A London Legend

Front matter

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON A LONDON LEGEND ' Candida is a most attractive heroine, and the book is distinctly the work of a man who is both a scholar and a man of the world. . . . The love-making all through is charming. I could guess the original of Dorothy Carteret, and she ought to be highly flattered, for there have not been many heroines in recent fiction so charming as lovely, proud, gracious Dorothy.' — Queen. 'A bright, healthy, and interesting book . . . The charm of Mr. McCarthy's book lies in his hero and heroine. . . . Mr. McCarthy's characters have an easy vitality, and we should not object to meet them in real life — which can be said of very few folk in present-day fiction .... Take it altogether, " A London Legend " is a clever book, that may be read from end to end wilh pleasure and even profit.' — Standard. ' I shall be astonished if " A London Legend " does not rank among the very successful books of the year. . . .

Mr. McCarthy is to be con gratulated upon it.' — Sun. 'Very prettily told indeed. . . . No one will fail to enjoy this novel.' — Glasgow Herald. ' There is another novel which I must not omit to mention — Mr. J. H. McCarthy's " London Legend." I know you will enjoy reading it as much as I have done.' — Truth. 'A fresh, delightful, and entertaining story.' — Daily Chronicle. ' " A London Legend " is a love-story, fanciful, fresh, and gay. . . . The heroine is from first to last a captivating creation.' — Daily News. 'A very pretty love-story is embodied in "A London Legend," and so pleasantly and gracefully is it told that the author has achieved a genuine success. Dorothy Carteret, the heroine of this romance, is a distinctly charming creation. Modern to the finger-tips, she is yet entirely free from the modern taint of morbidness, and her audacious disregard of convention savours rather of Rosalind or Fortia than of the unwholesome caprices of some recent heroines in fiction.' — Speaker. ' Mr. McCarthy has given us pleasure of a true kind, and we thank him very heartily.' — Literary World. ' The love-story running through the book is admirably touched on.

Mr. McCarthy always writes with distinction, and his latest novel should adil considerably to his reputation as a delightful raconteur and delineator of character. ' — Freeman' s Journal. ' The heroine of this well-told story is a New Woman of the right sort. She is proud, unconventional, fearless, but never unwomanly, and Mr. McCarthy has every reason to be proud of her.' — Lady's Pictorial. ' Not the least agreeable feature of " A London Legend " is the un mistakable family resemblance, both in grace of characterization and lightness of touch, which it bears to the early novels of the author's father. ... "A London Legend " is, in short, a decidedly successful romance of modern advanced society in its most attractive and generous aspects.' — Athenæum. BY JUSTIN HUNTLY McCARTHY \ AUTHOR OF ' DOOM,' ' LILY LASS,' ETC. ' Coincidence, coincidence, divine coincidence!

Chapter I

' IS THIS THE FACE ?' If I were half a poet, half a wit, I'd write an epic or an epigram In praise of ladies. A Pastoral in Pink. As he passed through the gates into the paved space before the portico he paused for a moment to look, as with a fresh eye, upon a familiar scene. In the clearly bright March air — the air of a March day that wore something of the favour of late April — the British Museum looked, for the moment, almost white. In consequence it looked almost Greek — in the sense, that is to say, in which most people speak of a building that is built in what is called the classic style as looking Greek. Brander Swift thought of this as he paused, and it pleased him to remember that he was not as such folk are ; that he knew very well that a Grecian building of the size of the British Museum would have been no cold, hueless mass, but a very blaze of colour — amber and azure and hot vermilion, and sumptuous with much gilding.

Even with the thought he half laughed at himself for being priggish ; but while he laughed he still paused, and, pausing, grew pensive. The pigeons that haunt the precincts of the Museum were fluttering about in all directions. Some were flying high in the chill air ; some strutted hither and thither on the pave ment with the insolent carriage peculiar to their kind ; some nestled tenderly in the empty spaces ofthe weather worn group of sculpture that crowns the front of the building. In his sudden pensiveness Brander Swift almost sighed aloud. For the sight of the pigeons, and something in the keen quality of the sunlit air, had reminded him of Venice, and of the days of his youth. Venice ! The days of his youth ! The two thoughts were full of exquisite pleasure, even of exquisite pain. Brander Swift sighed again.

