The Destined Maid

Front matter

THE DESTINED MAID PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON "THE NEXT INSTANT, WHERE A MOMENT BEFORE A LIVING MAN HAD STUOD A SKELETON SWAYED FOR A SECOND. THE DESTINED MAID. (Frontispiece.) THE . DESTINED MAID BY GEORGE GRIFFITH AUTHOR OF THE ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION* 'THE ROMANCE OF GOLDEN STAR* ' BRITON OR BOER ? ' ' THE GOLD FINDER ' 'THE VIRGIN OF THE SUN* etc He ffteets by heavenly chance express The Destined Maid ; some hidden hand Unveils to him that loveliness Which others cannot understand* — Patmore WITH FRONTISPIECE . BY HAROLD PIFFARD LONDON : F. V. WHITE & CO. 14 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C

Chapter I

' Who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon.' Old Proverb. ' Good Lord, that man's been having oysters ! I wonder what oysters really taste like. How many thousand years is it since I had one ! Just fancy a man, not particularly hungry, I suppose, and with a jolly good dinner in front of him, going in there and having half-a-dozen oysters just to help his appetite up ! What a cruel shame it does seem ! And yet, after all, I suppose it is only the logic of events. I've often done it myself, and I daresay some poor devil down on his luck, as I am, has seen me come out of a place like that, doing just what that fellow's doing. Damn!' Captain Charles Cursitor Chetwynd, late of Her Majesty's Royal Rifles, had a certain amount of reason for speaking as he did, although the remark was only addressed to himself.

He had begun life under favourable circumstances indeed, and up to a certain point in his career he had done very well. Then somehow things had seemed to stop with him. Luck, as he called it, turned dead against him. He failed by four days to get his major ity, and so had, of course, been compulsorily retired on half-pay. Then, in utter disgust, he had gone to a well-known loan-office which did business under the name of a bank, and hypothecated his half-pay for the sum of six thousand pounds, and with this he had had what is accu rately and comprehensively termed ' a flutter.' Like many others of his kind he had an idea that, because a man is a good soldier and has seen service and gained many experiences in various lands, he was therefore also a born financier, and that, having been served a scurvy trick by Fortune in the main concern of his life, the good lady would acknowledge the debt and make it up to him in some other way.

Acting under this most unfortunately misplaced belief, ho had taken his fate and his six thousand pounds in both hands and set out to ride a neck-or nothing race with Destiny. Just at the la3t fence he had come a tremendous cropper. WThether by good luck or good management his investments on the Turf and the Stock Exchange had turned his six thousand into nearly twenty thousand net in the course of a couple of years, and then, urged by the instinct of the bom sportsman and gambler, he had gone out to Monte Carlo with the intention of either breaking the bank or himself. Naturally the latter event came off first, and he had come back to London at the expense of the Manage ment. There had been an inconvenient number of suicides that year, and the Management had found it worth while to give the English plunger a thousand francs in addition to his first-class fare to get him out of the way.

Nearly all the money that he had lost seemed to him to have gone vid the croupier into the pockets of a man of undefined nationality and apparently cosmo politan experience, who seemed to conceal a distin guished personality under the almost obvious alias of Smith — which, as he had more than once politely insisted, was to be spelt Smythe. Edward de Vere Smythe was the name on his card. The ' de Vere ' alone would have harmonised much better with his appearance and his ways of living. Still, as he was insistently but politely particular about the spelling of the Smythe, it was only reasonable to believe that that really was his name. Captain Chetwynd had come back to London a not much wiser and hardly even a sadder man, and had proceeded to assist Destiny in the usual way by putting the whole of his financial jetsam on a horse.

The horse, as such brutes usually do when a man's last farthing but one is on them, ran like a pig and came home at the tail-end of the procession. The next day, having dropped in the betting from seven to two down to thirty-three to one, it romped home an easy winner. That was Captain Chetwynd's luck. He had had some thoughts of putting his absolutely last sovereign on it again, but at the last moment a mistaken prudence - had kept his hand out of his pocket. Now that last sovereign had been changed, and one shilling and sixpence in silver and fourpence in copper was the exact amount of the change that he had out of it. He had lived somehow for a couple of weeks on that sovereign and his credit at Morley's Hotel, but it is only just to say that, knowing that nothing short of a miracle would enable him to pay his bill, he had taken nothing from the hotel but the necessary bed.

