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Storm Of London

<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2> Lionel was not listening to his companion any longer; his mind had wandered from the East-End to the present scene, and gradually losing sight of his surroundings, his eyes lingered rapturously on a feminine form of unsurpassed beauty. Her elbow resting on an Etruscan vase, she leaned her soft cheek on the palm of her hand and looked up inquiringly at a portrait by Lely, representing the ancestress of one of our fashionable women. Lionel had never seen such grace, such simplicity—the word innocence fluttered on his lips, but soon vanished; he had rarely connected that quality with any of the women of his world. But, innocent or not, the form before him was faultless; the setting of the head on the shoulders perfect, the Grecian features radiantly pure. Who could she be? No matter, she was beauty, womanhood, that was sufficient, and it filled his heart with beatitude to gaze on such perfection without having to read the label attached to it. Dick was right, no guide could enlighten him as to what were his feelings. He had never seen her before; no doubt, she was a foreigner landed here on the day of the storm. Greece alone could have given birth to such a symmetric form and such harmony of movements. He moved away from his porphyry column as in a trance, leaving Danford to converse with a celebrity who wanted to know who someone else was; on his approaching the unknown beauty, his eyes lingered more intently on her exquisite face, and he contemplated her lovely hazel eyes shaded by long dark eyelashes. It was the only thing a man could contemplate now—a woman’s face; for, however demoralised a man might be, he defied him from ever behaving indelicately to a woman in the state of nature. As he came close to her, she dropped her eyelids and levelled her gaze to his; they looked into each other’s eyes—and they loved. “Allow me to lead you to a lounge,—you seem tired.” “Thank you, I am not tired,” answered a musical voice; and her velvety eyes drank deep at the fountain of love that flowed from his eyes. “I was far away, transported into the world evoked by this picture. I tried to divine the thoughts of this notorious beauty at the Stuarts’ Court, and the vision became so vividly real, that I could see her take up her blue scarf and raise it in front of her face as she blushed in looking at my nakedness.” “I should have thought the model who sat for this portrait could have easily beheld our mythological world without having to lift her scarf to hide her confusion. I do not think she was renowned for the purity of her life, nor for the nicety of her language.” “The more reason for her inability to look nature in the face. Nature is too amazing to those trained to artifice. The glory of a sunset would be blinding to those who never had seen its reflection but on houses or pavements.” How adorably sensitive was her mouth; he remembered having seen, in Florence, expressions like hers. The divine Urbinite had excelled in delineating these touching faces. “It is getting late. If you are thinking of leaving, will you allow me to escort you?” She laid her hand on his, and without a word they left the room. One by one the guests returned to the secret bower to say a courteous adieu to the Marquise—a thing which formerly had not been frequently witnessed—it had been so irritating to see that perpetual grin on her lips, that incessant fanning, and, above all, to watch her sliding scale of good-byes, which had become alarmingly tedious. The Adam and Eve of “London regained” slowly descended the marble staircase, passed through the hall, out of the front door, and found themselves on the pavement as unconcerned about their surroundings as if they had dropped straight from a planet. They gazed at each other, and in that luminous orb of the visual organ, they discovered the only world for which it was worth living or dying. “I do not know who you are, and I do not desire to know, until you have answered my questions. This I know, that you love me; my love is too great not to be echoed by yours. What we feel for one another is above all worldly considerations, what we can give each other is beyond what the world can give or take away. Will you accept the life devotion of a man who has never loved until this day? I blush at what I used to call love—and shall never profane your ears with a recital of what men call their conquests.” “I accept the gift of your heart and of your life, and I give you mine in exchange. I have never loved either.” She lifted her pure face to his; a cloud rushed across the sky, leaving the pale moon to illumine the young couple walking in silence in their dreamland. After a long pause Lionel spoke. “Where shall I escort you? Where is your home?” “Will you take me to Hertford Street, No. 110?” “Gwendolen!” “Lionel!” And both looked down, for the first time suffused with shame at discovering their identity. Confusion overwhelmed him, not at their present state, but at the sudden thought of their past lives of indelicacy. He was the first to break the silence, for man, being essentially practical, must at once know more about what he finds out; and an Englishman above all must necessarily investigate his newly-conquered dominion. Perhaps this is the reason for their being such good colonists; they do not gaze long at the stars and sunsets of a new Continent, but very promptly turn