The Galaxy

Front matter

By Susan Ertz

By Susan Ertz

New York Mcmxxix

Chapter 1

Laura Alicia Deverell was born on May 10th, 1862, at precisely a quarter past one o'clock on a Thursday morning. Those interested in that pseudo-science astrology or astromancy may trace her life and character, if they wish, among the stars, where no doubt it is all written.

She opened her eyes upon a large, dark bedroom, badly illuminated by gas, in a house in Mecklenburg Square. A competent midwife pronounced her a splendid child, and Mrs. Deverell, as soon as she could speak, apologized to Mr. Deverell, as soon as he could be found at Mott's where he was spending the evening, for having produced a child of the wrong sex. He forgave her on the understanding that she did not offend again, and fled from the odour of ether—that dubious and impious modern invention that Mrs. Deverell had such difficulty in persuading her old-fashioned medical attendant to give her.

The Crimean War, most dolorous of campaigns, was just being forgotten; Garibaldi was preparing his attack on Rome under the banner "Roma o Morte!"; the American Civil War was being discussed at London dinner-tables with considerable bias in favour of the South, (for though slavery was everywhere in bad odour, the Southerners were, after all, "gentlemen!"); the Prince Consort had not long been dead; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was enjoying an immense popularity; Tennyson had just finished writing "The Holy Grail"; Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister, and crinolines had not yet gone out of fashion.

The house in Mecklenburg Square belonged to the young couple's father, old General Deverell. He had served under Sir Arthur Wellesley in the Peninsular War, and was now bedridden and of a great age. His son and daughter-in-law looked upon him as a respected ancestor and paid him a hushed and dutiful visit once a day, which was all he required of them. Harry Deverell was his only son and heir, being the child of a second marriage when the General was already well on in years. The old man had his own faithful, black-gowned attendant, Mrs. Goosey, a dame of the most awful propriety, who was more like an aged black hen than a woman. She had her meals alone and took great care not to mix with the servants. In this somewhat difficult and unusual household young Mrs. Deverell spent two not very happy years. She was a light-hearted creature then, deeply interested in fashion, and full of the little tricks and pettinesses which became the average young woman of her day as friskings and a show of claws become a kitten.

Harry Deverell was thirty when he married her. He met her at her first London ball and fell in love with a round head prettily dressed with flowers and curls, a pair of plump shoulders, and a flow of arch and innocent conversation sprinkled with borrowed opinions. Her name was Rosa Morgan, her father had a small place in Monmouthshire and she was wild to marry and live in London.

Like many of the young men of his day, Harry Deverell was acquainted with two kinds of women, and two only: there were the "soiled doves" encountered in places of public entertainment, and there were the sheltered matrons and maidens met with in drawing-rooms. It was considered desirable for a young man to extend his acquaintance with the first as far as possible before settling down to domesticity with the second. This rule Harry followed punc- tiliously, for he was a thoroughly conventional person. He even, upon his marriage, learnt crochet and petit point, but these amusements were beginning to pall when it was discovered that a child was on the way, an event which afforded him an opportunity of resuming, for a while, his old life, for Rosa could no longer go out. She succumbed—not without satisfaction—to the exigencies of her delicate state, and Harry got in touch again with some of his male companions and once more began the rounds of the night places—Limmer's, Mott's, the Cremorne, the Argyll, the Café Riche.

But with a difference which did him some credit. He was fond of his little Rosa, though too much of her society bored him at that time—his complete subjugation to family life came later—and he now avoided the familiarities of the "soiled doves" and contented himself with drinking a good deal and playing boisterous practical jokes in the company of his friends Arthur York and Arthur Sutcliffe, afterwards Lord Doxendale. These pranks presently became the talk of London, echoes of them resounded even in polite drawing-rooms, and only after Arthur York had been accidentally killed by a policeman's truncheon too energetically wielded in a fray, did they cease. They are still sometimes recounted by the aged and reminiscent bore, particularly the letting loose of a sackful of large and fierce sewer rats in mixed company upon the floor of one of the best known places of public entertainment in London. This was Arthur Sutcliffe's idea, and it was his one bid for fame. As Lord Doxendale he became unfertile and obscure and was only twice heard of again; once when he was robbed in a railway carriage, and once again at his death.

