Without Sin. A novel

Front matter

Without Sin popular 6s. IFlcwe-S. The Manxman. By Hall Caine. The Bondman. By Hall Caine. The Scapegoat. By Hall Caine. The Ebb-Tide. By R. L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. The Heavenly Twins. By Sakah Grand. Ideala. By Sarah Grand. Oup Manifold Nature. By Sarah Grand. The Master. By I. Zangwill. The King of Schnorrers. By I. Zangwill. Illustrated. Children of the Ghetto. By I. Zangwill. The Premier and the Painter. By I. Zangwill and Louis Cowen. A Drama in Dutch. By "Z. Z." A Victim of Good Luck. By W. E. Norris. The Countess Radna. By W. E. Nokris. Mr. Bailey-Martin. By Percy White. Corruption. By Percy White. Stories for Ninon. By Emile Zola. A Comedy of Sentiment. By Max Nordau. The Malady of the Century. By Max Nordau. Herbert Vanlennert. By C. F. Keary. In Haste and at Leisure. By E. Lynn Linton.

The Potter's Thumb. By Flora Annie Steel. From the Five Rivers. By Flora Annie Steel. The Last Sentence. By Maxwell Gray. The Tower Of Taddeo. ByOuiDA. Illustrated. The Naulahka. By Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier. The O'Connors of Ballinahineh. By Mrs. Hungerford. A Superfluous Woman. By E. F. Brooke. Transition. By E. F. Brooke. At the Gate of Samaria. By W. J. Locke. Elder Conklin. By Frank Harris. Terminations. By Henry James. Sentimental Studies. By H. Crackanthorpe. Chimæra. By F. Mabel Robinson. An Imaginative Man. By R. S. Hichens. Out Of Due Season. By Adeline Sergeant. Miss Grace of All Souls'. By W. E. Tirebuck. The Years that the Locust hath Eaten. By Annie E. Holdsworth. A Self-Denying Ordinance. By M. Hamilton. The Xlth Commandment. By Halliwell Sutcliffe. London: WM. HEINEMANN, 21 Bedford St., W.C. Without Sin A Novel By Martin T. Pritchard — 7 London William Heinemann The word " Immanuel" /tas, through an inadvertence^ been printed in the head lines of this book.

All rights reserved To J. AM. Because all riches that I have you gave, Because your heart and soul my toys have been, Because you say the things I only mean, I choose the better lover's part of slave; Because I've given you all things you crave : The foolish head you crown with gold and green, The lips that for your loving kisses lean, The soul that you alone have power to save — / found, through having given all, that yet Much more than I could e'er repay teas due; So, knowing 'twould increase while we two live, I made this book to give you for my debt — However good — too poor it were for you ! However bad — you'll kiss me and forgive ! M. J. P. WITHOUT SIN

Chapter I

It was the moment of dawn, and London for a brief space lay empty and silent beneath an opalescent sky. Out in the Green Park the ruffled birds, roused from their brief summer night's sleep, stretched their wings and preened themselves in the warm flood of pink light that filtered through the broad leafage of the plane trees. But in the streets off Piccadilly, narrow and hemmed with tall houses, the pale dusk still lingered. A shower had fallen about midnight, and the gas lamps were mirrored in the wet pavement as the man whose duty it was to extinguish them passed down Bond Street towards Piccadilly. He walked mainly in the road, crossing from side to side as he came upon each lamp. The damp ground deadened the ring of his foot steps, till they scarcely struck an echo from the sleepy houses.

When he reached the last lamp and turned into Piccadilly, Bond Street lay grey and dead and empty. A few of the upper windows presently caught the growing light, and stared with a startling blankness at the shadowy outline of a policeman who lounged within a deep doorway, and at a cat which, with lowered tail and stealthy tread, was slinking homewards. A IMMANUEL 2 Half-way down Old Bond Street, the heavy iron shutters, painted a light starch blue, of Ephraim Levinge's Art Galleries, made a clear and bright patch in the morning's dusk, but the gold lettering which crossed the shop front was still blurred and indistinct. Behind the shutters, in that portion of the shop which was reached directly from the street, some tall carved cabinets filled with china, and a colossal pair of marble figures were enshrouded in grey gloom, but beyond, in the great gallery, the glass roof of which was shadowed by no high buildings, the day grew quickly and lustily, until the two small gas jets which burnt all night for safety's sake flickered and faded like dying candles.

