The Neglected Authors - Women Born 1850 - 1899

The Neglected Authors - Women Born 1850 - 1899

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society.

In literature the ambition is much narrower.  In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published.  And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading.  Obviously for most of humanity’s time people couldn’t read and texts couldn’t be published in any great number.

In the 15th Century Gutenberg’s printing press began the revolution to address the second and by the 19th century had gathered pace with startling speed and mass distribution.  Education for the many was brought in to help people understand more of their world and, with new skills, how to have a better place within it.  Now, if the powers that owned the presses and means of distribution agreed an audience would now be able to avail themselves of your ideas, your printed words.

All too often the talents of women have been scorned, mocked and laughed at.  In reality that was more usually by those who’s own talents were hardly fit to even grace their shadows.  

But society in general still connived and set women to one side in almost everything that men considered their rightful territory.  And literature was one such territory.  Remarkably resilient as well as talented these women strove to be published, to show themselves as equals.  The results more often than not proved that they were. 

Sadly, in the thirst for the new, the recent and the past fell from sight, relegated to dark corners and dusty shelves.  

But the printed word is rarely without someone, somewhere busying themselves through piles of papers and books rediscovering what a good story is, whatever its age.

In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents whose time has now come again.

Index of Contents

The Striding Place by Gertrude Atherton

The Bishop of Hell by Marjorie Bowen

Clairvoyance by D K Broster

Let Loose by Mary Cholmondeley

Extradited by Isabella Valancy Crawford

The Death Mask by Ella D'Arcy

They Don't Wear Labels by E M Delafield

The Shadows on the Wall by Mary E Wilkins Freeman

In the Séance Room by Lettice Galbraith

White Bread by Zona Gale

The Difference by Ellen Glasgow

The Preposterous Motive by Susan Glaspell

A Spirit Elopement by Clotilde Graves

The Voice of God by Winifred Holtby

Talma Gordon by Pauline E Hopkins

The Operation by Violet Hunt

Diary of a Plain Girl by Amy Levy

Passed by Charlotte Mew

A Redeeming Sacrifice by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Luz by Elinor Mordaunt

Lucy Wren by Ada Radford

A Dream of Wild Bees by Olive Schreiner

All Souls Eve by Dora Sigerson Shorter

Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched by May Sinclair

Far Above Rubies by Netta Syrett

The Octoroon's Revenge by Ruth D Todd

Blessed Are the Meek by Mary Webb

The Oculist by Catherine Wells

Why I Live at the PO by Eudora Welty

The Striding Place by Gertrude Atherton

Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse shooting. To stand propped against a sod fence while his host's workmen routed up the birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth the killing. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his estates in the South. The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills.

It had been a bad day. A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it fairly sprang beneath the feet. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been small. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of a new-minded debutante who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above them.

But it was no one of these things that sat on Weigall's mind as, when the other men went up to bed, he let himself out of the castle and sauntered down to the river. His intimate friend, the companion of his boyhood, the chum of his college days, his fellow-traveller in many lands, the man for whom he possessed stronger affection than for all men, had mysteriously disappeared two days ago, and his track might have sprung to the upper air for all trace he had left behind him. He had been a guest on the adjoining estate during the past week, shooting with the fervor of the true sportsman, making love in the intervals to Adeline Cavan, and apparently in the best of spirits. As far as was known there was nothing to lower his mental mercury, for his rent-roll was a large one, Miss Cavan blushed whenever he looked at her, and, being one of the best shots in England, he was never happier than in August. The suicide theory was preposterous, all agreed, and there was as little reason to believe him murdered. Nevertheless, he had walked out of March Abbey two nights ago without hat or overcoat, and had not been seen since.

The country was being patrolled night and day. A hundred keepers and workmen were beating the woods and poking the bogs on the moors, but as yet not so much as a handkerchief had been found.