Then, becoming conscious that he was murmuring 'The days of my youth !' to himself softly, in a way that made for ridicule, he hurried forward to ascend the Museum steps. The phrase was still humming in his ears as he pushed forward one of the swinging glass doors and passed within the precincts of the Gaunt House of Art. It seemed to dominate him — to reduce him to a condition of absorbed contemplation. Under its influence he surrendered his stick to the custodian of all sticks and umbrellas without tossing, as it were, across the counter that cabined the custodian the customary morning greeting. He pocketed without a word the metal disc that represented his pawned weapon, and walked slowly into the first of the Græco-Roman galleries. The days of his youth ! What was there, after all, in that collocation of words which need appal him ?

For Brander Swift considered himself a young man, and was considered to be a young man by his friends, and even by his enemies, which was more important. To be three-and-thirty is to be but a boy, he had assured himself often before this time, and he now reassured himself vehemently with a kind of petulant insistence, as he moved onward among the monumental visages of the lords of Rome. But the sight of those pigeons fluttering in that fair, false spring had troubled him, reminding him of days when he was very much younger— days when there was not the least reason tq r 3 assert his youth ; when his wish was rather to jog Time in his halting progress. Now, all of a sudden, he seemed to have grown old — very old ; now, all of a sudden, his easy-going life, that habitually moved with the measure of a patient stream, seemed to have changed its temper, and to be racing with merciless rapidity towards its goal.

Brander Swift shivered un easily as he looked about him. So looking, he saw nothing that was not already long familiar to him. At the extreme end of the room, to his right, thin-visaged Cæsar — he who all men think of when they think of Cæsar — regarded an altered world with a philosophic disdain upon his peaked face. Almost at his side — for he had strayed unheeding half the length of the gallery — was the thick-necked, thick lipped bust of Nero of the House of Brazen-beard. Brander Swift drew nearer to this bust, and smiled sourly as he looked at it. ' I wonder,' he said to himself, in his quickly-speeding thoughts, ' if you enjoyed yourself, Illustrious ; if that game of yours was really worth its Roman candle, with its long revel of lust, and laughter, and live torches ; if a great artist really perished by the hand-stroke of Phaon— or was it Epaphroditus ?' He scrutinized the marble face as intently as if he almost fancied that the marble might melt, and smile an answer to his questions.

Then, as the handsome stone remained impassive, he shrugged his shoulders, and moved away. After all, he had not come to the Museum that day to look for the hundredth or the thousandth time upon the features of Imperial Nero, or to vex its quiet with absurd interrogations. What, then, had he come for ? He answered his own question at once with a brisk mendacity. He had come to refresh his mind with the contemplation of certain Grecian images, the wreckage of that lost civilization. The contemplation was essential to the furtherance of the work upon which he was then busy. But even as he so answered himself he laughed, for he knew that he was lying — lying very pitifully and very cheaply. Brander Swift had a right to laugh at him self, for if there was one thing that he hated more than another, it was lying ; and lying to himself was just as bad as lying to other people.

There was no use, after all, in keeping up to himself the affectation that he had come to the Museum that morning bent upon the study of forgotten gods or heroes. He had, it is true, cheated himself, or tried to cheat himself, when he began his work, into the conviction that it was really necessary for him to get up and go forth and pass the Museum portals to look at a certain antique effigy in a certain nook. But the cheat was pretentious ; it lacked substance ; it did not carry con viction with it. It had been so far effectual that it had induced him to leave his papers and his proof sheets, put on his hat, and make his way from the quiet of Queen Square to the Museum. But having done so much, the deception suddenly avowed itself to be a flimsy fraud, and deserted him altogether. He had come to the Museum as the gambler comes to the green cloth — a child of chance.

Had its Pantheon deified Chance, that image would have been his fitting goal this morning. For his conscience, now thoroughly naked and ashamed, confessed aloud that he had come to the Temple of Learning moved by no desire for deeper erudition, moved by no desire to look on some dead face made monumental in stone, but only by the faint hope and the fond desire to look again upon a living face — upon the face of a girl. He had seen the face only twice in his life, twice before, at about the same hour as now and in about the same place. It was a very beautiful face, the most beautiful face he had ever seen, he assured himself now as he drifted through the gallery, though even with the assurance memory gave a twinge as he remembered that he had used the same words before, with no less confidence, about other faces.

Yet why not, after all ? Is not life all progress towards the ideal, from the y 5 beautiful towards the more beautiful, the perfection of yesterday proving only the disappointment of to-day ? While his bodily eyes were glancing in all directions among the statues to see if she whom he sought were there, his mental vision feasted on the face that had haunted him for half a week. But though it showed very plainly in his mind's glass, he could not very readily reduce its beauties to words. She had dark hair and dark blue eyes, but there is a wilderness of pretty women in the world with dark hair and dark blue eyes. That her face was finely oval, that her colour was rather warm than pale, that the quality of her complexion was delicate with an air of Southern delicacy, that her lips were very vividly red — all these were exquisite items that did not in their enumeration paint a very decided picture.