Here within the four walls, papered in a soft, rich shade of crimson flock, were collected the fruits of a hundred labouring minds, the works of a thousand toiling hands, the world's art of five hundred years. Tapestries stitched by the slim fingers of royal dames and damosels, whose lords and lovers were fighting for their faith's sake in far Palestine, made misty back grounds for delicate cabinets of Vernis Martin micro scopically clear. Tulip wood commodes, overlaid with fine marquetrie and mounted with chased ormolu, bulged among slender Sheraton chef d'œuvres and the mannered simplicity of Empire escritoires. The Dubarry's toilet table and mirror reflected the coarse features of a pictured Marat. Limoges enamels and Cosway's miniatured beauties filled the ebony recesses of an old Italian cabinet which gleamed with the scarlet and amber of clear cornelians and the milky whiteness of rare onyxes.

The tortured limbs of an ivory Christ, torn in war-time from the shrine of some peasants' church among the southern vineyards and yellowed with the passing of centuries, separated the round eyes and bare bosom of a IMMANUEL 3 Dutch beauty as painted by Jan Van Eyck from a corner of farmyard life in Morland's best style. Beneath the glass tops of the show tables, jewelled watches and daggers, rings and rare scraps of the old Venetian goldsmith's work, sparkled amid the filmy web of laces which still savoured of the incense that had smoked about the altars of Spain, or had decked the feast day robes of some waxen faced saint. Beneath the apex of the clear glass roof gleamed the cold perfections of half a score of statues, the crude whiteness of their limbs heightened by the brilliant hues of many tall vases which had once blazed in the Imperial apartments of the Pekin Palace.

Rare crackle and priceless blue, jewelled Sevres and floreated Dresden shone from behind the glazed doors of the rosewood cabinets on which Chippendale himself had worked. The cabinets stood either side of the fireplace, the polished steel grate of which, together with a plain mahogany writing-table placed at right angles, looked startlingly modern and utilitarian among the vanities and glories of dead ages. A sun ray, flung back in cold reflection from an upper window, struck down through the glass roof. It glowed redly on a faded strip of arras, hanging from a brass rod across a small door which gave access to the rooms above the shop. Suddenly through the stillness of the dead past came the soft footsteps of a living present, and the sound of a carefully drawn bolt only by a second preceded the stirring of the blurred figures on the worn arras into a quivering life.

A hand, tiny and white and dimpled as that of a marble Amorini, pushed aside the heavy folds, and into the midst of the art of the world, among the treasures of gone kings and queens, the relics of the IMMANUEL 4 ravishing fripperies of famous light-o'-loves, glided a girl child. She was little for her ten years, with the slender limbs and narrow, arched feet tradition claims for long lineage and blue blood. In colouring she was fair, and for a child a thought too pale, but the fresh ripeness of her bow-shaped mouth dispelled the idea of ill health. Her hair, which rolled in heavy tangled curls below her waist, was of a very light gold where it fluffed in loose disorder about her face, and it only suggested a fuller tint of red in the shadows of the mass. Her forehead was white and round, and crossed by thin, slightly arched brows of the suggested pale red tint.

The nose was perfect, small, and straight, and but slightly widened where the thin, sensitive nostrils melted into the smooth curves of the cheeks. The chin was short and round, and creased with one slight dimple, but it was too small for strength, thereby belying the clear cut and firm lines of the mouth. So far the features were those of a singularly pretty child, a little too pensive, and formed perhaps for ideal youth, but possessing, despite that, a quaint charm. Yet it was the eyes, with all their defects of colour and shape, which made at once the peculiarity and fascination of the face. They were set rather far apart, and were of a decided almond shape, the effect of which was enhanced by the thick white eyelids, which seemed depressed by the singular fulness below the arch of the brow.