to business, and to what they can make out of their discovery. “What have you been doing all these last weeks, Gwen?” She told him what her occupations had been; they were limited, it was true, but they had helped to open her eyes on a few of life’s problems. “Have you been shut up in your room ever since the storm?” “Nearly, with the exception of the day of the first exodus, when I felt I must either have some air, or die. I have been out once or twice since, at unearthly hours of the morning; but this is the first party I have been at—I could not risk meeting you. I had pictured our meeting very differently from what it has been; I dreaded it, and little imagined this would be the end of it.” “No, sweetheart,” interrupted her lover, “you mean, the beginning of our life. Tell me all you did at home.” “I have studied more, my dear Lionel, in these last weeks than in all my life before, including my school days. My books have been the sun rising and setting, the stars and the birds’ twitterings; I have thought of poetry, philosophy, and history—” “Poor Gwen, how dull it must have been! Fancy you studying the works of nature, and imagining that you are a philosopher!” “You are cruel, Lionel.” “Forgive me, Gwen. I am more than cruel, I am unjust, for I am the last who ought to scoff or reprove. I stand here as a repentant sinner, only begging to kiss your hand and to be allowed to gaze on your beauty.” “Lionel, believe me, I thought a great deal.” “Could you not telephone to your friends?” “Telephone! What for, and to whom? When I think of the bundle of wires I used to despatch, and of the trayful of cards and notes the footman was wont to hand to me; each one in view of some Ranelagh meeting, a box for a first night, a Saturday to Monday invitation, and many more important nothings which formed the epopée of my London life! But who would have cared to know of my inner thoughts, of my heart’s desires? We shall have to learn a new language before we can write again, Lionel; for the phraseology that suited the shams of our past life would be inappropriate in our Paradise regained.” “Did you see your father?” “Ah! Lionel, he is the very last one I could have set eyes on! I have not seen him since the Islington Tournament. How long ago that seems. I heard a fortnight ago, through my guide, Nettie Collins, that he only came home on the day of the first exodus!” “Perhaps you have seen him, Gwen, but not known him again. Guides are no good in these family relationships.” “I must say candidly that philosophy was too much for me. I can, as yet, only grasp what touches my heart. We shall talk much, think deeply, you and I, my dearest Ly.” “Not that name, dearest! It burns your sweet lips. It was the synthesis of the false life you and I lived.” “Then it shall be, Lion. My Lion will you be?” “Yes, your Lion, my beautiful Una.” “Tell me; why have you never loved? A man is free, and has every opportunity to choose; it is not like us women, who are told from infancy what we are worth and what kind of market the world is.” “Love did not enter into the programme of my school life, Gwen. Had love been part of education, I doubt whether our old world would have lasted as long as it did. It is because love has had no fair play for centuries that injustice, hypocrisy and tyranny have ruled unmolested. Love may be, in words, the principle by which all things are ordained, but hatred is the real password, and we are so accustomed to the clever trickery that we do not detect the fraud.” “But was not your father fond of you?” “He took me to Italy several times during my long vacations. I remember being taken by him to the Uffizi Gallery and being told to look at the pictures;—I used to stand transfixed in front of Raphael’s Madonnas. Then dad would turn up—too soon—with some Italian lady whom he had no doubt picked up—by appointment—and my dream was over.” “And your mother, Lion, was she pleased when you came home? You must have been such a dear boy!” “Home! Mother! I can hardly articulate the sacred words.” “Tell me about her; for of course I have only heard what the world had to say of her, of her reckless life and tragic death in the hunting-field; but I want you to tell me, for between us there can never be any secret, nor any subterfuge.” “Tell you, Gwen; there is so little to tell. The lives of fashionable women are not so full of adventures as the lower classes seem to think. It is not for the things they do they should be blamed, but for all they do not do. There are a great many legends about Society women that are, in fact, but twaddly prose; there is a great deal of fuss all round a fashionable beauty, and very little worth fussing about. Spite and vanity are at the root of many rotten homes. I know my home was an arid desert, because my father never forgave my mother for having brought him to the altar; and she vented her spite on him by compromising herself with every man available or unavailable. The more my father showed his contempt to her, the more she threw herself into a vortex of frivolity. Her vanity could only equal her coldness. Her curse was to be incapable of any love. She never for one instant loved the man she inveigled into matrimony; she never cared a jot for her children, and she certainly had no passion, however ephemeral it might have been, for any of the men with whom she compromised herself. In this lies the ghastliness of such lives. Were there more bona-fide passion, there would be less cruelty and