Avenged on Society. A novel

Front matter

NEW NOVELS. KITTY'S FATHER. By Frank Barrett, Author of ' Lieutenant Barnabas,1 etc. In 3 vols. >»* CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO. By I. Zangwill, Author of 'The Old Maids' Club,' etc. Second Edition. In 3 vols. -^ 'A remarkable book, rich in interest.' — Times. THE TOWER OF TADDEO. A Novel. By -.Ouida, Author of ' Under Two Flags,' etc. J113 vols. ' One of the author's best stories.' — U orld. A KNIGHT OF THE WHITE FEATHER. B-^Tasma, Author of ' Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill,1 etc. In 2 vols. 1 Should rank with the few first-rate novels of the season.' World. THE SECRET OF NARCISSE. By Edmund Gosse. In 1 vol. Crown 8vo., 5s * A simple striking story . . . told with faultless grace and precision.' — Ti?nes. V ANITAS. Polite Stories. By Vernon Lee, Author of ' Hauntings,' etc. Crown Svo., 5s. 'Drawn with a strong pen . . . presenting points of beauty and interest.' — Scotsfuau.

CAPT'N DAVYS HONEYMOON, Etc. By Hall Caine. Uniform with 'The Bondman' and 'The Scapegoat.' Crown 8vo., 3s. 6d. Sixth Thousand. 4 These stories are simply delightful.' — Scotsman. LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. A NOVEL EV H. F. WOOD AUTHOR OF 'THE ENGLISHMAN OF THE RUE CAINE,' THE PASSENGER FROM SCOTLAND YARD,' ETC. LONDO N WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1893 [Ail rights reserved]

Chapter I

Quadrant Club, W., Tuesday. My dear Elsie. There is nothing in your second note that alters my view of your position. Why break the silence which you have hitherto imposed upon yourself ? Let the painful story die out. That you should utterly abhor the notoriety in which you have found yourself involved, I do, of course, at once understand ; but, my dear child, to give to the world a narrative such as that which you have just placed in my hands, can hardly prove, as you must see, the most effectual means of withdrawing from the public gaze ! It would be said of you, indeed, that you are seeking for even further notoriety. Your conduct and motives would be canvassed with the utmost harsh ness. Reconsider your resolve, or tell me, at any rate, that I am to hold back the manuscript for some little time longer.

Always yours sincerely, Ashton Teesdale. Hotel Gauthron, Paris, Thursday. Thank you again and again, my dear and kind friend, for this fresh evidence of your thoughtful care. Believe me, I fully appreciate both the foresight and the personal sympathy that have dictated the objec tions urged in your prompt answer. I cannot change my resolve, however. My own account of the events in question is due to the memory of the dead. Think for a moment with me of all that has happened, all that is still happening. When you tell me that the matter might perhaps be left to die out of the public mind, do you not for get that this depends, not upon ourselves, but upon others, over whose actions we can exercise no possible control ? Time alone would afford no remedy what ever. The attitude you commend as dignified and reserved has already been turned to too great account by the other side.

One day we find them publishing a series of false ' disclosures '; another day I read the report of a spurious 'conversation' with myself; the hand that strikes the blow in these and similar instances being the one hand by which I must, of necessity, for sooth, suffer myself always to be disarmed. As time goes on, the blows become fewer, but more confident, the voice speaks out more loudly and more continu ously, the figure grows to the incredible and over shadowing proportions that have amazed us all. What an extraordinary career ! Whether my poor feeble accents can be heard amid the din of adulation from alike the ' classes ' and the ' masses ' is assuredly more than I would venture to predict j nor, in truth, have I ever contemplated any mere measure of retaliation. It will suffice for me to place on record my own version of the facts, so far as these are known to myself.