Weigall did not believe for a moment that Wyatt Gifford was dead, and although it was impossible not to be affected by the general uneasiness, he was disposed to be more angry than frightened. At Cambridge Gifford had been an incorrigible practical joker, and by no means had outgrown the habit; it would be like him to cut across the country in his evening clothes, board a cattle-train, and amuse himself touching up the picture of the sensation in West Riding.

However, Weigall's affection for his friend was too deep to companion with tranquillity in the present state of doubt, and, instead of going to bed early with the other men, he determined to walk until ready for sleep. He went down to the river and followed the path through the woods. There was no moon, but the stars sprinkled their cold light upon the pretty belt of water flowing placidly past wood and ruin, between green masses of overhanging rocks or sloping banks tangled with tree and shrub, leaping occasionally over stones with the harsh notes of an angry scold, to recover its equanimity the moment the way was clear again.

It was very dark in the depths where Weigall trod. He smiled as he recalled a remark of Gifford's: "An English wood is like a good many other things in life—very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken.

Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be—what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days."

Weigall strolled along, smoking, and thinking of his friend, his pranks—many of which had done more credit to his imagination than this—and recalling conversations that had lasted the night through. Just before the end of the London season they had walked the streets one hot night after a party, discussing the various theories of the soul's destiny. That afternoon they had met at the coffin of a college friend whose mind had been a blank for the past three years. Some months previously they had called at the asylum to see him. His expression had been senile, his face imprinted with the record of debauchery. In death the face was placid, intelligent, without ignoble lineation—the face of the man they had known at college. Weigall and Gifford had had no time to comment there, and the afternoon and evening were full; but, coming forth from the house of festivity together, they had reverted almost at once to the topic.

I cherish the theory, Gifford had said, that the soul sometimes lingers in the body after death. During madness, of course, it is an impotent prisoner, albeit a conscious one. Fancy its agony, and its horror! What more natural than that, when the life-spark goes out, the tortured soul should take possession of the vacant skull and triumph once more for a few hours while old friends look their last? It has had time to repent while compelled to crouch and behold the result of its work, and it has shrived itself into a state of comparative purity. If I had my way, I should stay inside my bones until the coffin had gone into its niche, that I might obviate for my poor old comrade the tragic impersonality of death. And I should like to see justice done to it, as it were—to see it lowered among its ancestors with the ceremony and solemnity that are its due. I am afraid that if I dissevered myself too quickly, I should yield to curiosity and hasten to investigate the mysteries of space.

You believe in the soul as an independent entity, then—that it and the vital principle are not one and the same?

Absolutely. The body and soul are twins, life comrades—sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, but always loyal in the last instance. Some day, when I am tired of the world, I shall go to India and become a mahatma, solely for the pleasure of receiving proof during life of this independent relationship.

Suppose you were not sealed up properly, and returned after one of your astral flights to find your earthly part unfit for habitation? It is an experiment I don't think I should care to try, unless even juggling with soul and flesh had palled.

That would not be an uninteresting predicament. I should rather enjoy experimenting with broken machinery.

The high wild roar of water smote suddenly upon Weigall's ear and checked his memories. He left the wood and walked out on the huge slippery stones which nearly close the River Wharfe at this point, and watched the waters boil down into the narrow pass with their furious untiring energy. The black quiet of the woods rose high on either side. The stars seemed colder and whiter just above. On either hand the perspective of the river might have run into a rayless cavern. There was no lonelier spot in England, nor one which had the right to claim so many ghosts, if ghosts there were.

Weigall was not a coward, but he recalled uncomfortably the tales of those that had been done to death in the Strid:

(Normal and as a whisper)

"This striding place is called the 'Strid,'

A name which it took of yore;

A thousand years hath it borne the name,

And it shall a thousand more."

Wordsworth's Boy of Egremond had been disposed of by the practical Whitaker; but countless others, more venturesome than wise, had gone down into that narrow boiling course, never to appear in the still pool a few yards beyond. Below the great rocks which form the walls of the Strid was believed to be a natural vault, on to whose shelves the dead were drawn. The spot had an ugly fascination. Weigall stood, visioning skeletons, uncoffined and green, the home of the eyeless things which had devoured all that had covered and filled that rattling symbol of man's mortality; then fell to wondering if any one had attempted to leap the Strid of late. It was covered with slime; he had never seen it look so treacherous.

