarcely less artistic
than its own brother, vanity, I shall make no apology for now alluding,
in as marked a manner as possible, to myself. I"--he spoke here with
superb emphasis--"I am absurd. For years I have tried in vain not to
hide it. For years I have striven to call public attention to my
exquisite gift, to impress its existence upon a heartless world, to lift
it up as a darkness that all may see, and for years I have practically
failed. I have practically failed, but I am not without hope. I believe
that my absurdity is at last beginning to obtain a meed of recognition.
I believe that a few fine spirits are beginning to understand that
artistic absurdity, the perfection of folly, has a bright and glorious
future before it. I am absurd, and have been so for very many years,
and in very many ways. I have been an æsthete. I have lain upon
hearth-rugs and eaten passion-flowers. I have clothed myself in breeches
of white samite, and offered my friends yellow jonquils instead of
afternoon tea. But when æstheticism became popular in Bayswater--a part
of London built for the delectation of the needy rich--I felt that it
was absurd no longer, and I turned to other things. It was then, one
golden summer day, among the flowering woods of Richmond, that I
invented a new art, the art of preposterous conversation. A middle-class
country has prevented me from patenting my exquisite invention, which
has been closely imitated by dozens of people much older and much
stupider than myself; but nobody so far has been able to rival me in my
own particular line of business, and my society 'turns' at luncheon
parties, dances, and dinners are invariably received with an applause
which is almost embarrassing, and which is scarcely necessary to one so
admirably conceited as myself."

At this point, Esmé, whose face had been gradually assuming a pained and
irritated expression, paused, and looking towards the West, which was
barred with green and gold, and flecked with squadrons of rose-coloured
cloudlets, exclaimed in a voice expressive of weakness--

"That sky is becoming so terribly imitative that I can hardly go on. Why
are modern sunsets so intolerably true to Turner?"

He looked round as if for an answer; but, since nobody had anything to
say, he passed one hand over his eyes, as if to shut out some dreadful
vision, and continued with rather less vivacity--

"For the true artist is always conceited, just as the true Philistine is
always fond of going to the Royal Academy. I have brought the art of
preposterous conversation to the pitch of perfection; but I have been
greatly handicapped in my efforts by the egregious wisdom of a world
that insists upon taking me seriously. There is nothing that should be
taken seriously, except, possibly, an income or the music halls, and I
am not an income or a music hall, although I am intensely and strangely
refined. Yet I have been taken seriously throughout my career. My
lectures have been gravely discussed. My plays have been solemnly
criticised by the amusing failures in literature who love to call
themselves 'the gentlemen of the press.' My poems have been boycotted by
prurient publishers; and my novel, 'The Soul of Bertie Brown,' has
ruined the reputation of a magazine that had been successful in shocking
the impious for centuries. Bishops have declared that I am a monster,
and monsters have declared that I ought to be a bishop. And all this has
befallen me because I am an artist in absurdity, a human being who dares
to be ridiculous. I practise the exquisite art of folly, an art that
will in the future take rank with the arts of painting, of music, of
literature. I was born to be absurd. I have lived to be absurd. I shall
die to be absurd; for nothing can be more absurd than the death of a man
who has lived to sin, instead of having lived to suffer. I married to be
absurd; for marriage is one of the most brilliant absurdities ever
invented by a prolific imagination. We are all absurd; but we are not
all artists, because we are not all self-conscious. The artist must be
self-conscious. If we marry seriously, if we live solemnly, and die with
a decent gravity, we are being absurd; but we do not know it, and
therefore our absurdity has no value. I am an artist, because I am
consciously absurd; and I wish to impress upon you to-day, that if you
wish to live improperly, you must be consciously absurd too. You must
commit follies; but you must not be under the impression that you are
performing sensible acts, otherwise you will take rank with sensible
people, who are invariably and hopelessly middle class."