Natu rally, therefore, the constant ' business in the City ' which had been his ostensible reason for having nothing more than this had taken the shape of semi-starvation on about a shilling a day. He was still too honest a man and too much of a gentleman to stoop to that kind of fraud which takes the shape of asking a friend for a loan without the remotest possibility of being able to pay it back. There were plenty of men in London who would have lent him five or ten pounds for the asking, but he had taken a sort of pride out of his losing game with Destiny which was about the only thing that he had taken out of it, and he had made up his mind to fight the thing out to a finish without any such dishonest aids as that. A few minutes ago he had come down the steps of Morley's Hotel into Trafalgar Square, well dressed and well groomed, the picture of a well-to-do English gentle man who had just recovered from an illness.

The fact was that he was practically starving. As far as he knew, he had left the hotel for the last time. His luggage would be kept until he paid the bill, and that he never could do. He knew that the bill must be something over twelve pounds, and that it would be presented that evening. Meanwhile he had one-and-tenpence in his pocket, and was walking eastward along the Strand, and had just seen a man coming out of White's oyster shop wiping his lips with his handkerchief, a nice, grey silk one, with the obvious and unmistakable air of a man who had just had half-a-dozen natives as an appetiser for dinner. That is why Captain Chetwynd had said ' Damn ! ' He hadn't had a decent meal for nearly a fortnight, and the idea of anyone going and spending nearly as much as the whole of his worldly wealth in getting an appetite was simply exasperating.

He went on past Gatti's. Then he stopped and went back. It was just about seven — and dinner time — and he did as he had done a hundred times before. He bought a ' Pall Mall Gazette ' from the man in the portico and went in through the glass doors. The porter pulled one of them open for him and bowed as he passed, and Captain Chetwynd smiled grimly to himself, wondering what the man would have done if he had only known the real state of his finances. Still, he walked through the lower dining-room and up the steps into the big hall, just as though he was going to order as expensive a dinner as the place could supply. He looked about and saw the people eating and drinking. There were prosperous, comfortable looking men sitting at the little tables opposite to young ladies who were obviously not their wives.

He saw the bottles of wine uncorked and standing by their half filled glasses. He caught the glitter of the diamonds on the men's fingers and on the breasts and round the necks of the women, and he found himself wondering what had become of the pretty things of this sort that he himself had been wont to give away not so very long ago. He didn't quite know why he had come. It was rather a silly thing, under the circumstances, for a hungry, almost starving, man to go into a place like that, and aggravate his own hunger by watching other people eat and drink more than was good for them. Still, perhaps, the sensation was worth it. It was a sort of outside glimpse of a world that he was no longer in, for, as a matter of fact, he was now as far away from these people as he had been when he was toiling with his men dragging a gunboat up the Third Cataract of the Nile.

He went up the steps and turned to the right into the Adelaide Gallery, with the intention of going out again into that other world which really was his now by way of King William Street — at any rate, looking as though he had dined. And then a familiar voice came from one of the little side tables, saying : ' Hulloa, Chetwynd, is that you ? How do ? Going strong, I hope. Have you dined ? ' He pulled up and turned sharply round, and saw Mr. de Vere Smythe sitting with a hors d'œuvre in front of him and a newly opened half-bottle of Heidsieck beside him. ' Well, yes, thanks— pretty good, as things go. How long have you been back ? ' ' Back ! Why, I've been half over the world since I saw you. In the Casino, wasn't it ? But there, we can talk afterwards. Sit down and have a bite of dinner with me.

I haven't begun yet.' 'Thanks, I've ' ' Now, pardon me, Chetwynd, you haven't, if you'll excuse me taking the liberty of saving you from telling a lie ; so just sit down right there, as our friend Man hattan would have said. I've been wanting a talk with you for some time, and as I've lost your address this is quite a fortunate meeting for me.' 'Is it ? ' said Chetwynd rather grimly, as he sat down. His first impulse had been to take the huff, and walk out and go on starving in the street ; but there was a very peculiar something in the way that Mr. de Vere Smythe had said those few words. It was a something that he had noticed before, especially in his remarks at the tables in the Casino. There was no way of defining it, because there didn't seem to be any human words that would suit the purpose ; but whatever it was, it had a most wonderfully persuading power about it — only an intonation, perhaps, combined with a most exact choice of words.