When Laura was barely a year old the General died, leaving such a large sum to Mrs. Goosey that there was a considerable scandal about it. Harry was strongly advised not to contest the will, which had been drawn up when the General's health, both mental and physical, could be considered above suspicion, so Mrs. Goosey ended her days the owner of a carriage and pair and a nice little house in Cheyne Walk, and the old man's attachment to his nurse-companion remained one of the major mysteries of the young people's lives. Rosa used sometimes to see Mrs. Goosey driving in the Park, sitting bolt upright in her stiff and awful black, as ugly and unlovely an old woman as ever wore bombazine.

Rosa made up her mind that she must leave the house in Mecklenburg Square at the earliest possible moment, but this Harry was reluctant to do, though for no better reason than that he had been born there. So Rosa had to use wiles, and these took the form of fainting fits, hysterics, and the seeing, on suitable occasions, of her father-in-law's ghost. The ugly old house had got badly on her nerves and undoubtedly the hysterics would, in the course of time, have become genuine enough, and a fixed habit. The outside of the house was dismal and dilapidated, the interior almost as bad. The basement crawled with black beetles, and was dark and insanitary. The dining-room was funereal and smelt of crumbs, boiled cabbage and cheese. It had in it a massive mahogany side-board, a red turkey carpet, a huge wine-cooler, a mahogany table which would seat twenty-four people, two dozen leather-seated mahogany chairs, and dark red rep curtains draping the high windows. The drawing-room was large and cold and possessed two back-to-back ottomans in yellow satin, many pier glasses, wax flowers under glass cases, a terrible ormolu clock, and, hanging from hideous gilt cornices, dark green plush curtains with faded yellow streaks. Finally, the General's ghost, twice seen by Rosa upon the stairs in a single day, brought on an attack of hysterics lasting over two hours, and Harry at last consented to sell the house and everything that in there was.

For some time past Rosa had had her round blue eyes upon a house in Kensington Square, and this she got. While not being at all of a literary turn of mind she was much impressed by the discovery that Kensington Square had been at different periods the home of Addison, Talleyrand, the Duchesse de Mazarin, John Stuart Mill, and Mr. Thackeray. It was cheerful, open, healthy, and for the baby, Laura, the proximity of the Park was a great convenience.

For days before they moved, Rosa could have been seen in the double-fronted brick house, directing the disposal of the new furniture. She would alight with one of the maids from the hired brougham in her bonnet and short jacket and full-skirted dress with hideous scalloped flounces—a costume that banished all her youth and grace—and go bustling from room to room and up and down the stairs with eager, excited face. Harry kept out of the way, hating confusion and disorder. The house contained a powder-closet for the dressing of ladies' hair in earlier days, and Rosa showed it to her friend Florrie Peddler, who often came in to see how she was getting on.

"Isn't it quaint?" Rosa said. "I'm glad I didn't live in those days. What a lot of bother ladies must have been put to, to look nice."

Since the house was built, early in the eighteenth century, it had hardly been touched, and the downstairs rooms were all panelled with the original Queen Anne woodwork. The craze for æsthetic culture not having dawned as yet, Rosa decided to leave the walls as they were for the present, though she didn't particularly care for them. At the end of the front hall was a door leading to the garden, a narrow strip of ground where Rosa thought of planting lilies of the valley in great profusion until Harry decided it had better be filled up with shrubbery.

The furniture she had bought for the house was not very unlike the furniture in Mecklenburg Square, but it was on a lighter, smaller scale. Rosa loved the more feminine furniture of the time—the little black chairs and tables ornamented with painted flowers and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the wool-work fire screens, the fitted mahogany sewing-tables, the footstools and tidies. For her walls she bought prints and steel engravings, at Harry's suggestion, and both he and her friends thought the house a miracle of taste.