An interruption occurred here--one of the smallest children who was
stationed in the front of the group under the cedar tree suddenly
bursting into a flood of tears, and having to be led, shrieking, away to
a distant corner of the garden. Esmé followed its convulsed form with
his eyes, and then remarked--

"That child is being absurd; but that child is not an artist, because it
is not conscious of its absurdity. Remember, then, to be self-conscious,
to set aside the normal, to be young, and to be eternally foolish. Take
nothing seriously, except yourselves, if possible. Do not be deceived
into thinking the mind greater than the face, or the soul grander than
the body. Strike the words virtue and wickedness out of your
dictionaries. There is nothing good and nothing evil. There is only art.
Despise the normal, and flee from everything that is hallowed by custom,
as you would flee from the seven deadly virtues. Cling to the abnormal.
Shrink from the cold and freezing touch of Nature. One touch of Nature
makes the whole world commonplace. Forget your Catechism, and remember
the words of Flaubert and of Walter Pater, and remember this, too, that
the folly of self-conscious fools is the only true wisdom! And now sing
to us your hymn, sing to us under the cedar tree self-consciously, and
we will listen self-consciously, even as Ulysses listened to----"

But here a gentle and penetrating "Hush!" broke from the lips of Mrs.
Windsor, and Esmé paused.

"Sing to us," he said, "and we will listen as the old listen to the
voices of youth, as the nightingale listens to the properly trained
vocalist, as Nature listens to Art. Sing to us, beautiful rose-coloured
children, until we forget that you are singing a hymn, and remember only
that you are young, and that some day, in the long-delayed fulness of
time, you will be no longer innocent."

He uttered the last words in a tone so soft and so seductive that it was
like honey and the honeycomb, and then stood with his eyes fixed
dreamily upon the children, who had been getting decidedly red and
fidgety, unaccustomed to be directly addressed, and in so fantastic a
manner. The relief of the teachers at the cessation of Amarinth's
address was tumultuously obvious. They once more turned out their toes.
The anguished expression died away from their faces, and they ceased to
twist their fingers into curious patterns suggestive of freehand
drawings. The national schoolmaster, unlocking his countenance, and
delightedly assuming his wonted air of proud authority, stepped forward
and called for the Old Hundredth; and in the gentle evening air the
well-known tune ascended like incense to the darkening heavens. Shrilly
the youthful voices rose and fell, until the amen came as a full stop.
Then the little troop was marshalled two and two, made a collective
obeisance to Mrs. Windsor and her guests, and wheeled out of the garden
into the drive at a quick step, warbling poignantly, "Onward, Christian
Soldiers." Gradually the sound decreased in volume, decreased in a long
diminuendo, and at last faded away into silence.

Mrs. Windsor sighed.

"Children are very sticky," she remarked. "I am glad I never had any."

"Yes," said Madame Valtesi; "they are as adhesive as postage-stamps.
What time do we dine to-day?"

"Not till half-past eight."

"I shall go in, and sit down quietly and try to feel old. Youth is quite
terrible, in spite of what Esmé says. Esmé, youth is not passionate; it
is merely sticky and excited."

"What a pity it is not self-consciously sticky," he murmured,
accompanying her into the house.

"Why?"

"Then perhaps it might be induced to wash occasionally. I wonder if I
can find a hock and seltzer. I feel like a volume of sermons--so very
dry."



XV.


It was a romantic evening, and although Lord Reggie prided himself on
being altogether impervious to the influences of Nature, he was not
unaware that a warm and fantastic twilight may incline the average woman
favourably to a suit that she might not be disposed to heed in the early
morning, or during the garish sunshine of a summer afternoon. He
presumed that Lady Locke was an average woman, simply because he
considered all women exceedingly and distinctively average; and
therefore, when he saw a soft expression steal into her dark face as she
glanced at the faded turquoise of the sky, he decided to propose at
once, and as prettily as possible. But Tommy was fussing about, wavy
with childish excitement, and at first he could not speak.

"Tommy," said Lady Locke at last, "give me a kiss and run away to your
supper. But, before you go, listen to me. Did you attend to Mr.
Amarinth's lecture?"