As for the charge of seeking notoriety, I should regard it with absolute in difference. The sensationalism which surrounds the story has been no work of mine. When the entire case was reprinted from the files of newspapers and sold broadcast as a cause celtbre, none of us, I suppose, could have anything to say, the speculation being doubtless legitimate enough, what ever the pain inflicted by it upon ourselves. That enterprise, anonymous, as you will remember, I should feel inclined now to attribute to Mr. Elsmere, acting with or without the cognizance of the person prin cipally concerned. The rival edition, issued not long afterwards, and bought up everywhere, with its un scrupulous preface and its undeniably fine photo graphs, awoke perhaps in me the sense of duty from which at length resulted the compilation of my own narrative.

Of course you have seen the announce ments of an autobiography, richly bound and hand somely illustrated ? It seems to me that that production must surely prove one of the most terrible volumes ever written. The story which I have to tell has thus been rendered an indispensable contribution to the case. Pray do not postpone for a single day the business of pro curing its publication. In respect of the maintenance or suppression of pages that concern yourself person ally, I should be very eager to defer to your wishes ; otherwise, there is no reason that I can detect why any portion whatever of the narrative should be ex punged. No doubt I do not myself invariably appear therein at particular advantage ; but I have not been stimulated by any desire to figure as a heroine, and those who have persisted in paying court to me for all sorts of imaginary perfections may console themselves henceforward with the knowledge that their angel, ideal, idol, Egeria, and what not, was nothing but an ordinary girl, who had been rather conceited in her early teens, and — may I say it to you ? — decidedly a spoilt child.

They cannot shrink from certain flippancies in my estimates of themselves more than I, who have not attempted to disguise the im pressions formed at the time, shrink from them now. But I wish to appear to them as I was, not as they believed me to be. In one conspicuous instance I misjudged a noble character. A ' truce to jeremiad and proemial phrase,' how ever, as Mr. Elsmere would observe. Shall I have to correct proofs ? Will, of course, advise you as to changes of address. Ever your grateful and devoted Elsie. Quadrant Club, W., Saturday. My dear Elsie, Regarding your letter to hand yesterday as final, I will attend without delay to the mission which you have placed in my hands. The complete perusal of the manuscript has revealed to me the additional pain inflicted upon you basely from another quarter.

Coupled with the strange and dramatic ordeal from which — definitely, I hope — you have just emerged, these new facts explain abundance of what has latterly, in you, puzzled me to a very great extent indeed, and, first of all, a tone and grasp considerably in advance of your years. You speak as if you had left your girl hood far behind, far in the past. Suffering and vicis situde may bring their useful discipline, my dear ; but remember that you are only now in your twenty second year, a point which, as an elderly person to whom an apportionment of age more or less has be come an affair of serious import, I feel constrained to recall betimes to your recollection. Several passages in the manuscript relating exclu sively to myself I have struck out, availing myself of the permission to that effect conveyed by your last letter, and considering that you had too highly rated what was a source of constant pleasure to us both, as well as a tribute to the memory you invoke.

With the exception of those passages, the narrative will be published intact. My own request — and, unless I hear from you to the contrary within a week, I will assume that you perceive no reasons against the proposal — is that the story should be preceded by the present correspondence. Yours always, Ashton Teesdale.

Chapter II

I KNOW that when the history which I am now com mencing shall have reached its close, my project, the recital to the public of everything obscure in the events that have brought the name I bear into a celebrity as unparalleled as it is unenviable, will en counter an opposition hard indeed to withstand. The progress of the narration now begun will speedily render manifest why on no account is that opposition to be permitted to prevail. At the outset, a rough sentence may be passed upon my undertaking. It may be said that I am actuated by mere hatred, an unnatural hate ; or I may find that the prefatory avowal freely made above, but to be cancelled if I choose, will be turned against me in a facile sneer. If so, let it be so. My duty lies before me, plain and determinate. Much in the bitter controversy to which I am thus adding an essential document, has been said about the circumstances surrounding my earliest years.

As a matter of fact, I remember neither my father nor my mother — no one, in truth, prior to those most constant and loyal guardians and friends, Mr. and Mrs. Ashton Teesdale. It was beneath their roof that the ' poor little orphan ward, Elsie Royd ' — as I was spoken of by certain neighbours and acquaintances, either compassionately or patronizingly, until one day came the discovery that I was not an orphan, not their ward, rather tall for my age, and not in the least ' poor ' — grew up under the tenderest solicitude, and under a more than parental indulgence. We lived at first in the country. Mr. Teesdale owned some property at Chalgrave, in Sussex, and to the dear old half-empty manor-house we tenated there my mind still goes back irresistibly as conjuring up ideas that to most others of my age are ideas of home.