He said to himself that she might have lived in France in the days of Charles IX. ; that she might have moved in the train of Marie Stuart and prompted the prose of Brantome and the verse of Ronsard : he felt sure that she would have shone splendidly in the rich habit of the sixteenth century. But even by this gradual procession of reduction from the general to the particular, Brander Swift felt that he would scarcely succeed in conveying to anyone else the attraction, the victorious beauty, of the face that he had seen twice and that he was now hoping with all his heart he would be lucky enough to see for a third time. As he moved along the galleries he pleased and teased himself with reminiscences. To-day was Monday. He had seen her for the first time on the previous Friday. ' Dies Nefasta !' he muttered, and then he sneered at himself for his superstition in thinking Friday an un lucky day, as he recalled many pleasant episodes in life which belonged to, or had begun upon, a Friday.

He had come to the Museum on that Friday as he had been wont to come there any day, on and off, for years back ; he had come then really to do what he now shammed to be doing, to consult some relic of the past. He saw her first in the long Grecian gallery where the spoils of the Parthenon repose. She was looking at one of the groups with a greater air of interest than that vouchsafed to the marvels of Phidias by the listless sightseer. At the same time there was something alert in her bearing, something fresh in her glance which differentiated her from the ordinary art student who came there, daily and dismally, to copy from the antique, and to whom the antique remained, for ever and ever, a thing to be measured off with an elevated pencil against a white wall. Her beauty had first attracted him, then her evident interest in things that interested him to his heart's core, then the difference in her bearing and habit from those who were the familiars of the sculpture galleries.

For though she was very simply dressed, and dressed, too, in stuffs of dark texture unexciting to the eye, even he, unwise in such gear, could see that there was something in her dress that was not as the dress of most of the eager young ladies who carried culture and conversation into every nook of the place. Although he had no very ready appreciation of the niceties of women's wear, he had noted that if her dress hinted at austerity it did not suggest poverty. He cited to himself Milton's rendering of Horace, ' simple in neatness,' as he made his memory dwell upon her appearance during the long Sunday in which he had thought of little else. But he immediately rejected the citation as conveying too meagre an appreciation of the girl's appearance. Neatness seemed but a workaday, domestic merit in divinity.

He had a kind of consciousness that her gloves were finely fashioned, that her hat had no home-made air about it, that the sombre brown of her gown, the sombre black of her winter coat, suggested an entirely voluntary gravity of hue, that the texture was fine and finely cut. In fact, she left on his mind the impression of a well-clothed young woman to whom the being well-clothed was a habitual state, an unbroken custom. When he had seen her for the first time on that Friday in the Elgin Room, his attention had been arrested by her graceful carriage, by something delicate in the turn of the neck, in the poise of the head, by fine shape suggested through the thickness of a winter habit. Then, as he passed, she turned, and he saw her face and its beauty conquered him. He passed her again and again, doing his best to appear intent upon the statues, doing his best to make his eyes when they met hers seem merely indifferent.

When he felt that he had no decent excuse to make to himself for lingering longer, he went away, went into the Assyrian rooms and confided to the images of Assur-bani-Pal that he had just seen the most beautiful woman in the world. Dead Assyria received the tidings with indifference. Whereupon a great weariness of dead Assyria came over Swift's soul, and he assured himself that it was his duty to blot out the memory of its grotesqueness by another sight of the flawless forms of Attica. But when he had got back to the Elgin Room, he found that his passion for the flawless forms of Attica paled and waned. For the girl who had been among them so short a time before had gone, and though Swift went religiously all over the Museum at a pace that amazed its calm custodians, he did not see her again.

He thought about her a good deal instead, and felt, almost for the first time in his life, that he would like to be able to express himself in rhyme. The next day, the Saturday, he went to the Museum again, still with the same ostensible search for know ledge. But in his heart he wondered if he should see her again. He scarcely hoped to see her. He argued with himself very judicially, urging the extreme unlikeli hood that such a girl would come to the British Museum day after day, or even that if she did she would come at the same hour to the same place. But though he argued against his hopes, he went to the Elgin Room none the less directly, and there, in the Elgin Room, to his great amazement and delight, he saw her again. She was standing before a different group of sculpture, looking at it with the same intentness that she had shown on the previous day.