He remembered as he sat down that some months before, on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, he had asked him whether he had ever made a failure with a woman, and Mr. de Vere Smythe had answered with a most extraordinary freedom from coxcombry or conceit. 1 No ; but then, you see, that isn't my fault.' So Captain Chetwynd sat down, and when he had told the waiter to bring him just what his friend had ordered, and the man had left, his host said to him : ' But won't you have an appetiser first ? They don't make a bad blend of gin and Vermouth here. I've just had one myself.' ' No, thanks ! ' said Chetwynd, putting his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, and staring straight into Mr. de Vere Smythe's somewhat pale blue, steely-looking eyes. ' The fact is, I'm too infernally hungry to want that ; and now, meanwhile, will you be good enough to tell me how you happen to know that I'm half-starved and very badly in want of a dinner, for I see clearly that you do know it.' ' My dear sh*, I could give you half-a-dozen answers, all equally logical and all equally false ; and as I don't think you'd quite understand the true one, it might be as well to be content with the most obvious one — because I do know.' ' Well, but even granted that you did, what is there in the situation to prompt you to — well, I suppose I may as well give it its right name, and say, such an act of charity as this ?

I don't know that I have ever laid you under any particular obligation. True, I lost a lot of money at the Casino, and I believe that most of it got round to you by a somewhat circuitous route ; but I can't think of anything else, unless perhaps it was introducing that little French girl, Mam'selle de Brioche, to you that night after she'd lost all her money.' He spoke in an off-hand, defiant sort of tone, which a good many men would have thought somewhat offensive; but Mr. de Vere Smythe-who, by the way, was a tall, spare, well-set-up man, apparently between forty and fifty, with a face that would have been hand some but for its utter lack of human expression, and a well-trimmed moustache and pointed beard that looked as if they had been gradually turning grey for the last century or so-only smiled a colourless sort of smile, and said : ' My dear fellow, please don't talk about charity to me.

I absolutely haven't any in my constitution Possibly that is why I have, on the whole, been fairly successful in the world. It is really a very commonplace sort of matter. I saw you coming through, I wanted to renew your acquaintance, and, after all what better method of re-introduction is there than a bit of dinner and a bottle of wine? Well, here's the soup. We may as well begin. A glass of sherry with it ? ' J ' Thanks, yes ; I think I will' ' Et apr&s ? The usual thing, I suppose.' Captain Chetwynd nodded and went on with his soup, trying very hard not to look as though he had not tasted any for a month. His host ordered another bottle of Heidsieck, giving directions that it was to be chilled, not frozen. Captain Chetwynd finished his soup, and would really have liked to ask for another plateful, but the savagery of hunger was not quite strong enough in him for this yet, so he was able to wait for the fish with a good assumption of the care lessness of the regular diner.

But the first sip of the champagne was like a fresh glimpse of heaven to a banished angel, and he said so, frankly. His host laughed, not altogether pleasantly, and said rather drily : 'I'm afraid the simile, although natural, is not altogether a correct one. You know,' he went on, tinkling his nails against the bottle, ' this sort of stuff is more usually associated with the easy descent to — well, going downstairs, you know. However, if there is anything of the heavenly sparkle in it to you, I'm glad to hear it. It's always a pleasure to see a vanished joy restored, you know.' ' I thought you said just now you hadn't any charity about you,' said Chetwynd a little more good humouredly; for that first sip of champagne had had a wonderful effect upon his outlook on the world. ' That sounds a bit like charity, doesn't it ? ' ' You can't always tell a metal by the ring of it,' said the other with a little chirrupy, bird-like sort of laugh. ' As a matter of fact, there is no charity about it.

I am enjoying your dinner more than you are.' ' How the dev ? I mean, I don't quite see how that can be,' said Chetwynd between a couple of mouthfuls of turbot. ' You know, it takes a hungry man to really enjoy a dinner.' 'I don't know about that. You will remember that one of our greatest philosophers has taught us that our pleasure in doing anyone else a kindness is almost identical with the feeling that we should experience if that same kindness were done to us. In other words, when you come to the last analysis, the highest generosity and the lowest form of selfishness are somewhere about the same thing. A man who has never known the sensation of hunger would not experience the slightest satisfaction in standing a hungry man a dinner, and therefore of course he wouldn't do it, and would let the man go on starving.' ' Well, to tell you the truth, I am enjoying myself a bit too much to bother about metaphysics, but I must say that that strikes me as a simply infernal doctrine.

In fact, with all due deference to the distinguished philosopher, I should think that it might have been imported straight from the Pit itself, for use in mislead ing erring souls on earth. That is, at least, I should think so if I believed in this kind of thing.' ' And you don't ? ' said Mr. de Vere Smythe, leaning his elbows on the table, and looking at his guest across his joined finger-tips. ' Your experience has, I presume, led you to look upon this world and its life as a sort of series of living pictures, thrown on to a screen for a few minutes and then vanishing into blackness ; a sort of whirr and rattle and flash, a passing light and motion, and then a snap, after which darkness — until the next picture.' ' Well, yes, that's not altogether a bad way of putting it. There's only one thing wanting, and that's the noise.