My guardian and Aunt Alicia, to adopt at once the sole designations by which I knew Mr. Teesdale and his wife, were childless. They had nephews and nieces, however, in numbers, and among these, from time to time at Chalgrave, were formed for me the ordinary companionships of childhood. As the eldest nephew, Spencer Hillyard perhaps obtained a somewhat larger share of consideration than that accorded to the rest. He usually brought with him his school-books and his examination-papers ; he could study anywhere, at any time of the day, whether away in the fields at really not long after daybreak, or at home in bed late, harassed by what he called his cephalalgy. We knew that he battled against formidable competitors, but of his victories or discomfitures he never talked, and we all — the younger ones, that is — looked up to him with great pride and confidence, as to a champion of our house.

I say ' our house ' advisedly, for the cousin ship that united all the others grew by habit to be extended to myself. Mr. Teesdale spent much of his time abroad. He was extremely fond of travel, and would often have had us accompany him. My dear Aunt Alicia long prevailed upon him to leave us at Chalgrave together quietly. She loved her home, not change ; she loved all old associations, the simple scenes around us, nature, the poor. I can look upon her portrait when I pause to lift my head. Oh, may that pure and reverent spirit, that sweet and modest charity temper ing an ardour always for justice and for right, guide me in my own path ! It seems to me I never saw her otherwise than as there mirrored, unpained her smile and soft her gaze, in the brighter days of her beauty, an illusive radiance of apparent health.

When at length we quitted Chalgrave for a three months' absence on the Continent, the step was agreed to by Aunt Alicia in gratification of my own idle wish. We went first into Switzerland, returning thence, by easy stages, through France to the Normandy coast. Spencer met as at Lausanne, journeyed with us to wards the sea, and did not go back to England until the last week of his holiday. Spencer was then nine teen, and I was eleven. A girl may develop a very considerable propensity for self-love, or for hero-worship, as the case may be, even in her twelfth year ; it may be either the worship of her own sufficient self, or the Platonic exaltation of some hero not yet quite a man, although older than a boy. To me, at that time, Spencer seemed a pro digy. I liked to hear him talk with his uncle about institutions and the future ; I used to think he knew as much upon these abstruse subjects as anyone could possibly learn; and the terms he chose would send me poring over my inadequate school-room dictionary.

He had his memory stored with out-of-the-way bio graphical and historical incidents and data, all sorts of parallels and anecdotes ; and for the fluency with which he could retail them, according to his company, in foreign languages as well as in his own, rivalling my governess, a middle-aged person of quality from Poland, I set him certainly high up on a pinnacle. The conversation sometimes turned in my presence upon his ' career.' He was immensely sanguine. Spencer intended himself for the diplomatic service. I gathered from his references to that calling that it stood supreme among the businesses of the world. The men of Spencer's generation, I heard, were to steer our country through the most perilous courses, and to avert the most tremendous dangers threatening from our enemies abroad.

And it was all to be done peacefully. There was to be no conscription, and no increased demand upon the tax-payer. These irenical triumphs were to be worked for us all by the men of Spencer's generation, the men of Spencer's diplomatic 'school'; and though, of course, as a little girl, I did not know any of those gentlemen personally, and, indeed, had not liked the son of his ' crammer,' who came to stay with us for a fortnight, I felt that England might place her trust and hope in Spencer. The regulations imposing, amongst other matters, a minimum of age upon candidates nominated for Attacheships in the Diplomatic Service, Spencer used at times to cover with so much convincing ridicule, that neither of us could think at all highly of their framers. On the other hand, he never spoke without the greatest respect of the special tutor under whose care he read.