In colour they were rather a light grey, saved from shallow ness, coldness, and insincerity, by the intense blackness of the fine lashes. They had an unfathomable depth, a vague suggestion of mysterious introspection, an expres sion that was so absolutely unmundane, that they lent to the child's whole personality an atmosphere of etherealism. IMMANUEL 5 She was clad in a frock of pink cotton, which, as she had dressed herself, remained frankly unbuttoned at the back where her small fingers could not reach. Nothing daunted by the strange effect of the new morning light on the oddly mingled contents of the Art Gallery, the little girl dropped the arras behind her and advanced. With light, leisurely steps, she threaded her way among the polished inlaid tables burdened with rare porcelain and the huge Oriental vases which would have crushed her had they fallen.

Now and then she paused in her passage to lay her warm baby hands on the satin of a chair or the heavy bosses of a carven chest. " I've come to say good-bye, I've come to say good bye," she murmured, as though she desired to justify herself in the nursery crime of breaking the bounds of the upper part of the house by stealing downstairs to the forbidden ground of the " Big Room," as she had called the gallery ever since she could remember. With a childish sense of fairness she noticed each object in her path, until she came to the eastern end of the gallery where the deep bay of the ceiling still cast a blue shadow. Into the dimmest corner she crept with infinite care, wedging her slender body between a heavy gilt chair and a high carved pedestal of ebony and ivory. " I've come to say good-bye."

A faint note of regret threaded her childish treble, and a pucker of pain drew her brows together. She stood before a small picture of the Madonna, painted on a panel in the style of the early Italian school. From a background of transparent cobalt, the fair face of the Virgin shone like a jewel, transcendently holy, humanly pitiful. From beneath the gauze drapery which veiled the hair of palest corn colour, the tender IMMANUEL 6 eyes half hidden by the lowered white eyelids, gazed with divine benignity at the child. As the day grew to fuller glory, the thin thread of gold above the saint's head, and the great graven clasp which held a royal cloak of worked green velvet across an underdress of pink, shone brightly, and in the quiver of the reflected light, the silent sad mouth seemed to the child to smile.

In response she crept closer to the picture, and laid her lips against the glass which covered the panel. " I'm going away to-day to school, and I am not coming back till I am quite a big girl. But I shall never forget you, for grandfather says I am like you, so does Martin. Oh, I hope I am ! I would like to be." With one dimpled finger she traced the outline of the pictured face, then passed her hand about her own cheeks, whispering, as she did so : " Martin always says that you were good, the goodest woman that ever lived. If I look like you, perhaps I shall be as good as you — one day — when I am grown up." Presently, with the natural unrest of a child, she slipped from her cramped place and continued her wanderings. On a shelf near by stood a tiny Dresden shepherdess. It was to be hers one day if she were a good girl, and she looked at it now with a smile of prospective possession.

On the ground beneath the shelf was a heap of stuffs : old brocades smelling of camphor chests, embroidered muslins saintly sweet of dead roses, and strips of finely drawn lawn, the work of patient German fingers. The little girl dragged the scented pile into the light, which now flooded the gallery in a golden haze of sun shine from end to end. Her tiny hands turned over and IMMANUEL 7 sorted the stuffs, while her budding femininity saw a use for the smallest scraps. How sweet her best doll, Mabella, would look in this bit of scarlet and gold, and if only her grandfather would give her that piece of blue brocade, Martin could re-cover the drawing-room furniture in her doll's house. " I wonder if he will give it me," she said to herself. " He cannot want a tiny bit like that. I must beg — I must coax."

She raised her eyes, already in imaginary supplication. They fell upon the picture in the corner. The pure sweet face, to the child's imagination, always responsive to every emotion, was sad, and seemed to express reproof. As though caught in an act of naughtiness, she flushed scarlet. "I forgot you," she said ; " I am sorry." With her innocent heart filled with a desire for forgiveness, and unable to plead her cause in words, she gravely and in perfect faith smoothed out a strip of the cobwebby lawn and placed it scarfwise on her head. That done, she pulled a stiff piece of worked brocade about her shoulders, and, trailing the rustling folds behind her, stepped towards the sacred picture. " Tell me how to be good," she pleaded, as she scrambled up into the gilt chair, from between the bowed arms of which the Pompadour had ruled France.