You know, we passing phantoms like to hear ourselves talk; the living photograph dispenses with that.' ' And the orchestra makes up the difference. Well, we can compromise on that ; and that perhaps is metaphysics enough for an evening, although I can't say that I agree with you, and I don't know but that I could convince you you are wrong if I were to try. However, that doesn't matter now. The flight of the passing hour is more to the point. If you'll pardon what seems like an impertinent curiosity, but really is not, I should like to hear how the Fates have been treating you since we parted.' During the course of the dinner — or, to be more correct, between the courses of it — Captain Chetwynd told the whole story unreservedly. In the first place, he had a strange undefinable instinct that it would be just as well to do so ; and, in the second place, as the beneficent influences of the food and wine spread through his system and warmed his blood and soothed his long-tortured nerves, he grew excusably expansive for a man who had never been particularly taciturn ; and when it came to the coffee and liqueurs and cigars he had so far given himself and his condition away that his host had offered and he had accepted, under that queer persuasive influence of his, a loan of twenty-five pounds.

There were hundreds of men in London whom he knew a great deal better than this man, and he would have starved before taking it from any of them. Yet somehow he took it from him quite as a matter of course. ' Well, now,' said Mr. de Vere Smythe when he had paid the bill, ' what do you propose to do with yourself this evening ? It just happens that I've got a box at the Empire. The fact is, I was expecting another man, and he has disappointed me. Do you care to share it with me ? ' The idea of a box at the Empire was just then to Captain Chetwynd what the sight of a South Sea Island would be to a castaway who hadn't seen land for many days. ' Nothing I should like better,' he said. ' Very well, then; we'll go. " Faust " is still on, and that's a thing that always has a curious sort of interest for me. I've seen it I don't know how many times in one form or another.'

Chapter II

' The electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.'— Bybon. Captain Chetwynd enjoyed himself thoroughly through the first part of the performance. It was like getting back into a world that he had been banished from — a regaining of something that he had apparently lost for ever. It might be only just for that evening, but still he had felt the loss quite enough to be sufficiently thankful even for this few hours' reprieve. The well-dressed men and women in the boxes and the circle and down in the stalls, seemed like old friends, though he didn't recognise one of them. The lights seemed like the dawn of a day that he had never expected to see, and the music kept singing and laughing and shouting, like voices welcoming him back to a house from which he had believed himself banished for good.

Then the curtain rose on ' Faust,' and as it did so his host leaned over to him and said in that quiet, queerly suggestive voice of his : ' I think you'll find they've made a few develop ments in this since you saw it last. It might be worth your while to watch it a little more closely than one watches a ballet as a rule, although, of course, it's only the very faintest shadow of an old and very foolish fable. The very idea of a man bartering his immortal soul, if he believed he had one, for a little renewed youth and a certain, or rather uncertain, amount of money ! It seems to me perfectly ridiculous.' ' I wish to God I had the chance ! ' said Captain Chetwynd, in a voice that sounded something like a savage growl. ' I don't think that I should hesitate very long.' Mr. de Vere Smythe didn't make any reply to this.

He just looked swiftly round at him with a smile on his lips and a look in his eyes which sent a queer shuddering kind of shiver through his guest's nerves, and then he turned round and apparently devoted his whole attention to what was going on on the stage. Captain Chetwynd did the same, and, curiously enough, from the moment that his eyes fell on the moving figures and ever-changing groups, to the moment when the curtain fell, he never shifted his gaze for an instant. What was happening he didn't quite understand. It might possibly have been the effect of the good wine that he had drunk after so long an abstinence. Prob ably it was ; but certainly the whole thing was utterly different, and not a little strange. He knew, for instance, that a ballet such as this must be mere pantomime ; and yet, as he watched, the whole story of Faust came up into the upper strata of his mind with a most marvellous completeness of recol lection.