That respect impressed us both exceed ingly. We agreed that Spencer's ' crammer' must be truly a remarkable man. It is with Etretat that I should properly begin my story. To an insignificant occurrence there, I trace the fixed idea which was to give no rest until I learnt the truth. We had lingered on week after week at Etretat, attracted less by anything the place could offer as a seaside resort than by the picturesqueness of the country around ; and in our own despite, notwithstanding Mr. Teesdale's horror of Continental bores, we had formed a few chance acquaintances. One of these was a bejewelled, high-coloured matron, who had rooms with her daughter at our hotel, and who, at the table d'hdte, always occupied the fourth seat from the entrance of the dining-room. She knew the name of every fresh arrival, whence they had all come, and how long they were going to stay ; why the two young ladies who ran down from Paris had to leave us for another establishment; and which was the sun burnt gentleman whose bill stood greatly in arrear.

She had glistening purple eyebrows and a powdered aquiline nose, and she ate so conspicuously, and talked in such a loud, persistent nasal drone, that Spencer nicknamed her the Dominant Fourth. The daughter, not ill-looking, full face, cackled in a higher key, with the same heathenish intonation. Poor Mr. Teesdale ! how he suffered from them until they left ! And yet they did their utmost to render themselves agreeable to us from their peculiar point of view. They asked us about our private affairs, and confided to us some thing of their own — informed us, that is to say, that the dollars they were worth would total up to hundreds and hundreds of thousands ; that they possessed more dollars than some members of the English aristocracy, and that their dresses for the current season had been made in Paris by Madame Lupus, Rue de la Paix.

I remember all this vividly, because of a trifling circum stance bound up with it. ' And so, Miss Elsie,' said the Dominant Fourth to me one evening after dinner, when I had strayed from the rest of our party on the terrace at the Casino — ' and so you don't remember your dear parents ?' She knew very well that I did not remember them. The question was one to which, in general terms, I had long been accustomed, and my answer to the question had become, with habit, stereotyped and mechanical. This woman and her daughter had already put the same query in an oblique fashion, before Spencer and Aunt Alicia. What there was that struck me in the present instance I am powerless to define, but for the first time I checked myself in answering as usual, ' No.' These women were certainly strangers to us.

Did I not remember my 'dear' parents, they had asked. ' Do you ?' I added suddenly. They laughed and shook their heads, and tossed their chins, and wanted to embrace me. A third female from the table d'hote joined them. ' The sweetest child, she is !' droned the Dominant Fourth. ' Just the sweetest love-bird !' echoed her shrill daughter. The newcomer, flounced, bedizened, and tinkling, turned a faded blue eye upon me, and deepened her premature wrinkles in a horrid smile. ' They must have been just lovely, her papa and mamma,' she said, pronouncing ' pupper ' and ' mummer.' ' And are you first cousins, you and that handsome cousin of yours?' resumed one of them. ' Spencer ? No,' I returned ; ' we are not cousins at all, you know, really !' They nodded and laughed in their puzzling manner again, and again paid me absurd compliments.

I felt relieved at the approach of Spencer with Mr. Vervaine. The latter was then a fellow-pupil at the ' crammer's,' and had touched at Etretat on a yacht ing trip. ' His Excellency invites you for a sail to-morrow, Elsie,' announced the handsome cousin of mine, to give him his description by the Dominant. ' Will there be any wind ?' I asked, looking out at the motionless vessel in the dead calm. ' What did I tell you, Jack ?' continued Spencer, making fun of me. ' Give Elsie a lesson, and she'll take the boat on for you, you can stay here.' Mr. Vervaine explained. We might unquestionably count upon a breeze. He seemed to fancy that I understood the symptoms he was distinguishing, and so I interrupted him to confess entire ignorance. In the meantime, Mrs. Dominant and her daughter had assailed Spencer with rapid queries in an undertone.