"Yes, yes, yes, mother! Of course, of course, of course!" cried Tommy,
dancing violently on the lawn, and trying to excite Bung to a tempest.

"Well, remember that it was meant to be comic. It was only a nonsense
lecture, like Edward Lear's nonsense books. Do you see? It was a turning
of everything topsy-turvy. So what we have to do is just the opposite of
everything Mr. Amarinth advised. You understand, my boy?"

"All right, mumsy," said Tommy. "But I forget what he said."

Lady Locke looked pleased, kissed his flushed little face, and packed
him off.

"I hope the school children will do the same," she said to Lord Reggie
when he was gone. "What a blessing a short memory can be!"

"Didn't you like the lecture, then?" Reggie asked. "I thought it
splendid, so full of imagination, so exquisitely choice in language and
in feeling."

"And so self-conscious."

"Yes, as all art must be."

"Art! art! You could make me hate that word!"

Reggie looked for once honestly shocked.

"You could hate art?" he said.

"Yes, if I could believe that it was the antagonist of Nature, instead
of the faithful friend. No, I did not like the lecture, if one can like
or dislike a mere absurdity. Tell me, Lord Reggie, are you
self-consciously absurd?"

He drew his chair a little nearer to hers.

"I don't know," he said; "I hope I am beautiful. If I am beautiful, that
is all I wish for. To be beautiful is to be complete. To be clever is
easy enough. To be beautiful is so difficult, that even Byron had a club
foot with all his genius. Cleverness can be acquired. Hundreds of stupid
people nowadays acquire the faculty of cleverness. That is why society
is so boring. You find people practising mental scales and five-finger
exercises at every party you go to. The true artist will never practise.
How soft this twilight is, though not so delicate and subtle as that in
Millet's 'Angelus.' Lady Locke, I have something to tell you, and I will
tell it to you now, while the stars come out, and the shadows steal from
their homes in the trees. Esmé said to-day that marriage was a brilliant
absurdity. Will you be brilliantly absurd? Will you marry me?"

He leaned forward, and took her hand rather negligently in his small and
soft one. His face was calm, and he spoke in a clear and even voice.
Lady Locke left her hand in his. She was quite calm too.

"I cannot marry you," she said. "Do you wish me to tell you why?
Probably you do not; but I think I will tell you all the same. I am not
brilliant, and therefore I have no wish to be absurd. If I married you I
should be merely absurd without being brilliant at all. You do not love
me. I think you love nothing. I like you; I am interested by you.
Perhaps if you had a different nature I might even love you. But I can
never love an echo, and you are an echo."

"An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats," he said.

"But if the voice is quite ugly the echo cannot be beautiful," she
answered. "I do not wish to be too frank, but as you have asked me to
marry you I will say this. Your character seems to me to be an echo of
Mr. Amarinth's. I believe that he merely poses; but do those who imitate
him merely pose? Do you merely pose? What Mr. Amarinth really is it is
quite impossible to tell. Perhaps there is nothing real about him at
all. Perhaps, as he has said, his real man is only a Mrs. Harris. He may
be abnormal _au fond_; but you are not! What is your real self? Is it
what I see, what I know?"

"Expression is my life," Lord Reggie said in a rather offended voice,
drawing away his hand. A red spot appeared in each of his cheeks. He
began to realise that he was refused because he was not admired. It
seemed almost incredible.

"Then the expression that I see is you?" she asked.

"I suppose so," he replied, with a tinge of exceedingly boyish
sulkiness.

"Then, till you have got rid of it never ask a woman to marry you. Men
like you do not understand women. They do not try to; probably they
could not if they did. Men like you are so twisted and distorted in mind
that they cannot recognise their own distortion. It seems to me that Mr.
Amarinth has created a cult. Let me call it the cult of the green
carnation. I suppose it may be called modern. To me it seems very silly
and rather wicked. If you would take that hideous green flower out of
your coat, not because I asked you to, but because you hated it
honestly, I might answer your question differently. If you could forget
what you call art, if you could see life at all with a straight,
untrammelled vision, if you could be like a man, instead of like nothing
at all in heaven or earth except that dyed flower, I might perhaps care
for you in the right way. But your mind is artificially coloured: it
comes from the dyer's. It is a green carnation; and I want a natural
blossom to wear in my heart."