They had not long been installed when Rosa once again became the subject of hints and whispers, and in due course she had the joy of knowing that she had given Harry a son and heir, whom they agreed to call James Harold Alexander Morgan Deverell, and to spoil in every conceivable way. A year later another girl was born, and was named Violet. The little family was then complete. Harry hoped for yet another son, but Rosa produced no more offspring. She seemed to have forgotten the trick.

The Deverells were badly off for relations. Harry had some cousins living in Richmond with whom his father had persistently quarrelled, and Rosa had an aunt and uncle—on her mother's side—living in Mayfair. These people, the Merton-Stuarts, were well-to-do, and had a large family, but they looked upon Rosa as a poor relation and her father, a heavy drinker, as a disreputable old man. They had invited her to stay with them for a season in London, and it was while she was living under their roof that she met and married Harry. One of the daughters had since married into Court circles and this still further elevated the family, so that Rosa hardly ever saw them now, and when she did, was made to feel rather more humble than she liked.

As for Rosa's father, he had proved a sad disappointment, both to her and to Harry. He lived alone on his small estate in Wales, giving shooting parties from time to time to which he invited a few congenial men friends, and otherwise leading a retired and sodden existence. Later he drank so heavily that he lost all ability to manage his affairs, fell into the hands of money-lenders and woke up one morning to find he had sold the place to pay his debts. He then went to live with a widowed sister of a religious turn of mind who lived in Anglesea, and there Harry sent him money from time to time, thankful that his father-in-law was not on his and Rosa's hands.

Mr. Morgan had seemed a highly satisfactory parent when the marriage was first agreed upon, and Harry had frequently talked of "my father-in-law's estates in Wales." Now there was nothing whatever for young James to inherit. Thanks to Mrs. Goosey, Harry's own prospects had been considerably dimmed, and there was no one at all who would be likely to die and leave him money. It seemed that fate was against him, and he sometimes talked gloomily, when the servants were not about, of going into trade, but nothing ever came of this.

He occasionally looked in at White's, but the stakes there were too high for him. He was fond of spending a morning at Tattersall's where he often met old friends and talked about horses, of which he was very fond. Sometimes his friends asked him to exercise their mounts while they were away, and Harry was very pleased to do this, for there was nothing he liked better than riding in the Park. But on the whole his time was spent about the house, or taking walks with Rosa, or accompanying her when she went shopping, or going now and again to the auction rooms to bid for an engraving.

When Laura was six, he suddenly acquired the habit of taking her out, while the nurse busied herself with the other two children. He found Laura a diverting child and it gave him satisfaction to appoint himself her instructor. He had a great many theories about the infant mind and liked directing it. He would take her for walks in the Park, talking to her all the while with infinite condescension, and people often turned to look at the tall, thin man with the peevish face framed in side-whiskers, holding by the hand a little girl wearing a shepherdess hat tilted far forward over her eyes with streamers dangling behind, high, tightly buttoned boots, a ruffled skirt that reached to their tops and a little double cape or dolman with a heavy chenille fringe.

On the subject of God Mr. Deverell was extremely well-informed, and nothing pleased him more than to answer the questions she asked betraying her childish interest in this exalted Being. His eloquence sometimes brought tears into his own eyes.

God, he often explained to her, was very like himself. He, too, was the father of a family, only God's family was of course very much bigger and included everybody who was really and truly a Christian. The sins and disobediences of His children made Him very sad and He was often obliged to punish them severely, but when they were good it made Him happy to reward them. Even if they had been bad, and sincerely repented, He forgave them and gathered them up to His beautiful home in the skies where they lived blissfully for ever and for ever.

"Then were you very bad, papa, when God sent you the jaundice?" asked little Laura. Harry had lately recovered from a severe attack of this depressing and lowering illness, and his temper was still uncertain. It was an unfortunate question.