Curled in the satiny depths the child lay quiet and still, till from very inaction and the hothouse warmth of the gallery the heavy lids drooped, the baby lips parted, and the little maid slept. Outside, in the sunny streets, the first low roar of awakened London throbbed skywards. The lumber of waggons was punctuated by the shrill jingle of milk carts, and the buoyant rattle of light, home-going hansoms. The first 'buses, laden with heavy-eyed work- IMMANUEL 8 girls and sallow young clerks, snatching a brief smoke before business hours, and reading flimsy halfpenny papers, rolled down Bond Street. A sudden crop of dust pails sprang mushroom-like from the kerbstones, and the opening shops gave up a stuffy, close odour to the fresh summer air. The postman walked briskly down the street, nodding " good morning " to the servants and cleaners at the shop doors.

As he neared the pale-blue, blank front of Ephraim Levinge's art gallery, a small door in the iron shutter was opened from within, and a touzled headed youth in rather dirty shirt-sleeves and a green baize apron stepped yawning into the brilliant sunlight. " Oh ! lor," he cried, as the postman came within earshot, "you don't mean to tell me as it's eight o'clock?" " Seven minutes past, young man ; I began at the end of the street on the stroke of the hour," said the postman sharply. With a smothered groan, the boy clutched the proffered bundle of correspondence and then dived into the twilight of the shop, from whence, in another moment, issued the creaking of an ill-oiled winch, as he began to slowly wind up the revolving shutter. The flood of garish light which poured in from the street roused the dreaming child.

She slid from her silken throne and stood in all the quaintness of her gorgeous draperies before her beloved picture. " Good-bye ! good-bye ! " she whispered, her upturned mouth momentarily misting the clearness of the glass over the panel. " I've caught you, Miss Mary, have I ? A nice fright you give me when I found your bed empty. Oh ! you naughty girl ! " And the frightened maid shook the child IMMANUEL 9 until the clear lawn scarf slipped sideways over her curls and the single button of her frock gave way. " Bessie ! What has Miss Mary been doing ? Mr. Levinge would be very angry if he saw you shake her like that." The voice came from the outer shop, where, outlined black against the dazzling sunshine, a man stood. So intense was the contrast between the dim light of indoors and the white glare of the street that it was impossible to see his face.

But one glance at the silhouetted form showed him to be tall and spare, with sloping shoulders slightly bent, and a long narrow head craning forward from between them. The little girl sprang forward as he spoke " Oh ! Martin, I am not naughty, indeed I'm not ; I only came to say good-bye to Our Lady." "And what time did you set about doing it, I should like to know, miss ? " snapped the servant, whose wrath against her charge did not dare to do more than smoulder in the presence of Mr. Baird, the business manager and right hand to Ephraim Levinge. " I came down before the birds began to sing," answered the child directly. " Then p'raps you'll just come upstairs and be decently dressed," said Bessie, stripping little Mary's royal brocade and transparent veil from her and tossing them on a chair with all a true-born Philistine's contempt for old " rags."

" I'll come, Bessie," replied the child gently. " You'll see me off, won't you, Martin ? " she added, putting out her little hand to the silent figure before her. " I go away to school to-day." " I shall see you before you start, certainly," replied Martin Baird, turning towards the ample writing-table in IMMANUEL 10 the front shop at which the intricate accounts of Ephraim Levinge's vast business were kept. As he took off his hat, which was of silk and scrupulously glossy, though scarcely of the latest fashion, and turned to hang it on its usual peg, above the iron safe, the light fell full upon his face. Martin Baird was a Scotchman, and showed his nationality in every line of the high sorehead, from which already the grizzled hair was in rapid retreat ; in the deep-set, small, grey eyes, the close-shaven long upper lip, which shut like a trap upon the softer lines of its fellow, and in the broad rugged jaw and square chin.