She got up.

"You are not angry with me?" she asked.

Lord Reggie's face was scarlet.

"You talk very much like ordinary people," he said, a little rude in his
hurt self-love.

"I am ordinary," she said. "I am so glad of it. I think that after this
week I shall try to be even more ordinary than I already am."

Then she went slowly into the cottage.

That evening Lord Reggie told Mrs. Windsor that he found he must leave
for town on the following morning.

She was horrified, and was still more appalled when Esmé Amarinth
expressed an intention of accompanying him.

"It's worse than the Professor's fit last year," she said dolefully.
"But perhaps it will be better if we all go back to town to-morrow. You
will not care to be rustic without any men, will you, Madame Valtesi?"
she added.

"No," replied that lady. "It would be too much like having a bath in
Tidman's salt, instead of in the ocean. It would be tame. We three women
in this cottage together should be like the Graiæ, only we should not
have even one eye and one tooth between us. Perhaps we have been rustic
as long as is good for us. I shall go to the French plays to-morrow
night. I like them--they always do me so much harm."

"And I will take Tommy to the seaside," said Lady Locke.

"My dear lady," said Esmé. "How terribly normal!"

"And how exceedingly healthy!" she replied.

He looked at her with a deep pity.

Next morning as she bade good-bye to Lord Reggie, she said to him in a
low voice--

"Some day, perhaps, you will throw away the green carnation."

"Oh! it will be out of fashion soon," he answered, as he got delicately
into the carriage.

"So you have been refused, Reggie," said Esmé, as they drove towards the
station. "How original you are! I should never have suspected you of
that. But you were always wonderful--wonderful and very complete. When
did you decide to be refused? Only last night. You managed it
exquisitely. I think that I am glad. I do not want you to alter, and the
refining influence of a really good woman is as corrosive as an acid.
Ah, Reggie, you will not be singing in the woods near Esher when the
tiresome cuckoo imitates Haydn's toy symphony next spring! You will
still be living your marvellous scarlet life, still teaching the London
tradesmen the exact value of your supreme aristocracy. If you had become
a capitalist you might have grown whiskers and become respectable. Why
do whiskers and respectability grow together? Here we are at the railway
station. Railway stations always remind me of Mr. Terriss, the actor.
They are so noisy. The Surrey week is over. Soon we shall see once more
the tender grey of the Piccadilly pavement, and the subtle music of old
Bond Street will fall furtively upon our ears. Put your feet up on the
opposite cushion, dear boy; while I lean out of the railway carriage
window and smile the people away. When people try to get into my
compartment I always smile at them, and they always go away. They think
that I am mad. And are they mistaken? How can one tell? There is only
one sanity in all the world, and that is to be artistically insane.
Reggie, give me a gold-tipped cigarette, and I will be brilliant. I will
be brilliant for you alone, remembering my Whistler as commonplace
people remember their obligations, or as Madame Valtesi remembers to
forget her birthday. Ah! we are off! Look out of this window, dear boy,
and you will see two elderly gentlemen missing the train. They are
doing it rather nicely. I think they must have been practising in
private. There is an art even in missing a train, Reggie. But one of
them is not quite perfect in it yet. He has begun to swear a little too
soon!"


THE END.



NOVELS BY MAARTEN MAARTENS.


    _THE GREATER GLORY. A Story of High Life._ By MAARTEN MAARTENS,
    author of "God's Fool," "Joost Avelingh," etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.