"Now that shows," said he, at the same time irritated and pompous, "that you do not think. I said nothing about illness being sent as punishment. We are all subject to poor health from time to time. I was speaking of such things as extreme poverty, sudden and violent death and great disasters. Those things are sent as punishments. The people of Pompeii, for instance, were very wicked. I told you about Pompeii the other day, but I suppose you have forgotten."

"No, papa," said the chastened Laura. "I have not forgotten."

"It was very silly of you to ask such a question," Mr. Deverell went on. "You must learn to think before you speak. A nice little girl does not dream of asking her papa if he is bad. She knows he is not. She looks up to her father and loves him, and knows that what he does is right, just as she looks up to God and loves Him, and knows that what He does is right. Now do you understand?"

"Yes, papa." The little girl swallowed a lump in her throat and tried to keep back the tears. It was so good of her papa to take her out for walks, she was proud and happy to be so honoured, and now she had said a dreadful thing and made him angry. The elm trees swam before her eyes. She stumbled over a stone and would have fallen had he not jerked her sharply by the arm. His anger seemed cumulative and retrospective.

"It seems to me," he said harshly, "that the children of today have no idea of reverence, of respect. I would no more have dared to ask such a question of my father than I would have dared to strike him in the face. We spoil our children, and this is the result. Your brother is no better. He is bad-tempered, self-willed and forward."

"Oh, papa, no!" cried Laura, cut to the heart at this criticism of her darling. "No, no, James is good. Truly, he is good."

"And now you contradict," her father complained, thoroughly exasperated. "I say James is bad-tempered. You say I am wrong. You have the temerity to put your opinion before mine. Really, this is too much. You will tell your mamma when you get in if you please, that you have been extremely naughty and ungrateful. This is the last time I will take you out until you are old enough to behave properly. When that will be it is impossible to say."

He turned toward home, walking with long strides and it was all Laura could do to keep up with him by running. She was crying now, but he paid no attention to her. Suddenly a masculine voice hailed them, and Harry turned to see his old friend Arthur Sutcliffe hurrying toward him. His face brightened, and his peevish expression vanished.

"Hello, Arthur old boy! It's years since we met. How goes the world with you?"

"I can't complain," said his friend, holding his hat at an angle above his head in deference to Laura. "There's . . . life in the old dog yet. How's yourself? And is this fine young lady your daughter?"

"Yes. My eldest child. I've had to give her a scolding. Dry your eyes, Laura, and shake hands with Mr. Sutcliffe."

Laura took a little handkerchief out of a pocket in the front of her dress, wiped her eyes and face, and then proffered her hand. She saw a bright-eyed, rakish, whiskered little man very sportily dressed and wearing a fascinating sprigged waistcoat. He wore his hat, which he replaced after shaking hands with her, very much on the side of a head of curly, iron-grey hair. His face, though youthful, even boyish, was wrinkled by hundreds of small fine lines, and he had a trick of jerking his eyebrows upward and winking that Laura found most interesting to watch. He also had an odd little habit of speech which was less a stammer than a hesitation before certain words.

"That's right, don't . . . cry any more. I dare say you didn't . . . deserve the scolding. Here's a nice new shilling to make up for it. What do you . . . say to that?"

Laura looked up at her father for permission, and was encouraged by his expression, which had completely changed.

"Take it, my dear, take it. Keep it as a souvenir. Giving away shillings to ladies for nothing is not this gentleman's way."

"Thank you very much," said Laura gravely, and pocketed the shilling. The two men laughed and looked at each other with roguish understanding.

"You're . . . just the feller I wanted to see," said Mr. Sutcliffe, taking his friend by the elbow. "Doing any thing . . . tomorrow night?"

Cautiously, Mr. Deverell asked why.

"Some of the boys of the old brigade have taken windows for the . . . ceremony. You know what I mean." Furious winks. "We wanted you to come, but you're such a . . . family man these days there's no counting on you." He added, "Better come, all the same. There won't be many more of 'em, you know."