They took Mr. Vervaine for I know not what illustrious personage, the fact being simply that the pupils dubbed him ' His Excellency ' among themselves, because of his excellent prospects, his family influence, and his advantageous nomination — at least, so Spencer had A VENGED ON SOCIETY 13 said. The Dominant was delighted to make Mr. Ver vaine's acquaintance. She and her daughter had passed a season or two in London, and we had observed that they would talk of the English aristocracy as though it belonged to them, or, by some miracle, they to it. They had met some people at a reception given by their Minister in London, and those people had after wards nodded to them near Hyde Park. They often told us so; and presently the Dominant was inquiring of Mr. Vervaine whether he knew those people.

He did not know them, he replied ; nor had he met others whom they had met, and whose titles they repeated at full length. When, under the growing perception of a mystery, I began, in later days, to keep the diary which will have facilitated my present task, the first entry upon its pages recorded this trivial scene. I saw, looking back, each detail in the picture, each link in the chain of thought. The morrow was to bring to me a descent almost into the abode of death, and yet it has been the earlier and trivial scene, not the crash and swirl and thunder of the waves, wrenching me away, which remained in my mind an impression stamped indelibly with pain and fear. Mr. Vervaine, Spencer, and the daughter of the Dominant sauntered to the balustrade of the terrace, and stood for some moments there, chatting and gazing seawards.

As I, too, glanced listlessly across the unrippled surface at the still figure of the yacht, a fragment of conversation reached me from the two left near at hand — the mother and the compatriot. I moved out of earshot repeating their vague words, at first inattentively, afterwards with surprise. They had concerned myself. ' But are you not connected with the Hon. David Vervaine?' The question was being asked of Spencer's fellow-pupil ; the three at the balustrade had resumed their slow walk. ' That Secretary of State you have, for something or other, the young and rising politician who's said to be so bright ?' ' " Bright ?" ' echoed Mr. Vervaine dubiously. ' Under- Secretary,' corrected Spencer. 'Under secretary for India.' - David is my brother,' said Mr. Vervaine ' The eldest,' added Spencer.

And he, Mr. Jack Vervaine, had nevertheless not met either these, or these, or those ! The daughter intoned her string of titled names with an accent of superiority. ' That is,' whispered Spencer, who had sat down beside me, ' Jack's to talk of his own family and set, as if he were one of his father's upper servants, dining at the butler's table !' ' Well, you see,' responded Mr. Vervaine, ' I am only just in the " crammer's" hands from Oxford, and before I was at Oxford I was at Eton, and before I was at Eton I was in the nursery, and so I have not been anywhere, and I don't know anyone.' ' Here comes the breeze for to-morrow, Elsie,' announced Spencer. A sensation as of cooler air had preceded that faint flutter of a ribbon, the stir of gauze. Where the thin line of cloud had crept over the dim sky, afar, a fringe to the veil, the dying sunset flamed.

To-morrow ! At the same hour to-morrow, when the sea swept its masses, livid, against the crumbling rocks at the extremities of our little bay, I had looked on the same tranquil picture, as if in a dream. The people here told me afterwards that I had been drowned ; and I resented their seriousness as a form of jocularity adopted towards the juvenile. What I remembered of the matter itself was slight. There was my dis obedience of Mr. Vervaine's injunction, the pride in my own hardihood, an exultation in the buoyant flight of the yacht, and then the roar of a huge white crested wave, which, as I laughed, struck and bore me off. What ensued ? The vision of the dead calm under the fading sunset fire, our vessel like a toy-boat fixed on an expanse of glass, the vision of the groups upon the terrace, the echo of those vague words, the answering pain, in a dream.

Two lives were risked for the heedless child, the girl of eleven. Had their effort proved ineffectual, I do not think that either Mr. Vervaine or Spencer Hill yard would have wished to return. So far as they would speak of it subsequently, each said the rescue had been the other's, and in this neither would yield. The retrospect, with its elements of an obvious romance, can touch me still — in a new sense, however, and not in a sense of regret. Revisiting Etretat now, and tracing back the imagined idyll, which at one time had seemed obvious, almost necessary and fore gone, I can but wonder at its contrast with the actual retrospect, the course of reality, a different romance.