"Until the Appletons discovered the merits of Maarten Maartens, the
foremost of Dutch novelists, it is doubtful if many American readers
knew that there were Dutch novelists. His 'God's Fool' and 'Joost
Avelingh' made for him an American reputation.... He is a master of
epigram, an artist in description, a prophet in insight."--_Boston
Advertiser._

"It would take several columns to give any adequate idea of the superb
way in which the Dutch novelist has developed his theme and wrought out
one of the most impressive stories of the period.... It belongs to the
small class of novels which one can not afford to neglect."--_San
Francisco Chronicle._

"Maarten Maartens stands head and shoulders above the average novelist
of the day in intellectual subtlety and imaginative power."--_Boston
Beacon._


     _GOD'S FOOL._ By MAARTEN MAARTENS. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

"Throughout there is an epigrammatic force which would make palatable a
less interesting story of human lives or one less deftly told."--_London
Saturday Review._

"A remarkable work."--_New York Times._

"Maarten Maartens has secured a firm footing in the eddies of current
literature.... Pathos deepens into tragedy in the thrilling story of
'God's Fool.'"--_Philadelphia Ledger._

"The story is wonderfully brilliant.... The interest never lags; the
style is realistic and intense; and there is a constantly underlying
current of subtle humor.... It is, in short, a book which no student of
modern literature should fail to read."--_Boston Times._


     _JOOST AVELINGH._ By MAARTEN MAARTENS. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

"So unmistakably good as to induce the hope that an acquaintance with
the Dutch literature of fiction may soon become more general among
us."--_London Morning Post._

"A novel of a very high type. At once strongly realistic and powerfully
idealistic."--_London Literary World._

"Full of local color and rich in quaint phraseology and
suggestion."--_London Telegraph._

"Maarten Maartens is a capital story-teller."--_Pall Mall Gazette._

"Our English writers of fiction will have to look to their
laurels."--_Birmingham Daily Post._



HANDY VOLUMES OF FICTION.


     _PEOPLE AT PISGAH._ By EDWIN W. SANBORN.

"A most amusing extravaganza."--_The Critic._


     _MR. FORTNER'S MARITAL CLAIMS, and Other Stories._ By RICHARD
     MALCOLM JOHNSTON.

"When the last story is finished we feel, in imitation of Oliver Twist,
like asking for more."--_Public Opinion._


     _GRAMERCY PARK._ A Story of New York. By JOHN SEYMOUR WOOD,
     author of "An Old Beau," etc.

"A realistic story of New York life, vividly drawn, full of brilliant
sketches."--_Boston Advertiser._


     _A TALE OF TWENTY-FIVE HOURS._ By BRANDER MATTHEWS and
     GEORGE H. JESSOP.

"The reader finds himself in the midst of tragedy; but it is tragedy
ending in comedy. The story is exceptionally well told."--_Boston
Traveller._


     _A LITTLE NORSK; or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen._ By HAMLIN GARLAND,
     author of "Main Traveled Roads," etc.

"There is nothing in story-telling literature to excel the naturalness,
pathos, humor, and homelike interest with which the little heroine's
development is traced."--_Brooklyn Eagle._


     _TOURMALIN'S TIME CHEQUES._ By F. ANSTEY, author of "Vice
     Versâ," "The Giant's Robe," etc.

"Each cheque is good for several laughs."--_New York Herald._

     _FROM SHADOW TO SUNLIGHT._ By the MARQUIS OF LORNE.

"In these days of princely criticism--that is to say, criticism of
princes--it is refreshing to meet a really good bit of aristocratic
literary work, albeit the author is only a prince-in-law."--_Chicago
Tribune._


     _ADOPTING AN ABANDONED FARM._ By KATE SANBORN.

"A sunny, pungent, humorous sketch."--_Chicago Times._


     _ON THE LAKE OF LUCERNE, and Other Stories._ By BEATRICE WHITBY.

"The stories are pleasantly told in light and delicate vein, and are
sure to be acceptable to the friends Miss Whitby has already made on
this side of the Atlantic."--_Philadelphia Bulletin._

Each, 16mo, boards, with specially designed cover, 50 cents.



HANDY VOLUMES OF FICTION.