He shuddered and turned away, impelled, despite his manhood, to flee the spot. As he did so, something tossing in the foam below the fall—something as white, yet independent of it—caught his eye and arrested his step. Then he saw that it was describing a contrary motion to the rushing water—an upward backward motion. Weigall stood rigid, breathless; he fancied he heard the crackling of his hair. Was that a hand? It thrust itself still higher above the boiling foam, turned sidewise, and four frantic fingers were distinctly visible against the black rock beyond.

Weigall's superstitious terror left him. A man was there, struggling to free himself from the suction beneath the Strid, swept down, doubtless, but a moment before his arrival, perhaps as he stood with his back to the current.

He stepped as close to the edge as he dared. The hand doubled as if in imprecation, shaking savagely in the face of that force which leaves its creatures to immutable law; then spread wide again, clutching, expanding, crying for help as audibly as the human voice.

Weigall dashed to the nearest tree, dragged and twisted off a branch with his strong arms, and returned as swiftly to the Strid. The hand was in the same place, still gesticulating as wildly; the body was undoubtedly caught in the rocks below, perhaps already half-way along one of those hideous shelves. Weigall let himself down upon a lower rock, braced his shoulder against the mass beside him, then, leaning out over the water, thrust the branch into the hand. The fingers clutched it convulsively. Weigall tugged powerfully, his own feet dragged perilously near the edge. For a moment he produced no impression, then an arm shot above the waters.

The blood sprang to Weigall's head; he was choked with the impression that the Strid had him in her roaring hold, and he saw nothing. Then the mist cleared. The hand and arm were nearer, although the rest of the body was still concealed by the foam. Weigall peered out with distended eyes. The meagre light revealed in the cuffs links of a peculiar device. The fingers clutching the branch were as familiar.

Weigall forgot the slippery stones, the terrible death if he stepped too far. He pulled with passionate will and muscle. Memories flung themselves into the hot light of his brain, trooping rapidly upon each other's heels, as in the thought of the drowning. Most of the pleasures of his life, good and bad, were identified in some way with this friend. Scenes of college days, of travel, where they had deliberately sought adventure and stood between one another and death upon more occasions than one, of hours of delightful companionship among the treasures of art, and others in the pursuit of pleasure, flashed like the changing particles of a kaleidoscope. Weigall had loved several women; but he would have flouted in these moments the thought that he had ever loved any woman as he loved Wyatt Gifford. There were so many charming women in the world, and in the thirty-two years of his life he had never known another man to whom he had cared to give his intimate friendship.

He threw himself on his face. His wrists were cracking, the skin was torn from his hands. The fingers still gripped the stick. There was life in them yet.

Suddenly something gave way. The hand swung about, tearing the branch from Weigall's grasp. The body had been liberated and flung outward, though still submerged by the foam and spray.

Weigall scrambled to his feet and sprang along the rocks, knowing that the danger from suction was over and that Gifford must be carried straight to the quiet pool. Gifford was a fish in the water and could live under it longer than most men. If he survived this, it would not be the first time that his pluck and science had saved him from drowning.

Weigall reached the pool. A man in his evening clothes floated on it, his face turned towards a projecting rock over which his arm had fallen, upholding the body. The hand that had held the branch hung limply over the rock, its white reflection visible in the black water. Weigall plunged into the shallow pool, lifted Gifford in his arms and returned to the bank. He laid the body down and threw off his coat that he might be the freer to practise the methods of resuscitation. He was glad of the moment's respite. The valiant life in the man might have been exhausted in that last struggle. He had not dared to look at his face, to put his ear to the heart. The hesitation lasted but a moment. There was no time to lose.

He turned to his prostrate friend. As he did so, something strange and disagreeable smote his senses. For a half-moment he did not appreciate its nature. Then his teeth cracked together, his feet, his outstretched arms pointed towards the woods. But he sprang to the side of the man and bent down and peered into his face. There was no face.