Chapter III

To say that the preoccupation of the fixed idea was to give me no rest until I learnt the truth is to speak in a mere colloquialism, and is erroneous. It was the knowledge of the truth itself which broke up all repose. The curiosity as to my parentage deepened at first slowly. It had awakened late, as has been already perceived. I had no recollection of my father and mother, could not have missed their care, and did not observe in my few companions, as a child, that any exceptional fervour in their attachments had usually been called forth by their own parents. Living quietly at Chalgrave, and hardly ever separated from Aunt Alicia, I mixed seldom with strangers, and seldom became exposed to circumstances that would have forced my thoughts back to my own position and to myself. Spencer's cousins, and their comrades of the same age, who came to stay with us at Chalgrave, had depicted their parents in pretty much of a uniform manner.

I concluded that parents were mostly people who dictated or tyrannized, interfered, placed restric tions, and kept one down. Spencer grumbled that his father was parsimonious ; Eglantine Heath, one of the school-friends, described her mother as ill tempered, and her father as a nuisance with his ill health. One or two of the girls had agreed with Eglantine, in our private conferences upstairs, that parents ' positively made you hypocritical,' inasmuch as they prohibited you, for instance, from reading the very books that were the most interesting, and obliged you to get them by stealth from the circulating library, through a maid-servant. In some of their story-books there were tales of long-lost children providentially recovered, long-lost parents found. Eglantine and her school-friend, Spencer's cousin, were fond of imagining themselves the little heroines, and they would choose their hero from this or that book, with a great deal of minute discrimination.

I myself could never join them in that youthful play-acting; it afforded me no pleasure; I should have sorrowed to be claimed as a long-lost child ; if long-lost parents had called for me at Chal grave, after tracking their infant daughter patiently for years, I should have resisted them first, I often said to myself, and run away from them afterwards. It would have been a most affecting incident, I thought, and a warning to all authoritative relations who interfered when they were not wanted and took you away, if Weeble, our old gardener, who was usually the first up, had opened our gates one morn ing and found me lying dead on the ground outside ; I had escaped, and had begged my way back to Chal grave, not even knowing the road, and, on reaching my journey's end at night, too weak to summon any body from the house, and recognised by the dogs, who sniffed and cried on the other side of the wired iron bars and would not bark, had perished of hunger or cold, or had fainted in the snow.

When thus dis covered, I should be reclining with the utmost grace, my left arm doubled under my head, my right hand clasping a locket, which contained a miniature ; my hair, which was long and a bright yellow, would be all loose, and my face would wear a beautiful and placid smile, so that our old gardener and his assistant should both say, ever after, that I looked as if I had ' jaast fell aaff to sleep like.' This was a bit of girlish self-consciousness, another form of the vanity which set Eglantine precociously figuring herself as the heroine of adventures thickly sprinkled with love scenes. Eglantine would be always refusing ' her hand,' or always bestowing it. As for me, I knew very well that what I built up in fancy now and then, under the contagion of example, was absurd. My parents were buried a long way off ; and other relatives I had not.

More than that, I had no locket containing a miniature, to be grasped in my right hand as I sank down in the snow. The lot of orphan, therefore, I was not by any means displeased with during those thoughtless years. The books I read were ordinarily selected by Aunt Alicia, and when in their pages I met with orphan hood, whether rendered pathetic, or poverty-stricken, or commendably devout, interesting in an especial degree it always had been made. I grew to look upon myself as a particularly interesting child. Our long absence from Chalgrave, bringing me into my thirteenth year, wrought a great change. The former companions of my own age seemed all at once to have become my juniors, with the exception, that is, of Eglantine Heath, who, indeed, was older than I by some sixteen or eighteen months. 'Ye be graa'd, Miss Elsie, sure/j',' said Weeble on the first morning of our return, as Eglantine and two or three more formed an escort for me through the gardens. ' Ye be graa'd.' ' And so have you, Weeble !' — and it was the truth, seeing that his rheumatism, which bent him double in the winter, had given him back some of his height since then, and we were now in autumn. ' And I say that she's " growed " more serious like wise, Weeble,' pronounced Eglantine. ' Pensive-like, don't 'ee knaw,' added one of the others, attempting the dialect.