_Each, 12mo, flexible cloth, with special design, 75 cents._

     _THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE._ By GILBERT PARKER.

"To tell such a story convincingly a man must have what I call the
rarest of literary gifts--the power to condense. Of the good feeling and
healthy wisdom of this little tale others no doubt have spoken and will
speak. But I have chosen this technical quality for praise, because in
this I think Mr. Parker has made the furthest advance on his previous
work. Indeed, in workmanship he seems to be improving faster than any of
the younger novelists."--A. T. QUILLER-COUCH, _in the London
Spectator_.

     _THE FAÏENCE VIOLIN._ By CHAMPFLEURY. Translated by W. H. BISHOP.

"The style is happy throughout, the humorous parts being well calculated
to bring smiles, while we can hardly restrain our tears when the poor
enthusiast goes to excesses that have a touch of pathos."--_Albany
Times-Union._

     _TRUE RICHES._ By FRANÇOIS COPPÉE.

"Delicate as an apple blossom, with its limp cover of pale green and its
stalk of golden-rod, is this little volume containing two stories by
François Coppée. The tales are charmingly told, and their setting is an
artistic delight."--_Philadelphia Bulletin._

"The author scarcely had a thought of sermonizing his readers, but each
of these little stories presents a moral not easily overlooked, and
whose influence lingers with those who read them."--_Baltimore
American._

     _A TRUTHFUL WOMAN IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA._ By KATE SANBORN,
     author of "Adopting an Abandoned Farm," etc.

"The veracious writer considers the _pros_ of the 'glorious climate' of
California, and then she gives the _cons_. Decidedly the ayes have
it.... The book is sprightly and amiably entertaining. The descriptions
have the true Sanborn touch of vitality and humor."--_Philadelphia
Ledger._

     _A BORDER LEANDER._ By HOWARD SEELY, author of "A Nymph of the
     West," etc.

"We confess to a great liking for the tale Mr. Seely tells.... There are
pecks of trouble ere the devoted lovers secure the tying of their
love-knot, and Mr. Seely describes them all with a Texan flavor that is
refreshing."--_New York Times._

"A swift, gay, dramatic little tale, which at once takes captive the
reader's sympathy and holds it without difficulty to the
end."--_Charleston News and Courier._



     _MANY INVENTIONS._ By RUDYARD KIPLING. Containing fourteen
     stories, several of which are now published for the first time,
     and two poems. 12mo, 427 pages. Cloth, $1.50.

"The reader turns from its pages with the conviction that the author has
no superior to-day in animated narrative and virility of style. He
remains master of a power in which none of his contemporaries approach
him--the ability to select out of countless details the few vital ones
which create the finished picture. He knows how, with a phrase or a
word, to make you see his characters as he sees them, to make you feel
the full meaning of a dramatic situation."--_New York Tribune._

"'Many Inventions' will confirm Mr. Kipling's reputation.... We would
cite with pleasure sentences from almost every page, and extract
incidents from almost every story. But to what end? Here is the
completest book that Mr. Kipling has yet given us in workmanship, the
weightiest and most humane in breadth of view."--_Pall Mall Gazette._

"Mr. Kipling's powers as a story-teller are evidently not diminishing.
We advise everybody to buy 'Many Inventions,' and to profit by some of
the best entertainment that modern fiction has to offer."--_New York
Sun._

"'Many Inventions' will be welcomed wherever the English language is
spoken.... Every one of the stories bears the imprint of a master who
conjures up incident as if by magic, and who portrays character,
scenery, and feeling with an ease which is only exceeded by the boldness
of force."--_Boston Globe._

"The book will get and hold the closest attention of the
reader."--_American Bookseller._

"Mr. Rudyard Kipling's place in the world of letters is unique. He sits
quite aloof and alone, the incomparable and inimitable master of the
exquisitely fine art of short-story writing. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson
has perhaps written several tales which match the run of Mr. Kipling's
work, but the best of Mr. Kipling's tales are matchless, and his latest
collection, 'Many Inventions,' contains several such."--_Philadelphia
Press._