Once again, as he passed her, she turned her head, and once again the same living joy in her beauty came to conquer him. He seemed to understand what the old world meant when it talked of ' possession,' when it spoke of men as being possessed. This time, as he remembered, he had acted more audaciously. He had remained in the Elgin Room, skulking behind the statues, furtively looking at the beautiful girl while he pretended to be wholly absorbed in his minute investigations of the ruined jaw of a river horse or a limb of the Duke of Athens. The lines of her body were delightful ; even in that shrine of sym metry the modern woman in her modern garb could afford to carry herself fearlessly. As she stood there, looking so steadily at the shattered masterpiece, her bearing charmed him in its youthful suppleness, in its youthful strength.

But it was her face that most en chanted him, her face, to see which he lingered behind pedestals, guiltily, feeling like a spy, but unable to resist spying. If he had found her fair on the previous day in that sudden glance, he found her ten times fairer now, as he surreptitiously peered at her round the corner of a venerable model of the Parthenon. It is the privilege of young men to think most rapturously upon a woman's face, and Brander Swift was still a young man. If that salacious cynic, Stephen Budget, had been with him, Stephen Budget would doubtless have looked upon the unknown beauty with very different eyes, and with a very different delight. But Brander Swift never saw with the eyes, and never thought with the mind, of Stephen Budget, and it was enough for him now to gaze upon the girl with something of that divine rapture that fills the speech of Marlowe's Faustus when he be holds the resuscitated Helen.

But, as he now remembered wistfully, he was not given much time wherein to gaze. His reconnoitring, his skirmishes into the open, his artful ambuscades, his strategies, were put an end to by the departure of their cause. The girl had given the most attentive study to the particular group of statuary with which she had been occupied when Swift came, this second time, upon her. He could not guess whether she had or had not noticed his sufficiently clumsy attempts to play the un perceived spy. At least, she showed no sign of being aware of his pertinacity, but pursued her own business as composedly as if she and her group had been alone in the world together. But as soon as she had finished that study she walked rapidly away, paying no heed to any of the other relics of Athenian splendour which the room contained.

She moved away, indeed, so rapidly that she was in the next room before Swift quite re covered from his surprise at her action, and she was almost out of sight before he had determined to take some action himself. Swift's action had taken the simple form of following the girl. He was determined that this time, at least, he would not lose sight of her so completely as he had lost sight of her on the preceding day. He followed her course sharply, as he followed it now in his memory, came upon her track in the Græco-Roman Gallery, saw her obtain possession of an umbrella in the hall, saw her pass through the swinging glass doors into the street. Swift remembered well the momentary hesitation that held him as she passed out. But the hesi tation was merely momentary. The doors had scarcely ceased to oscillate before Swift put his hand to them ; the girl was not at the bottom of the steps before he had passed through the doors and was standing on the top of the steps.

Now his memories were coming to an end. As she crossed the wide courtyard he followed her at a definite distance, for he had it in his mind, somewhat foolishly, as he admitted to himself even then and there, to hunt her, an unsuspecting quarry, to her home. But was she so wholly unsuspecting ? As she came near to the iron gate, she paused for a second in her rapid progress and looked behind her — looked straight at him. The expression of her face was inscrutable. A vainer man than Swift might have read an invitation into the action; another, vainer too, but in a different way, might have found therein a reproof, a rebuff. There was no sign in the girl's face to justify the one inter pretation or the other interpretation, yet that pause — that glance back— had proved enough to turn Brander from his half-formed purpose.

His steps grew slower. The girl went through the gateway, crossed the street, and disappeared. Swift had made no attempt to keep her in sight. He had only shrugged his shoulders._ ' What should such a fellow as I do,' he had said to himself with a certain acidulated whimsicality, ' in the pursuit of adventures ? I am no hero of romance ; go to, let me at least remember to be a gentleman, and not a jackass.' His thoughts had turned for a moment to his rooms and his work, only to recoil fiercely from both. It was a bright day, inviting to rapid motion, just such a day as this which now again found him within the precincts of the Museum. So he had walked to Regent's Park, and wandered there for a long time in its fields and groves, already touched with delicate suggestions of an approaching spring and a rejuvenated world, and in all his wanderings he saw but one face, which burned be fore his face in the clear air as sun-spots do when the eyes have looked too long upon the sun.