The Bishop of Hell by Marjorie Bowen

England, 1790. This is the most awful story that I know; I feel constrained to write down the facts as they ever abide with me, praying, as I do so, a merciful God to pardon my small share therein.

God have mercy on us all!

In the hope, vain though I feel it to be, that when I have written down this tale it may cease to haunt me, I here begin.

It was twenty years ago, and never since, day nor night, have I had any respite from the thought of this story, through which you can hear the drums of Hell beat loudly and yet which has an awful beauty.

God have mercy on us all!

Hector Greatrix was my friend, yet to say friend is to profane a noble word; rather was he my counsellor, companion, and prop in all things evil.

His reputation was hideous even among the rakehelly crowd who flattered and followed him; he went lengths from which others shrank, and his excesses, his impiety, his boldness terrified even those hardened in wicked ways.

And what added a deeper edge of horror to his conduct was that he had been an ordained clergyman.

Younger son of a younger son, his father had placed him in the Church in the hope of rapid preferment, for the Greatrix were a highly placed family and the great Earl of Culvers was the head of it; but the scandal of young Hector's life was such that even in those days he was unfrocked. His intimates, in the clubs and gambling dens, called him, in bitter derision, Bishop of Hell.

I write of the year 1770, when this tale begins.

Hector Greatrix was then in the height of his fame and fashion. No-one could deny him certain splendour; he was literally in physical height head and shoulders above his companions, and mentally also; his wit, his invention, his daring knew no bounds, but all these qualities were turned to evil. He was at this time about thirty years of age, of a magnificent figure, so graceful that his strength was hardly noticeable, tawny haired and tawny eyed, with features as yet unblemished from his debaucheries, the most elegant of hands and feet, the most exquisite taste in dress, and the most engaging of manners. There was not one honourable man nor respected woman among his acquaintances and all his intimates were villains; I do not except myself.

There was, however, one exception. Colonel Bulkeley, his cousin on the female side, had helped him by his countenance and by money. Why, I never understood, because William Bulkeley was the most austere, upright, and punctilious of men, of great wealth, of exceptional position, and of the most distinguished career.

I think now, as I thought then, that it was quite impossible for Colonel Bulkeley to realise what Hector Greatrix really was, or the set to which he belonged. The villain could be most plausible, and his cousin must have believed him to be wild, unfortunate, and blameable, but in no way vile or dishonoured.

In sum, Colonel Bulkeley effectually played the mediator between Greatrix and the chief of the family, Lord Culvers, who, no anchorite himself, was not ill-disposed towards his handsome and seductive nephew; but then his lordship, who was much disabled by gout, seldom left Greatrix Park and knew little of London society, so that he was by no means aware of his nephew's reputation.

I, as one of the most reputable of his disreputable friends, being, as I can truly say, more wild and young than vicious, was chosen to go with Hector to Greatrix Park when the old earl asked his company, and so I was able to see at close quarters how this charming knave pulled the wool over the eyes of his two kinsmen.

The end of the comedy was an allowance for Greatrix, a handsome subsidy from the earl most generously supplemented by a few hundreds more from the wealth of Colonel Bulkeley.

Greatrix was to study the law and live in chambers—suitable to his rank; he had no chance of accession to the family honours of the earl, whose heir, a dull, sickly youth enough, had lately married a blooming young woman of robust constitution, who had provided him with a couple of boys. So, Greatrix, thanks to Colonel Bulkeley, had done better than the most sanguine might have hoped. And he seemed more moved thereby than I had thought possible.

'Bulkeley has done me a good turn,' he swore, 'and damme if I'll ever do him a bad one.'

As for his allowance and the study of the law, he laughed at these things; what he really valued was the countenance of these two great, wealthy gentlemen.

'This visit will help my credit in London,' he declared. 'It is good for a couple of years' debt.'

'And what when two years are up and your credit and the patience of your relatives are alike exhausted?'

'Who am I,' smiled Greatrix, 'to think two years ahead?'