"Of late essays in fiction the work of Kipling can be compared to only
three--Blackmore's 'Lorna Doone,' Stevenson's marvelous sketch of Villon
in the 'New Arabian Nights,' and Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the
D'Urbervilles.'... It is probably owing to this extreme care that 'Many
Inventions' is undoubtedly Mr. Kipling's best book."--_Chicago Post._

"Mr. Kipling's style is too well known to American readers to require
introduction, but it can scarcely be amiss to say there is not a story
in this collection that does not more than repay a perusal of them
all."--_Baltimore American._

"As a writer of short stories Rudyard Kipling is a genius. He has had
imitators, but they have not been successful in dimming the luster of
his achievements by contrast.... 'Many Inventions' is the title. And
they are inventions--entirely original in incident, ingenious in plot,
and startling by their boldness and force."--_Rochester Herald._



     _A JOURNEY IN OTHER WORLDS. A Romance of the Future._ By JOHN JACOB
     ASTOR. With 9 full-page Illustrations by Dan Beard. 12mo. Cloth,
     $1.50.

"An interesting and cleverly devised book.... No lack of imagination....
Shows a skillful and wide acquaintance with scientific facts."--_New
York Herald._

"The author speculates cleverly and daringly on the scientific advance
of the earth, and he revels in the physical luxuriance of Jupiter; but
he also lets his imagination travel through spiritual realms, and
evidently delights in mystic speculation quite as much as in scientific
investigation. If he is a follower of Jules Verne, he has not forgotten
also to study the philosophers."--_New York Tribune._

"A beautiful example of typographical art and the bookmaker's skill....
To appreciate the story one must read it."--_New York Commercial
Advertiser._

"The date of the events narrated in this book is supposed to be 2000
A. D. The inhabitants of North America have increased mightily in numbers
and power and knowledge. It is an age of marvelous scientific
attainments. Flying machines have long been in common use, and finally a
new power is discovered called 'apergy,' the reverse of gravitation, by
which people are able to fly off into space in any direction, and at
what speed they please."--_New York Sun._

"The scientific romance by John Jacob Astor is more than likely to
secure a distinct popular success, and achieve widespread vogue both as
an amusing and interesting story, and a thoughtful endeavor to prophesy
some of the triumphs which science is destined to win by the year 2000.
The book has been written with a purpose, and that a higher one than the
mere spinning of a highly imaginative yarn. Mr. Astor has been engaged
upon the book for over two years, and has brought to bear upon it a
great deal of hard work in the way of scientific research, of which he
has been very fond ever since he entered Harvard. It is admirably
illustrated by Dan Beard."--_Mail and Express._

"Mr. Astor has himself almost all the qualities imaginable for making
the science of astronomy popular. He knows the learned maps of the
astrologers. He knows the work of Copernicus. He has made calculations
and observations. He is enthusiastic, and the spectacular does not
frighten him."--_New York Times._

"The work will remind the reader very much of Jules Verne in its general
plan of using scientific facts and speculation as a skeleton on which to
hang the romantic adventures of the central figures, who have all the
daring ingenuity and luck of Mr. Verne's heroes. Mr. Astor uses history
to point out what in his opinion science may be expected to accomplish.
It is a romance with a purpose."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._

"The romance contains many new and striking developments of the
possibilities of science hereafter to be explored, but the volume is
intensely interesting, both as a product of imagination and an
illustration of the ingenious and original application of
science."--_Rochester Herald._



STANDARD FRENCH FICTION.


     _PICCIOLA._ By X. B. SAINTINE. With 130 Illustrations by
     J. F. GUELDRY. 8vo. Cloth, gilt, $1.50.

