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Ebook has 3056 lines and 91357 words, and 62 pages

THE SLANDERERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS o MCMV

Published February, 1905.

TO MY GOOD FRIEND

JAMES MACARTHUR

Contents

THE SLANDERERS

PART I

HAD Zeus Gildersedge been a man susceptible to the more beneficent influences of nature, history might have chronicled him as a man rich in the finer aestheticisms of the soul.

The Hun was ever a Hun, though he stormed through the Vale of Tempe or gazed upon Lombardic lakes, splendid under a cloudless sky. Worthy follower of some commercial Attila was Zeus Gildersedge, a being granite to all nobler truths, impervious, irresponsive, unimpressionable, mute. Orpheus would have abandoned him in despair. A fabulist might have classed him with Lot's wife petrified in the plain beyond Sodom.

Zeus Gildersedge, misanthrope and consumer of opium, maintained a monasticism in his vices and kept the world at bay behind the red-brick wall that bounded his patrimony. Imagine an antique, gabled house perched on a hill overlooking the sea, a house of quaint archaicness, warm of bosom, opulent in roof and the glittering lozenges of its casements, girdled with a belt of cypresses and yews. The place had derived a profuse and negligent picturesqueness from its master's avarice. Roses bloom even for a miser, and Zeus Gildersedge was content to suffer the magnanimity of nature. Ivy festooned the casements; wistaria panoplied the porch; roses, red and white, reared the banners of Junetide on the walls. The garden was a delectable wilderness, a dusky pleasaunce smothered with flowering shrubs that claimed a lusty and superabundant liberty. From the garden green downs dipped southward to black cliffs and an opalescent sea. North, east, and west upland and wooded valley stretched dim and variable as a region of romance.

Gold, opium, tobacco, and claret--these were the genii who watched over Zeus Gildersedge's autumn years. He was mean in a cosmopolitan sense, save in the satisfying of his especial sins. In his youth and prime he had been a brisk swashbuckler in the mercenary wars of commerce. He had lived between the boards of his ledger, had married a wife, and begotten one child. He had buried the one and stood half in awe of the other. Now, at sixty, he lurked like a decapod in his solitary den, and stretched out his lean, hungry tentacles to grip rentals, dividends, and the like into his mercenary maw. A hard, flint-eyed old ragamuffin, tough for all his wine-bibbing, with a soul of leather and a heart of clay, he was never seen abroad save when he trudged five miles down-hill in his green coat and greasy hat to deposit pelf in the bank at Rilchester or to collect the rentals of sundry squalid cottages he owned in that town. You might see him on a Monday morning standing at cottage doors and ciphering solemnly in a dirty, little, blue-leaved ledger. He never gave away a halfpenny. If he favored any one with a letter, he never stamped the envelope. As for charities, he looked on them as the sentimental hobbies of a fond and spendthrift public. There was no parson in Christendom who could have wheedled a donation out of him, pleaded he ever so plausibly.

It would be but a reasonable inference that such a father should possess something peculiar in the way of a child, and Joan Gildersedge might have been apostrophized as the supremest possible contrast to her sire. Under the gray thatch of the one lurked much that was ignoble in the mind--avarice, an ignorant insolence, a coarse and blasphemous infidelity. Zeus Gildersedge personified much that was brutally typical of a British Midas. His daughter, with a strong and innocent perversity of soul, might have given Shakespeare a Virgilia and to civilization a star that could have regenerated a decaying chivalry.

Fortunately for Joan Gildersedge, she had arrived at no candid comprehension of her father's character. He was the only old man experience had as yet apportioned to her, and she could claim no examples to contradict the habitual surliness of age. Zeus Gildersedge's perpetual plaint was that of dire poverty, a protestation that his daughter had come to consider as inevitable as sunrise. True, he was morose, shabby, hard, reticent, and unlovely. Yet these very shortcomings had no air of strangeness for the girl. She had grown up under the shadow of avarice and ethical annihilation, and had come to consider such things among the natural phenomena of nature. She was neither particularly happy nor particularly miserable. None of the common experiences of girlhood had been hers. She had known neither love nor sympathy, friendship nor pleasure, brimming life nor the lack of it. And yet in the May of her girlhood she evidenced the example of a soul evolving within itself, of an individuality bourgeoning spontaneously under the sun, a stately plant starting into purple and red amid ruins and solitude. Unconscious of the inevitable law working in her own being, she followed her fashionless instincts, unknown of others, unknown even of herself.

Picture a low-ceilinged, mullion-windowed room, hung with faded red curtains, carpeted with gray drugget, embellished with sundry oil-paintings of dingy landscapes and impossible rusticities. Four high-backed oak chairs stood stiffly round the heavy mahogany table. A tattered rug thresholded the fireless grate. An escritoire stood against one wall, a melancholy bookcase against another. A cheap French clock on the mantel-piece chided the prodigal hours. On either side Romanesque warriors in bronze straddled impetuous chargers.