I think it was impossible for him to conceive of disaster or even common misfortune. His object gained, he was impatient to return to town; a woman with red hair was waiting for him. He had a curious and persistent passion for women with that bright shade of auburn, like burnt gold.

Colonel Bulkeley pressed us to stay a night with him on our way to town, and Greatrix, with an inner curse, for he wanted to be free of this formal, austere man, consented with a winning courtesy.

Moil Place was in Kent, quite near London, a commodious and elegant residence presided over by Mrs Bulkeley, who was some several years younger than her husband.

This type of woman was unknown to either Greatrix or myself. I have had no sisters and could not recall the character or the lineaments of my mother; Greatrix had two sisters, but they were town ladies of smirched reputation, and his mother had been a passionate, reckless, uncommon woman.

To both of us Mrs Bulkeley appeared flat, childish, almost imbecile, almost incredible. She had been married direct from a Clapham boarding school and had there received several tokens (as the doting husband let slip) for deportment and good conduct.

It was June, and she wore a muslin gown with a wide blue silk sash and a wide straw hat tied under the chin with another ribbon of the same hue. She lisped a little and her small face was clearly and definitely coloured like a china ornament; she was, in fact, like the puppets children dress up and play with; then, when she had gone into the house and was pouring tea behind the Bulkeley silver—pieces that looked larger than herself—she suddenly took off her hat and showed a head overflowing with auburn curls, long, glossy, almost vermilion, yet soft and like burnt gold, all knotted up on the crown of her head.

With this revelation of her hair you saw her beauty—the golden eyes with blonde lashes, the features of such an exquisite delicacy, the pearly shades on throat and neck, the delicious carmine of faint carnation.

I did not care to look at Greatrix, and yet I felt that I need not have suffered this embarrassment.

Colonel Bulkeley was the one man in the world for whom Greatrix had expressed any respect or consideration and the lady obviously adored her husband. I was both amused and surprised to observe the manifestations of sentimental affection between them. There was one child too, a little doll in white lace just out of the cradle; what fondness Colonel Bulkeley could spare from his wife was devoted to the infant.

I was cloyed and thankful when we had taken our seats for town. Greatrix, after the effort of the last few days, was in a surly mood. 'I have never passed a couple of days so tiresome,' he said.

And I, always minded to jeer at him when I could, replied: 'You have never seen a woman so beyond your reach, Hector. She never looked at you, I do believe.'

He laughed indifferently. 'Alicia Bulkeley is ready to the hand of any man who likes to reach out for her.'

What was yet good in me was shocked by this insult to our hostess, a woman who, commonplace and childish perhaps, had yet seemed to me to convey a sweet purity, a gentle fidelity, and an adoring affection beyond all reproach.

'She is in love with her husband,' I declared.

'The more reason she can be in love with another—'tis your passionately attached wives who fall the easiest victims; that little creature is amorous as a lovebird. Take Bulkeley away for a month or so and she'd flutter into any arms held out—'

'By God, Hector,' I swore, 'if you can't believe in any nobility or decency, don't defame those qualities. Your words stick in my throat. These people have exerted themselves in kindness towards you. Mrs Bulkeley is silly, maybe, but a gentlewoman deserving of respect.'

'Since when have you turned Puritan?' he asked coldly.

I was not affected by his sneers; I felt a certain definite repulsion against him, and from that day I saw less of him and applied myself with some diligence to my studies.

We each of us had rooms in Paper Buildings, and the more I heard of Hector Greatrix the more I withdrew myself from his companionship. Two of his boon fellows shot themselves; the daughter of his laundress was found hanged; a married woman of his acquaintance was taken out of a Hampstead pond one winter morning. His name was associated, secretly and sombrely, with all these tragedies.

Some rumours of these matters must have reached the earl in his lofty retirement, for I heard from the associates of Greatrix who still continued to be mine that there had been a summons to Greatrix Park, quarrels, and the employment once more of Colonel Bulkeley as Mediator.