less levity.” “Go on, Lionel.” “I never once saw my mother lean over the cot of her child; she rarely entered the nursery, and we only came down at stated hours to be looked at by visitors. These ordeals were painful. To appear motherly, my mother occasionally laid her hand on my curly head. Ah! those fingers scintillating with diamonds and precious stones; those hard bracelets penetrating into my delicate skin! How I loathed that hand on my head—it was such a hard hand.” “Poor Lionel, but you do not say how your little sister died.” “The least said about it the better. There are noble griefs, and there are ugly sorrows: mine was of the latter order. When Cicely died, my mother was at a State Ball. She knew the child was hopelessly ill before she went, but a dress had arrived that morning from Paris, and a State Ball is a duty; in fact, all social functions are duties which come before mere human feelings. After so many years, I can still see that gorgeous apparition as she came into the room to speak to the hospital nurse. I did not understand the meaning of it all, but felt awed by the soft murmurs of the nurse, the dim light, and the haughty manner of my mother. Next day the nursery was closed; I was kept in the room of the head nurse to play with my toys, and told severely not to make a noise. I asked for Cicely. The under-housemaid, a good sort of a country girl, took me by the hand and led me into the room where little Cicely was laid out. One bunch of narcissus was lying on her feet; they were the nurse’s last tribute to her little dead patient. And that was all. I realised nothing, I was seven years old. The days that followed were miserable; I missed my playmate and was daily brought down to my mother’s boudoir, to be interviewed by simpering old dowagers who gave me a cold kiss, and waggish young men who shook hands with me and called me “old fellow,” as if I had already entered some crack regiment, or won the Derby. My mother, in her diaphanous black chiffon, distributed cups of tea right and left, while she related in short sentences the end of little Cicely and the brilliancy of the State Ball.” “When I think, Lionel, that you and I were on the eve of repeating that same lamentable story—” “Enough of this horrid past, my beautiful Una; let us forget that it ever existed, and let us think of the present, of you, and of our future.” They had reached Hyde Park Corner. Gwendolen gave a circuitous glance on the scene that surrounded them, and remarked that the Duke of Wellington’s statue had disappeared. “Where has the statue gone to, Lion?” “Oh! Did you not know that it had been removed yesterday? You will never any more see Nelson on his column, Gordon holding his Bible, Napier with his gilded spurs, nor Canning, Disraeli, and so many others, on their pedestals—they have all been taken to South Kensington, for the present. The idea is to build a new hall outside London for all these relics of the past, where they may be viewed by the very few who are anxious to study the curios of an old worn-out civilisation. The Committee has come to the conclusion that our newly-revealed sense of modesty must inevitably be shocked by these indecorous memorials to our great men; and it has decided that the education of the masses must at once begin by the removal of objects more fit for a chamber of horrors than for the contemplation of pure-minded citizens.” “But what will they put on the pedestals and columns?” “I heard the curator of Walsingham House say last evening that he meant to suggest a new departure in monument erection. Instead of paying a tribute to the man who, as a soldier, a poet, or a statesman, had but done his duty during his short visit to this planet, he advised that monuments should be raised to abstract principles, and enjoined the Committee to start by replacing the equestrian Duke of Wellington with the detruncated statue of Victory in the Elgin Marbles collection. Gwen, we are at your door, and we must part. When shall I see you again, dearest?” “To-morrow in the Kensington Gardens, under the shady trees, we shall be able to talk of all the problems we must solve together.” “Good-night, my Una. How lovely you are, thus caressed by the soft rays of the moon. Have I never gazed into a woman’s face before, that I seem to see your eyes for the first time? I have now discovered the secret of inward beauty, and wherever you are, however surrounded you may be, I shall know you, for I have seen your soul. My whole life will be too short in which to express my rapturous admiration. Forgive me for the past years of blindness.” “Lion, it is I who have to beg your forgiveness. I never knew you—I never knew my own self. Was it our fault after all? It had never been our lot to meet as two free citizens of the Universe; but, like two miserable slaves of Society, we were trained to trick each other, and to play a blasphemous parody of love, while malice all the time was master of our fettered beings.” The door of No. 110 opened and closed on the vision of purity. Lionel walked up Park Lane and soon reached his home; he entered the library, and once more looked up at his father’s portrait. Was it fancy? But he thought he saw the face smile superciliously, and heard these cold words fall from the thin lips: “My poor fellow, beware of sentimentality. As I told you, I preferred being killed to being bored.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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