He was but forty-five, but early sorrows and a certain grim defiance of fate had written another decade across his brow. Those who had business transactions with him said they had sooner far traffic with old Levinge himself, for there was always a faint chance of a good deal with the Jew, but with the Scotchman never. Men and women were nothing to him. Neither the millionaires who clattered up to his employer's door in all the pomp and circumstance of Barker-built broughams and matched blood horses, nor the fair women who left the perfume of their silken skirts and the ring of their light laughter behind them. Neither for those who came to sell or to buy, nor Jew nor Gentile ; neither the honest soul who had come to misfortune's direst straits, nor the acknowledged " fence." For they were but atoms in that gigantic social system which had left his mother to die a drab's death in a ditch, and had chained him through his childhood, youth, and the best days of his man's estate to the worst horrors of beggary and starvation.

But for his employer, who had picked him out of the ignominy of an old clothes store in the New Cut — the IMMANUEL 11 shrewd old Jew who had scented acumen beneath his rags and had read honesty in his hungry, sunken face, who had trained his broad bony hands to tell a piece of pate tendre in the dark, and his keen, small eyes to settle the painter of a doubtful picture at a glance, for the man who had fed and clothed and saved him from worse than death, for his master and his friend, Baird would have died to express sufficient gratitude and devotion. And the little child ? She with floss-gold hair, that only glowed with richer tints in the shades of its meshes ; she with the eyes that saw beyond the edges of the world ; she with the plaintive bow-shaped mouth that seemed meet for the kisses of Sorrow ?

All the crushed affection and despised sentiment of the man's loveless life revived and fed on the fair innocence, the flower-like purity of Ephraim Levinge's grand-daughter, Mary. From the first hour, when from amid the wealth of continents she had toddled to greet him, an outcast and a starve ling, the reverence which lies in the hearts of all men for the pure and spotless had gathered in a halo of worship about the tiny creature. Martin Baird was not a religious man. The grand belief of a blind faith which accepts the axiom " whatever is, is right " had been killed within him by a cruel boy hood, and a youth spent in the sordid struggle for mere existence. The desperate animalism of the body had ousted the faith of the soul. But when the child's falter ing footsteps grew firmer, the baby lisp more distinct, and the precociously forming face and colouring of the little girl repeated in flesh the vague outlines of a dingy little panel picture of the Madonna which hung in a dark corner of the shop, vague stories and forgotten lessons stirred in Baird's heart.

The seeds of a dead faith quickened into life, and fostered by the mysticism of a IMMANUEL 12 restrained Northern temperament, grew to a strange idea, half chimerical, half real, yet wholly fantastic. For three years he had justified the art dealer's faith in him, and had so assisted the old Jew in his business that the building of the great gallery at the back of the shop became a necessity. Then Baird gave his quaint fancy reins, and he boldly hung the unnamed picture, now restored and set in a frame of old Italian carving, among the works by the masters of the world. " What's that rubbish doing here ?" had cried Levinge in his guttural English. " I won't have that in my fine new gallery. Everything here is signed and authentic. Turn it out ! Turn it out, I say, at once ! " " I shouldn't do that if I were you, Mr. Levigne," had answered Baird in his deliberately thoughtful fashion.

" It's true there is not a mark to show who painted the picture. But you can see it's of the grand Umbrian school — the greatest school of Italy. The painting is exquisite — and now that it is cleaned, it glows like a jewel." " Well enough — well enough," returned the other, peering under his heavy grey eyebrows at the work. " But my patrons like pedigree. People who don't know anything about what they are buying, want to feel sure they are not being made fools of. That's why people come to me ; I always give 'em a good name, and the real article for their money." " But you are not obliged to sell that picture," said Baird very slowly. " Not sell that picture," almost screamed the old man, all the Semitic instinct in revolt against the idea of keeping something which would not fetch a price.

" What would you have me do with it ? Give it away ? " IMMANUEL 13 " No, keep it. Why, sir, don't you see who it is exactly like ? " Ephraim Levinge thrust his gold-rimmed spectacles across his large bony nose, and looked long and closely at the painting. " It's exactly like little Miss Mary ; the mouth, the hair, even the shape of the brows, which are so high above the eyes. I should not part with it, sir." And through the years, the beautiful Madonna — " Mary's picture " — as the family called it, with the tender, meek look, scarcely fitting the royal raiment clasped about her, hung like a luminous gem in Ephraim Levinge's Art Gallery. And in the twilight of the summer evenings when business hours were over, and the pale-blue iron curtain shut out Bond Street and the world, Mary would creep down stairs as lightly as a spirit child, to Martin Baird, who would take the little Jewish maiden on his knee, and weave from slumbering memories stories of the Holy Virgin and of the martyred Saints, that being for bidden were sweet with mystery and the pleasures of a secret to the child.