I had seen little of the Bulkeleys; their severe and yet sentimental life, the chaste simplicity of their connubial bliss did not greatly attract me. I had been asked again to Moil Place and had needed all my fortitude to control my yawns. Mrs Bulkeley had now another infant at her breast and was more than ever infatuated with her husband.

Another six months and this idyllic family was rudely disturbed: Colonel Bulkeley's regiment was ordered to India for three years and he was forced to leave abruptly his wife and children he so tenderly loved.

That winter, to my surprise, I met Mrs Bulkeley in a London ballroom; it was only a few months since her husband had sailed and I imagined her consoling herself with her babies at Moil Place. When I spoke to her she seemed shy and confused; I learned that she had 'moped' in the country, that the doctor had ordered a change, and that these insufferable years of waiting would seem shorter amid the distractions of society. She was staying with a married brother at St. James's, and I could not doubt that she was well protected both by her own heart, her position, her relatives, her children; yet when I saw her dancing with Hector Greatrix I did not care to watch.

Needless to follow the course of an experienced and heartless seducer; suffice it to say that Greatrix was soon talked of in connection with Mrs Bulkeley, and, unattainable as I believed her to be, I could not forbear an appeal to her pursuer.

I found him, by rare luck, in his chambers.

'For God's sake, Hector,' I conjured him, 'stop your attentions to Mrs Bulkeley; even though it is impossible for you to destroy her peace of mind, you may blight her reputation.'

'What is this to me?' he asked coldly. 'Did I not tell you she would come at my whistle?'

I urged him to forbear. 'Never before have you compromised a woman of her position. Consider what it will mean to you—the fury of your uncle and of her husband, the scandal that will put you out of society—out of England.'

'And there,' he interrupted, 'I am likely to go in any case. I can keep the duns quiet no longer and my lord will be bled no more.'

I told him I hoped he would go before Mrs Bulkeley's good name was smirched by his detestable attentions and I reminded him solemnly of his obligations towards Colonel Bulkeley. He had no answer for me, and soon after I observed with relief that Mr Lambert, Alicia Bulkeley's brother, had taken alarm and that she was being kept from any opportunity of meeting Greatrix.

Yet what availed this?

Hector Greatrix, having spun his credit to the utmost and within a few hours of the Fleet Prison for debt, fled to the Continent and Alicia Bulkeley went with him.

Though I was never squeamish in these affairs, I will confess that this completely sickened me—the man was so vile, the woman so infantile, so pure, so attached to her husband.

The scandal was hideous. The earl cut Hector off with a curse; the Lamberts adopted the abandoned children; and as soon as they had news of Alicia, sent her a small allowance that was probably the main support of the wretched couple. This money was sent care of a bank in Genoa, but no-one knew where Mrs Bulkeley and her lover really were living.

Through the compassion of His Royal Highness, who had the chief command in India, Colonel Bulkeley was allowed to return to England on the receipt of the awful news and arrived in London something less than two years since he had sailed.

He immediately resigned his commission and returned with his children to Moll Place.

Declaring that he had no intention of following the fugitives, he said simply that if Greatrix ever returned to England one of the two would, in a few days, be dead; and Mr Lambert, with his next remittance, reported this message, advising his unfortunate sister and her paramour to keep clear of their native country for fear of further scandal and horror.

I avoided the possible chance of meeting Colonel Bulkeley. I had no desire to see this broken and outraged man, whose career, that had promised so splendidly, was broken in the middle and for whom life seemed to hold nothing but bitterness and humiliation. This, it might seem, should be the end of the story; it indeed appeared that nothing further could happen, either to the outcasts in their exile or to the betrayed husband, to alter the position of either or in any way bring them together again.

But who would have guessed at the turn Fate had in store?

Colonel Bulkeley had not been home much more than another two years when a severe epidemic of smallpox broke out in England; among the first victims were the wife and children of Lord Culvers; the son by his first marriage, always delicate, had lately died of a decline; and the old earl, then over seventy years of age, did not long endure the shock, but sank under the weight of his bereavement a few days after the funeral of his youngest child.