Harry shook his head.

"No thankee—not for Joe," he replied, in the slang of the moment. "I've given up going to see—ahem!—those affairs. As you say, there won't be many more, but—no, I think not."

"We're meeting at the old place at ten o'clock," Mr. Sutcliffe continued, persuasively. "Then we go to the . . . rooms with a couple of servants and a collation, and make a night of it. There'll be a . . . big crowd. Bigger than ever. They're moving heaven and earth to stop 'em. So this may be the . . . last."

"Quite right, too," said Harry, glancing a little uneasily at Laura. "Quite right, too, I dare say. Laura, you may walk as far as the gate alone. Trot off, like a good girl. Stop at the gate until I beckon."

She went, surprised at the change in her father. Her crime seemed forgotten. She stood by the gate and watched the leisurely crowd, the men elongated by tight narrow coats and tall silk hats, the women made enormous by their wraps and billowing skirts. She happened to be standing beside a be-shawled old woman who sat under a huge umbrella and sold oranges. She was talking to a ragged boy whose toes protruded through his boots.

"Aye, and get yer eyes blacked and the coat torn off yer," the old dame was saying to him. "You keep out of it, me lad. Let the gentry go if they've a fancy, and get their crowns smashed in. Wot sport there is in watching a man hanged is more nor I can see."

The words "a man hanged" frightened Laura, for she had once seen in some book of pictures a man swinging from a gibbet in chains with evil birds circling round him, and it had haunted her for many nights. But she was much too young to guess that there was any connection between the old woman's words and what her father and his friend were talking about. She looked longingly toward her father, hoping to see his beckoning finger.

He presently did summon her to his side once more, and the three, instead of going home, turned and walked in the direction of the great round concert building known as the Albert Hall, which was recently finished and which Laura understood was the most beautiful building in the world. Nine years later the Albert Memorial was piously erected, like a golden canopy over a Catholic Virgin. By the time they were ready to go home, Laura was very tired, for so deep were the two men in talk that they took no notice of her short legs and lagging steps. At times Mr. Sutcliffe would throw her a word or a wink, and once he took her by the arm and pointing in the direction of a dark, foreign-looking gentleman walking with a lady, said, "See, there goes the Prime Minister." It was her first glimpse of Mr. Disraeli, whom her father took great pleasure in hating.

She didn't see Mr. Sutcliffe again for two years, and once more it happened when she was walking with her father in the Park.

That day Harry was too much upset about the war between France and Germany to wish to talk to Mr. Sutcliffe about the Alhambra Theatre, where there were rival demonstrations nightly by French and Germans alike, with the band obligingly playing the patriotic airs of either country. Mr. Sutcliffe objected to this. He thought it a poor use to which to put the theatre, and there was no profit in it. He himself had invested a good deal of money in the Alhambra, and he wanted to see the theatre used for dancing. He told Harry that the authorities had refused a dancing license on the grounds that it led to immorality, and he was spluttering with indignation. It looked as though they might have to shut the place up.

"Dammed hypocrites!" he fumed. Harry told him very sharply not to swear before his young daughter, whereupon Mr. Sutcliffe apologized profusely, and gave Laura half a crown.

Harry was at this time already very set in his ideas and opposed to any sort of change. Innovation of any kind appeared to him a direct assault upon the security of his position as head of a family. Anything that he had not already thought about and got accustomed to, was—must be—bad and dangerous. And the idea of two great nations at war at England's very doors seemed to him an innovation of a most undesirable kind.

Mr. Sutcliffe's feelings about it were even more personal.

"Fancy Paris shut up. Shan't be able to go to the . . . Continent this year. Very annoyin', ain't it?"

Harry Deverell said that on his part he couldn't see what anyone wanted to leave England for, and that if he ever did think of taking his family abroad, Paris would be the last place he would dream of visiting. The French were a nation of gamblers and perjurers and worse. They had clearly brought this trouble on themselves, and England was quite right to keep out of it all.