And every night as she reluctantly left her strangely chosen friend, and glided away to her little bedroom, she would smile up at the picture and whisper : " I am glad my name is Mary, and that I look like her."

Chapter II

It was a summer's day in mid-season, five years later. The long line of carriages which filled King Street from end to end, the crowd of servants which lounged and gossiped round the heavy porch of Christie's, and the never-ending stream of people which flowed through the wide swing doors, betokened that one of the great sales of the season was going on within. The accumulated treasures of Simeon V. Dexter, Esq., of New York, Chicago, and London, bankrupt, millionaire, and bankrupt again, had a world-wide reputation, and for three days all society in its prettiest summer frock and glossiest silk hat, had assisted at the sale of the tables at which it had dined and supped, the lounges on which it had flirted and giggled, and the rare curios which it had envied scarcely six months ago. And as each lot was put up, a thousand piquant reminiscences bubbled from the prettiest lips in London.

To-day the pictures and the china were to be sold, and a strong element of art collectors leavened the merely fashionable throng. By the time Mr. Wood, in severe morning dress, and with his pink face glowing behind his gold-rimmed glasses from the heat, had stepped into the rostrum, the East Room was nearly full. The green walls, barred across with stout strips of wood, were hidden almost from the floor to the deep bay of the ceiling by IMMANUEL 15 the pictures which hung in long lines under the strong top light. The narrow cane-seated benches placed by the double line of baize covered tables were filled by the Jew dealers. Immaculately dressed, perfectly groomed, and most of them wearing flowers in their buttonholes, their full dark eyes were everywhere, and their fingers, thick and be ringed, scratched perpetual notes on the margins of their catalogues.

The chief characteristic of the dealer per meated every feature of their eager faces. There were bargains to be made, commissions to be charged, buying and selling to be done, and the biggest swell among them forgot for the moment his Saturdays at Hurst Park and Kempton, and his Sundays at Maidenhead, to wonder how the prices would run, and whether a " good thing " could be picked up cheap. Behind them pressed and surged in waves of many colours, a deep line of women, their light laces and flower-trimmed hats catching an extra bloom of freshness by contrast with the black frock coats of the men. Round the outer edge of all, ebbed and flowed a tide of society men. The dealers at the green tables were better dressed than they were, but they lacked the supple length of limb and high-bred air of insouciant ease, which characterised these leisured idlers.

The sale began, and amid the dull bidding for the first dozen pictures, people settled down to attention and by degrees stopped talking. An exquisite landscape by Crome, with luminous mellow distances, and the fore ground bathed in clear sunlight, first roused the rather languid competition. Both Birmingham and Manchester wanted the picture, and the bidding rose from hundreds to thousands by leaps and bounds. As the price rose, the flowery headpieces of the women ceased to oscillate, IMMANUEL and the dark eastern faces of the dealers grew eager, and their eyes bright. A gasp of relief and wonder followed the tap from the rostrum which announced a Brummagem victory. Mr. Wood smiled inscrutably at his intimates ; the buyers had tasted blood, and the day's sale would be a good one. While shrewd eyes were glancing at the next lot there was a slight stir near the door, where a small, spare man, long past the middle age, was elbowing his way through the crowd.

He was tightly buttoned in a well-worn frock coat, and his collar, which was encircled by a bird's-eye handkerchief, scraped his shaven chin. The sallow face and high bridged nose were drawn and immobile, but the eyes were a bright, clear hazel and never at rest. Side whiskers, dyed snuff brown and tightly curled down either cheek, gave the last touch of old world aristocracy to the millionaire Duke of Grand chester. In his wake was his artistic fidus Achates, Ephraim Levinge. The great art dealer's rusty hat and long greasy overcoat, which in cut was very like a gaberdine, set the old man as far apart from his curled and scented compatriots, as his squat body rolling on short thick legs and his large fleshy features proclaimed him of a different race from the well-built, clear-skinned Englishmen.