The Martyrdom of Madeline

CONTENTS

In this story I have touched, very feebly and inadequately, on one of the greatest and saddest of human problems—as great and sad, certainly, as the problem which forms the central purpose of my ‘Shadow of the Sword.’ What the creed of Peace is to the state, the creed of Purity is to the social community. So long as carnal indulgence is recognised as a masculine prerogative, so long as personal chastity is a supreme factor in the fate of women, but a mere accident in the lives of men, so long as the diabolic ingenuity of a strong sex is tortured to devise legal means for sacrificing a weaker sex—so long, in a word, as our homes and our streets remain what they are—the creed of Purity must remain as forlorn a dream as that other creed of Peace.
One word more with regard to my dramatis persono , none of whom are to be taken for photographs or caricatures of living individuals. In one case I have endeavoured to construct out of the editorial chit-chat of a journal an amusing personality,—not, I think, ungenerously conceived; of the real editor I know absolutely nothing, and I certainly bear him no ill-will, much as I dislike the system of personal journalism which he has created. All the other characters are purely fictitious. Gavrolles and his circle are to be accepted as representatives, not of æstheticism proper, but of the cant of æstheticism—which is quite another thing.


As the two women gazed at one another under the lamplight, one standing and looking down, the other sitting and looking up, you would have said they might have been twin sisters—they looked so wonderfully alike. Both were fair, with pale forget-me-not eyes, and skins delicately clear; both were tall and slight. Nor was there any very noticeable difference in the dress they wore. She who stood erect, with the rain beating down upon her head, wore only, besides her bonnet and dress of black stuff, a shawl wrapt tightly around her; the shawl was rich and valuable, but looked common enough in the dim light. She who sat, with her elbow on her knees and her chin resting in her open palms, wore a shawl too, and a plain stuff dress, sodden with the rain; her bonnet had fallen back, soaking and unheeded, on her shoulders, just held by the sodden strings.