The estates and the money were both entailed, every portion of property having been strictly tied up by a preceding earl, and Hector Greatrix was now Earl of Culvers and one of the wealthiest noblemen in England.

Lord Culvers was summoned to London by his lawyers, and on the same day Colonel Bulkeley came up from Moil Place and took a house in Dover Street, Mayfair, not far from his lordship's town mansion, Culver House.

Hector came as far as Paris and there stopped. He still had Mrs Bulkeley with him; not, as I supposed, from any remnants of affection, but because of her allowance, which was till now his sole means of support. I winced to think what Alicia Bulkeley must be like now.

There had never been any talk of a divorce, but now people began to ask why Colonel Bulkeley did not permit his wife to marry her lover; they were people who did not know Hector.

I received, unexpectedly, a summons from my lord to attend him in Paris; he had not too many reputable acquaintances then, and I had become a respectable enough citizen while he was sliding down to pandemonium. Therefore, I supposed, this dubious honour.

I went, as one will, partly out of curiosity, partly out of complacence, and partly out of a faint pity for Alicia Bulkeley.

He had, of course, handled plenty of money already, and upset as the city still was, I found them elegantly installed in a hôtel meublé that had only lately become national property.

Hector was sumptuous to behold and cordial enough in his wild way; he had changed for the worse—the first bloom of his beauty had gone, the first fineness of his manners; but he was handsome enough, God help him.

She was with him.

I learnt afterwards that she had had and lost in the feverish heat of Italy three children, and never had she been without another woman sharing her lover's favours; often these lived under the same roof with her. She had known, I think, most of the humiliations possible to a refined woman who lives with a vile, brutal man; there could have been little of horror and squalor that she had not seen, nay, been in the midst of...

I could hardly keep curiosity from my eyes—this was the doll of Moil Place, with her lisp, her muslin, her babies.

She was, and this is perhaps the most horrible thing, much more beautiful, rich, opulent in line now, with a full bosom and flowing curves of thighs and shoulders, taller (she had been but eighteen), clever at dressing, clever of speech; gay, abandoned, and intolerably wretched. Her tone was one of bravado, but the look in her eyes was that of a whipped dog who creeps away from the lash.

As soon as we were alone she was down on her knees to me with a movement so passionately sudden that I could in no way prevent it—on her knees, Mrs Bulkeley of Moil Place!

'Tell me,' she implored, 'will not William divorce me? Surely you have some message from him?'

I told her, none.

She began to weep. 'If I were free Hector might marry me before he returned to England—that is my only hope.'

'Surely, madam,' said I in pity, 'a vain one?'

But she was not yet free of the illusion women are so slow to lose—that they have always some power over a man who has once loved them or been their lover, and she cherished the desperate hope that her husband might set her free and she regain something of all she had lost under the name of Lady Culvers.

Never was there a more futile and piteous hope even in the brain of a foolish woman. I could not forbear saying to her, when I had induced her to rise from her knees: 'Madam, has not your association with my lord shown you the manner of man he is?'

'Indeed it has,' she answered bitterly, 'yet surely he could not, in these changed circumstances, abandon me—'

So she clung to the protection of that honour she had herself discarded, and a panic terror showed in her eyes as she added that she had now nothing with which to keep him—it had always been the money that had held him; the money the Lamberts sent, and, Heaven avert its face, other money, presents from Italian lovers of hers whom he had forced on her; she told me, with a wildness that made me fear for her reason, that she had paid for her last child's funeral by such means.

'And yet, madam,' I shuddered, 'you wish to continue your association with such a monster? Indeed, I wonder that you have not already left him, if only for the protection of another man.'

As she was silent, I added: 'Is it possible that you love him?'

She replied: 'No, I have never loved any but William and my dear, dear children.'

But I doubt if she knew what love was, and I think that for months she had known no emotion save fear.

Seeking to abate her misery I asked her what she could dread worse than had yet befallen her.

'There's Hell,' she said.

'I should think,' I replied, 'that Hell is where my lord is.'