"Saintine's 'Picciola,' the pathetic tale of the prisoner who raised a
flower between the cracks of the flagging of his dungeon, has passed
definitely into the list of classic books.... It has never been more
beautifully housed than in this edition, with its fine typography,
binding, and sympathetic illustrations."--_Philadelphia Telegraph._

"'Picciola' is an exquisite thing, and deserves such a setting as is
here given it."--_Hartford Courant._

"The binding is both unique and tasteful, and the book commends itself
strongly as one that should meet with general favor in the season of
gift-making."--_Boston Saturday Evening Gazette._


     _AN ATTIC PHILOSOPHER IN PARIS; or, A Peep at the World from a
     Garret._ Being the Journal of a Happy Man. By EMILE SOUVESTRE. With
     numerous Illustrations. 8vo. Cloth, gilt top, $1.50.

"A suitable holiday gift for a friend who appreciates refined
literature."--_Boston Times._

"It possesses a charming simplicity of style that makes it extremely
fascinating, while the moral lesson it conveys commends itself to every
heart. The work has now become a French classic. It is beautifully
gotten up and illustrated, and is a delight to the eye as well as to the
mind and heart."--_Chicago Herald._

"The influence of the book is wholly good. The volume is a particularly
handsome one."--_Philadelphia Telegraph._

"It is a classic. It has found an appropriate reliquary. Faithfully
translated, charmingly illustrated by Jean Claude with full-page
pictures, vignettes in the text, and head and tail pieces, printed in
graceful type on handsome paper, and bound with an art worthy of
Matthews, in half-cloth, ornamented on the cover, it is an exemplary
book, fit to be 'a treasure for aye.'"--_New York Times._


     _THE STORY OF COLETTE._ A new large-paper edition. With 36
     Illustrations. 8vo. Cloth, $1.50.

"There is not a line in this little idyl that is not as sweet and fresh
as a June morning."--_Boston Commercial Bulletin._

"One of the gems of the season.... It is the story of the life of young
womanhood in France, dramatically told, with the light and shade and
coloring of the genuine artist, and is utterly free from that which mars
too many French novels. In its literary finish it is well-nigh perfect,
indicating the hand of the master."--_Boston Traveller._

"The binding is exquisite."--_Rochester Union and Advertiser._



BOOKS BY MRS. EVERARD COTES (Sara Jeannette Duncan).


     _A DAUGHTER OF TO-DAY._ A novel. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

Few literary _débutantes_ have met with the success obtained by Sara
Jeannette Duncan's first book, "A Social Departure." Her succeeding
books showed the same powers of quick observation and graphic
description, the same ability to identify and portray types. Meantime,
the author has greatly enlarged her range of experience and knowledge of
the world. A true cosmopolite, London, Paris, and Calcutta have become
familiar to her, as well as New York and Montreal. The title of her new
book is no misnomer, and the author's vigorous treatment of her theme
has given us a book distinguished not only by acute study of character,
command of local color, and dramatic force, but also by contemporaneous
interest.


     _THE SIMPLE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB._ With 37 Illustrations by
     F. H. TOWNSEND. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

"It is impossible for Sara Jeannette Duncan to be otherwise than
interesting. Whether it be a voyage around the world, or an American
girl's experiences in London society, or the adventures pertaining to
the establishment of a youthful couple in India, there is always an
atmosphere, a quality, a charm, peculiarly her own."--_Brooklyn
Standard-Union._


     _A SOCIAL DEPARTURE: How Orthodocia and I Went Round The World
     by Ourselves._ With 111 Illustrations by F. H. TOWNSEND.
     12mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.75.

"Widely read and praised on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, with
scores of illustrations which fit the text exactly and show the mind of
artist and writer in unison."--_New York Evening Post._

"It is to be doubted whether another book can be found so thoroughly
amusing from beginning to end."--_Boston Daily Advertiser._


     _AN AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON._ With 80 Illustrations by F. H.
     TOWNSEND. 12mo. Paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.50.

"One of the most naïve and entertaining books of the season."--_New York
Observer._

"So sprightly a book as this, on life in London as observed by an
American, has never before been written."--_Philadelphia Bulletin._

"Overrunning with cleverness and good will."--_New York Commercial
Advertiser._

New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.





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