Let 'em alone, let 'em alone, When they fall out we shall come by our own,"

he quoted sententiously.

Laura, however, felt romantically drawn toward Napoleon the Third, chiefly on account of the pictures she had seen of him and of his lovely Empress, a feeling shared by a great many of her sex. Twice a week, Rosa had some of her friends come to the house to help her make Red Cross bandages and Laura was usually allowed to assist, a thing she greatly enjoyed. The ladies talked a good deal about the Emperor, and about the Empress and her beauty and her lovely clothes. None of them cared for Bismarck, that man of blood and iron.

"What are the Prussians going to do with Versailles?" Laura presently asked.

"Hello! This young lady reads the . . . papers, does she?" Arthur Sutcliffe asked, winking at her.

"My wife and I discuss current events with the children every Saturday afternoon," Harry explained. "Tell Mr. Sutcliffe what you know about the war, Laura."

Laura coloured, for unlike her younger sister Violet, she was not at all fond of showing off, but she began bravely:

"Papa says that Napoleon the Third is and badly behaved, and that the Prussians could put up with him no longer. Prince Bismarck did not want to go to war but was forced to, and now the Prussians will soon be in Paris. We must not mind our country being abused for keeping out of the war, because she is quite right to do so, but we must do what we can to help the poor soldiers of both countries."

"Bravo, bravo!" exclaimed Mr. Sutcliffe. "Well taught as a little parrot, ain't she?"

"All the same," Laura added, in a different voice, "if I were a soldier I would go and fight on the side of the French."

Mr. Sutcliffe pressed her to say why, but she shook her head and would make no answer.

"Where the sanctity of the home is no longer of importance," Harry Deverell said oracularly, "decay creeps in, and undermines the whole fabric of the state. France is already beginning to rot, like Ancient Rome. It should be a lesson to us all."

Mr. Sutcliffe winked at Laura, who replied with a shy little smile.

Chapter 2

James was a delicate boy, and it seemed at one time possible—and oh, how terrible a possibility!—that he might not live beyond his seventh birthday. The doctor was rarely called in to see Laura or Violet, but always to see James, and this delicacy of his was to Laura, who adored him, like an open wound. He was pale, with admirable features, thick dark hair, and fine eyes. His little body was very thin, and his bones seemed brittle. He was of a quiet, serious, reticent turn of mind, and such was his extraordinary reserve that he never complained of feeling ill, and was sometimes discovered to have a high temperature only by the hot dryness of his hands and the burning heat of his forehead.

The little girls, on the other hand, hardly gave their parents a day's worry. Laura was fast turning into an ideal elder sister. She took great care of Violet and loved to spend hours reading to James, or helping him with his lessons. Their schoolroom—once their nursery—was on the top floor of the house, overlooking the square, and was of no great size, most of the space on that floor being taken up by the servants, for children were not given the best rooms in those days.

Harry soon realized that he was destined to be bitterly disappointed in his son James. He had wanted a son who would go into the army or at least the church, and the boy's ill health made any sort of a career extremely unlikely. If they were able to rear the boy at all, the doctor said, they would be fortunate, and the bills he sent in made the young couple groan. A good deal of the time there was a stout, middle-aged nurse in the house who dressed in black and either made boisterous fun with the children in a way they did not much like, or alarmed them with tales of death and layings out. So what with the nurse, Mr. John the tutor and Miss Mossbanks, the governess, Rosa and Harry never saw each other alone except at night. Gradually, domestic worries and responsibilities became their daily food, and they took a kind of pride in them. It gave Harry a feeling of importance to realize that he was the father of a very expensive and exacting family, and so great was the pressure of domestic life upon him that he entirely succumbed to its demands. He and Rosa thought of nothing, now, but their children. They went out hardly at all, and had few friends. Rosa never questioned but that it was to this destined end that she had dressed her hair with flowers and curls for those first balls and learnt such a sprightly flow of conversation.