He was a very good German scholar. In fact, a great deal of his education bad been gained in Germany, and Goethe's masterpiece had been to him the crown of German literature ever since he had been able to read it with proper comprehension. It was therefore, perhaps, in some measure natural that, as he sat watching the mummers going through their posturing to the changing music of the orchestra, he should, by a sort of process of second-sight, see the real world-tragedy as Goethe wrote it, and hear the almost inspired language of the Master spoken as distinctly as though he were sitting in a German theatre, as he had so often done, and was hearing the play acted instead of seeing only a pantomimic representation of a few of its incidents. ' Well, how did you like that ? ' said his host, as the two big curtains came together. ' They seem to have caught the idea pretty well, haven't they ? ' ' Idea ? ' he replied, looking up, something like a man waking from a dream. ' To tell you the truth, I don't quite understand it.

It's a funny thing, but, do you know, while I've been sitting here watching that pantomime business I seem to have been actually see ing the play itself, and seeing it, mind you, as Goethe himself would have had it acted if he could have had actors and actresses made to order, so that they could have interpreted his theme exactly as he conceived it. Curious, isn't it ? ' ' Well, yes ; but, after all, not quite as curious as that a mere human animal minus a soul, according to your theory, should have conceived such a theme and worked it out in such a way. Of course, there's one great flaw in it. The Devil, as usual, gets swindled ia the end ; but I suppose that was a concession to human weakness, which even a Goethe had to make, being, as I say, only human himself.' ' Concession or not,' laughed Captain Chetwynd, getting up from his chair, 'I suppose that is about what would happen if the whole thing were true.' ' I'm not quite so sure of that,' said his host quietly ; ' but then, of course, I may have peculiar ideas on the subject.

Shall we take a turn round the circle, or shall we have a drink in here ? ' ' No, let's take a turn. I should rather like a change of scene after that, and still more I should like to have the pleasure of standing you a drink with your own money. I haven't stood even myself a drink for over a week.' ' Then I can almost understand your views on the subject of Faust and his alleged temptation,' said Mr. de Vere Smythe, with another of his colourless little smiles as he held the door of the box open for his guest to go out. They went round the circle, and then up into the big foyer on the first floor, looking out on to the Square. Just as Captain Chetwynd had ordered the drinks, a very lovely woman, splendidly dressed, and wearing about a thousand pounds worth of diamonds, if they were real, came in, followed by a rather mean, weedy looking youth, who, for all his faultless get-up and obvious appearance of wealth, looked a very poor sort of creature beside her.

As they sat down Chetwynd said: ' What a perfectly magnificent woman ! The very c incarnation of a fallen angel, if there are any in human form. I wonder how long she'll take to pluck that poor little pigeon.' ' Not long, I fancy,' said his companion, nodding very courteously at the moment to the woman, who returned his salute with a smile and a flash of the eyes which struck the Captain as being the most dangerously fascinating that he had ever seen. ' Don't you know her ? ' said Smythe, looking round at him ; ' I thought everyone in London knew Lea Lestrange — for that is her not inappropriate nom de guerre. " The Princess " they used to call her a couple of years ago at Homburg. I think you were in the Soudan then. She got the honorary title in considera tion of utterly and absolutely ruining a German prince ling inside a month.

In fact, I believe he shot himself on the night of the twenty-sixth day of their acquaintance. She is about as dangerous a divinity as that little Mam'selle de Brioche that you were speaking of just now, and she had about as much original sin con cealed about her bewitching little personality as anyone I ever met. Would you like to be introduced ? ' ' I ! ' said Chetwynd. ' What an idea ! There's one thing, though — she couldn't very well ruin me.' ' But there's no reason why you shouldn't be worth ruining again — some day,' said his companion, with another touch of that strange persuasive suggestiveness in his tone. ' Then when I am, I will ask you for an introduction to her. At present it rather behoves me to worship that kind of divinity at a respectful distance.' The conversation went on in this strain for a little while longer, and then the Princess got up.

As she did so a very strange sort of hallucination, not unlike what he had experienced during the progress of the ballet, came over Chetwynd. The shimmering silver grey silk dress she wore seemed somehow to dissolve into a diaphanous translucent fabric, and in an instant, to hi3 eyes, this living, moving daughter of the nineteenth century became as some lovely shape in stone , the realised dream of some Greek sculptor standing jewel-decked and flower-crowned in a sacred grove of Attica or Alexandria. • Confound it, I wonder what's the matter with me to-night ! ' he said aloud, rubbing his hand angrily across his eyes. ' Why, what's up ? ' said Smythe. ' Don't you feel well?' ' Oh, I'm all right that way,' replied Chetwynd, following the Princess out of the room with a dazed wondering kind of glance. ' Physically, I never felt better in my life, thanks to that dinner of yours ; but — I don't know whether it's the liquor or what it is — there's certainly something queer with my head.