But no; to her, still at heart a religious, respectable English gentlewoman, anything was preferable to the life of open shame before her if my lord forsook her; she thought, in her narrow, ignorant mind, that if she could marry her lover her fault would be condoned; and I knew that in the eyes of many it would be.

I advised her that she could go into retreat somewhere with the money that the Lamberts allowed her, but she shook her head with a feeble laugh; she knew, she said with a dreadful accent, her own weakness, and she saw herself, once cast off by my lord, sinking to the lowest depths of degradation, till she reached Bridewell or a foreign lazar house.

And I could see this too. I promised to speak to my lord, but naturally with little hope; but the next day when I saw him, sitting over his breakfast playing with his dogs, he gave me no opening, for he plunged into his own affairs.

'Look 'ee here, Jack,' he said, 'I was too drunk yesterday to talk business and when I came back from the opera you'd gone. But this is the matter I've sent for you for—has Bulkeley seen reason? As I've no news, I take it he has gone to his prayers and his pumpkins at Moil Place and will give no trouble.'

'No,' I said, 'Colonel Bulkeley came up to London as soon as he heard of your fortune, and has taken lodgings in Dover Street—'tis said that he keeps a watch posted by Culver House for your return.'

My lord's face turned ashy.

'What for?' he cried.

'That he may challenge you the moment that you set foot in England.'

My lord sprang up then; his rage was diabolic, there is no other word for this fury of a fiend outwitted at last; his oaths and blasphemies were detestable, atrocious, as he strode up and down with his dressing-gown flowing open and his locks, damp from last night's debauch, seeming to rise on his head.

'I never heard,' I said, wincing, 'that you were a coward, Hector, but it seems you are.'

'Coward!' he yelled. 'When I eloped with Bulkeley's wife I was a ruined man without a prospect in the world—did I think I'd ever want to return to England with the title and the money?'

He had been, in fact, exquisitely caught, but I could feel no spark of compassion for him.

'You'll have to meet the man,' I told him, not looking at his distorted face.

'I'll not. Bulkeley is a damned good shot. Do you think I want to go out when I've suddenly got everything to my hand?'

I could guess that he did not; to him the position, the money, meant the opening of Paradise. He would, no doubt, have a good life—fine flatterers, fine women, all that wealth could buy in London would be his; nay, there would be plenty who would receive him in the finest society of the town and not scruple to offer him their daughters in honourable matrimony; the hounded exile would be the great lord and at last able to get full value for his rank, his beauty, his audacity, his fascination.

'I stay in Paris,' he cried. 'People will come over to me here. I'll cheat the man that way. Paris is as well as London if you have money.'

'It were wiser, perhaps,' I said with disgust. 'But no-one will endure a man who is an avowed coward, my lord; you'll have to keep the company you've been used to lately if you stay out of England. People will know why—they're beginning to say already that you linger. I for one,' and I rose, 'would turn my back on you.'

'Blast your impudence, Jack,' he whispered. 'What is this tone to me?'

'You're a peer of England. Culvers is a great name; it'll cover much, but not cowardice.'

'Damn that word. I don't want to die—that's reasonable.'

'Yes; if I were you, my lord, I should not want to die.'

'Bah, you're thinking of my bishopric. Hell! As if I believed in Hell. There's nothing, not even Hell, Jack—one goes out like a snuffed candle—just blackness, blackness, nothingness, nothingness.'

The look on his face as he said this was one of such awful despair that I thought this was a moment when he might be softened by his own terrors.

'I can see one possible way out. Hector, if you were to let Colonel Bulkeley know that if he divorced his wife you would marry her—perhaps for her sake, he would forgo his revenge.'

He laughed in my face.

'The woman's been the harlot of half the rogues in Italy.'

I stopped him. 'Don't talk of that—even your corroded heart might blench there. Marry her, if you can, for your soul's sake and hers.'

His hideous pride was greater than his fear.

'A kept woman,' he mocked. 'My God, I'm Culvers now.'

'Remember it,'