Zeus Gildersedge was figuring lazily on the back of a dirty envelope, the cuffs of his gray shirt hanging unbuttoned over his bony wrists. A financial journal lay open on his knees. Now and again he would yawn soundlessly, and sip the glass that held the brown-red Lethe that he loved. As he scribbled, his hands quivered slightly. Hunched in his chair he looked like some sinister troll concocting mischief over his cups.

On a sudden some subtle savor assailed his nostrils, a steaming scent of sacrifice that caused Zeus Gildersedge to straighten alertly in his chair. He sniffed the air with his big, carnivorous nose. The paper, with an expostulatory murmur, slipped from his knees to the floor.

"Onions, is it!"

A more vigorous investigation approved the villany.

"Damn that woman! She's always cooking two vegetables, the glutton!"

He rose and rang the bell, and stood listening to the solitary clangor that came echoing through the silent house. The sordid minutiae of his avaricious household were ever weighing on the man's mind. Zeus Gildersedge could break his heart, or his apology for that organ, over the untimely disappearance of a pound of butter.

A stout wench answered the bell, a loosely ample person, with red cheeks, glossy jet hair, and scintillant brown eyes. Her hair was fringed about a sensual face; she wore a red-flannel blouse, a black skirt, and certain tawdry fripperies that denounced the donor. She was Zeus Gildersedge's only servant, and might indeed have been included with his opium and his claret as an especial luxury selfishly cherished for the sake of avarice.

"What d'yer want?"

There was a familiar and insolent frankness in the voice that seemed to imply that no very abundant respect was wasted between master and servant.

"What are you cooking onions for?"

"To eat, of course."

"Pah! you cook enough for a tavern. What's the use of talking to you of economy. I'll take it out of your wages."

"No, you won't," said the woman by the doorway, pouting out her lips. "I'm not here to starve."

Zeus Gildersedge turned his back on her.

"Bring in supper," he snarled.

"You're crusty to-night, master."

"Don't answer me, woman. Bring in supper."

"Miss Joan ain't in."

"Bring in supper."

"Taters and sheeps' ribs. I hope that'll suit. Wouldn't ruin a pauper. Have any cheese?"

"Bread's enough for a Christian."

"It's stale; but you'll eat less. Ain't we economic!"

Zeus Gildersedge returned to his chair and his paper, muttering under his breath. He had not been seated five minutes when a young girl entered the room, an old sun-hat trimmed with red roses in one hand, a basket of primroses in the other. She set the basket on the table and seated herself down in a window-seat with the air of one who has learned the wisdom of self-repression in her intercourse with her father. Joan Gildersedge could read the man's humor as fairly as she could decipher the face of the sky. His prevailing mood in her presence was gray, northerly, and cheerless. She knew that it was useless to approach him when the cloud of avaricious calculation hung low over his brain.

Considered feature by feature, Joan Gildersedge escaped the vulgar charge of being declared pretty. Considered as an individual creation, as a woman, she possessed a charm that was inevitable and unique. She had great, gray eyes, a large chin, a clear, satiny complexion, and delicate coloring. Her hair was abundant, glossed with a golden tinge, drawn back loosely and knotted low upon her neck. Her neck, indeed, was the most lovely portion of her figure--long, graceful, with a perfect sweep from her shoulders, smooth, stately as a gracious tower. She had long limbs, a big yet somewhat bony frame, a bosom girlish and hollowed under the shoulders. There was a rich and generous amplitude about her face and figure that made her appear womanly beyond her years.

Zeus Gildersedge thrust the envelope on which he had been scribbling into his breast coat-pocket. He turned and looked at the girl over his shoulder with a blank apathy that was scarcely parental. Joan Gildersedge had always been an inexplicable phenomenon to her father. Strangely enough, he stood in certain awe of her, having conceived against his will a species of wintry respect for the strong and mysterious magic of her youth. Her simple serenity baffled his Philistian prejudices. Her very obedience seemed the calm wisdom of one who humors the moods of a comrade deserving more of pity than contempt. Probably Zeus Gildersedge guessed shrewdly in his heart that he had begotten a being whose star dwarfed his petty, trafficking, miserable world. The girl's soulful superiority often angered Zeus Gildersedge, exaggerating his rough and rugged mannerisms towards his child.

"You're late," was his salutation.

For answer she lifted her basket of golden blooms, like a child who offers an oblation to some god.

"But I have gathered all these flowers."

Zeus Gildersedge sniffed and rustled the pages of his paper. Nothing was beautiful to him that did not proffer profitable barter.

"Can't feed on primroses. You've got a new dress on--eh?"

"Not very new, father."

"The more reason you should be careful. My bills for finery are big enough in the year. I can do with a suit of clothes for three years; a woman grumbles if she has only three dresses in twelve months. Superlative vanity. Pity we are not born with fur."

The girl laughed, a laugh devoid of malice or of self-justification. She took the flowers from her basket and began to bind them into posies, her large hands looking very white in the light of the sun. She was unvexed by such economical tirades, having grown as accustomed to her father's grumblings as to the growling of the sea.

"You ought to be grateful for having only one daughter," she said, "since I am such a burden."

"I am," retorted the man, surlily, burying his face behind the pages of finance.

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