He had walked till he was tired, thinking the youngest thoughts, and he remembered now how he had smiled at their sweetness, and how he had laughed at himself for being such an oaf of a schoolboy at his age. But whether he was pleased with his fancy or peevish at his folly, the fancy and the folly remained with him, not to be conjured away. At last, when the day began to darken, he had turned homewards, still musing upon the face. Travelling along the path of memory, he now recalled how in the evening he went, still in a sentimental mood, to dine with Stephen Budget as he had promised, and had found that it was not easy to preserve a sentimental mood in the neighbourhood of Stephen Budget's horny cynicism and hoarse salacity. But while he listened to Budget's talk — which somehow seemed to him less entertaining than of yore — and warmed his feet by Budget's fire, and drank of Budget's whisky and filled his pipe from Budget's canister, his mind every now and then would free itself from its environ ment.

Then while the sound of Budget's fat laugh grew fainter, Swift would imagine himself to be back again in the long white room, where a beautiful girl looked at the ragged hulk of Greek glory. Budget seemed to take note at last of his guest's inattention, and to grow slightly snappish, so Swift had pleaded fatigue and said good-night. And as he wandered back through the silent Bloomsbury streets from Alfred Place to Queen Square, he was still meditating upon the one theme, and he caught himself coming to a pause in Russell Square, and murmuring in his mind some old Greek that he but half remembered — some words that scholarship, or want of scholarship, attributes to Plato — words in which the poet-philosopher asks if his star looks up at those stars, and wishes that he were as the fields of heaven, that with its myriad eyes he might behold her face.

These memories came thickly to Swift now as he returned to the Museum — these and memories of that long Sunday, which was only yesterday, when he had idled shamefully, wandering in Kensington Gardens, and wondering what happy portion of that monstrous London town sheltered her, and why chance did not for once prove propitious and bring her to wander, too, in Kensington Gardens. Chance was not propitious, at which Swift had felt foolishly querulous. He was dining out that evening with his friends the Windovers. As a rule he was very happy at those modest little banquets, with that amiable journalist and his witty, pretty wife. But on this occasion he had proved but poor company, for he was occupying himself all the time with the problem whether he should or should not go to the British Museum on the following day — whether he would be a greater fool to go, on the very slender chance of seeing her there again, or a greater fool to stay away, and lose even a slender chance of seeing her.

When he had gone to bed that night he had made up his mind that he would play the fool no longer — that he would stay at home and stick to his work, and forget all about the British Museum and its beauty. It was only natural, therefore, after this deep resolve, that the following noontide should find him in the Museum galleries, moving nervously towards the Elgin Room.

Chapter II. In The House Of Art

The gods are all forgotten long ago, The merry gods to whom the Grecians prayed In those soft words so honey-sweet to flow Like some rare vintage that for long has stayed Deep-hidden in some happy earthen jar Whose ruddy grapes were ripely grown beneath some fortunate star. The Gods of Hellas, The Elgin Room was empty when Brander Swift entered it, revolving in his mind all these bitter-sweet memories. Empty, that is to say, for him. The usual official, with the usual wand, dozed the usual doze in the usual well-worn chair. Here and there the con ventional art -students, male and female, held sway, with easels and bread-crumbs and strenuous canvases. But to such a seeker as Swift the room seemed as desolate as a desert. For she was not there, and the creations of Phidias lacked the ideal votary.

Swift lounged to the end of the room in a sour temper, laughing somewhat spitefully at himself. What a fool he had been to suppose that she would come again, or, at least, to presume that she would of necessity come for the third time at the same hour, and come to precisely the same place. The thought that, perhaps, she was at this moment studying the remnants of Egypt upstairs, or was locked in, one of the elect, permitted to taste the splendour of ancient gems, stabbed him like a spur. He caught himself surveying with savage disdain the beautiful sculptured column of Ephesus, and in despair at his unutterable blasphemy he turned away. But in another second he had swung back, his face flaming, his glowing eyes fixed upon the column, his heart beating as if it had suddenly discovered for itself the law of circulation, and was unduly revelling in emotional experience.

For he had suddenly seen the sight he longed to see — the girl of his day dreams was walking with her wonted quick walk up the room in the direction of the spot where he stood. His first thought was one of almost unblended joy. His second thought was one of almost unblended pain. The joy was the joy of seeing her again, the pain that of being discovered, and discovered so flagrantly, playing the spy. He drew back hurriedly, pretending to be wholly absorbed by the investigation of a neighbouring piece of sculpture. She came nearer and nearer, and though he did not dare to look up, he measured her approach by the beating of his heart, by the trembling of his hands. His head seemed to swim, and for a moment he felt as if he should like to cry out. Then he thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat, and clenched them savagely. ' What is the matter with you,' he asked himself, ' that the sight of a girl in a gallery fills you with such imbecile emotions ?