Miranda of the Balcony: A Story

by A. E. W. Mason

He told her perhaps more than he meant to tell. It was an old story, the story of the faithless woman and the man who trusts her, and what comes of it all. The story of Helen and Menelaus, but disfigured into a caricature of its original by the paltriness of the characters and the vulgarity of the incidents. The throb of primitive passion was gone from the story, and therefore all dignity too. Subtle and intricate trivialities of sentiment took the place of passion, and made the episode infinitely mean. Menelaus was an attaché at Paris: Helen lived at Knightsbridge, and the pair of them were engaged to be married. Helen was faithless merely through a cheap vanity, and a cheaper pose of wilfulness, and even so she was faithless merely in a low and despicable way. It was an infidelity of innumerable flirtations. She passed from arm to arm without intermission, and almost allowed those who fondled her to overlap. Yet all the day she talked of her pride, and was conscious of no inconsistency between the vulgarity of her conduct and the high words upon her lips. She practised all the small necessary deceits to conceal her various meetings and appointments, and was unaware of the degradation they involved; for still she talked loudly of her pride. And when Menelaus lifted his hat and wished her good-morning, she only felt that she was deeply aggrieved.

Menelaus, however, was in no better case. He had not the strength to thrust her from his mind, but let his thoughts play sensuously with his recollections, until he declined upon a greater and a greater weakness.

"I went back to Paris," continued Wilbraham. "I had good prospects, but they came to nothing. Even now men going in for Mods. have to get up a book which I once wrote, and as for the service, if I were to tell you my real name, it is just possible that you might have heard it, for I was supposed to have done something quite decent at Zanzibar. Well, I went back to Paris. It's a hard thing, you know, to discover that the woman you have been working for, and in a way succeeding for, isn't worth the nicotine at the bottom of your pipe-bowl. At that time I reckon I would rather have been the wreck I am now, and believed it was all my fault, for, you see, I might then have imagined that if I had done all right, I should have won the desirable woman.... Anyway, after I got back to Paris, a little while after, there was trouble." Wilbraham examined his cane and drew diagrams upon the ground. "The woman blabbed, in a moment of confidence ... to her husband. There was a sort of a scandal.... I had to go. I didn't blame the woman who blabbed; no, Mrs. Warriner, I blamed the first woman, the woman in Knightsbridge. Was I right? I came back to England. I was a second son, and my father slammed the door in my face. Then, Mrs. Warriner, I blamed all women, you--you--you amongst the others, even though I didn't know you." He spoke in a gust of extraordinary violence, and so brought his confidences to an end. "Now your income is--" he resumed, and fetched out his pocket-book again. "I made a note about your estate when I was doing business with Warriner," he said. "The note comes in usefully now."

He found the details of which he was in search, and made a neat little sum at the corner of the leaf, to which Miranda paid no attention whatsoever. The queer inclination towards pity which had moved her to ask for his confidence, had been entirely and finally destroyed by the confidence she had asked for. The story was so utterly sordid; the characters in it so utterly puny. Before he told it he had acquired in her eyes even a sort of dignity, the dignity of a man battered and defeated in a battle wherein his wits were unequally matched against the solid forces of order; but in the telling he had destroyed that impression. Miranda had no feeling now but one of aversion for the wreck of a man at her side. She looked at the Horace, which still lay open on her lap, and the contrast between the fine scholar's handwriting and the stains of the pothouse had no longer any power to touch her. She set the book down on the bench, and stood up.

Wilbraham stopped his calculations, and, with the stump of his pencil in his mouth, looked at her alertly and furtively. She took a step or two towards the parapet of the Alameda. Wilbraham instantly laid his pocket-book on the seat with the pencil to mark the place, and without any noise, stood up. Miranda reached the railings at the edge of the gardens and leaned her arms upon it. The next moment she felt a firm grip upon her elbow. She turned round and saw Wilbraham's face ablaze with passion. "I suspected that," he said fiercely, "when first I saw where you had brought me," and he shook her elbow.

"Suspected what?" exclaimed Miranda, and she drew away to free herself from his grasp. Wilbraham's next movement answered her question. For he slipped between her and the railings with a glance at the precipice below.

"But you shall not do it," he continued. "I was robbed that way once before; I'll take care the robbery is not repeated." He leaned his back against the railings and shook his finger at her.

"Besides, there's no sense in it," and he jerked his head backwards to signify the abysm. "You are crying out before you are hurt. You don't even know how much I want; I shan't ruin you. I made a mistake that way once; I had the best secret conceivable, and ran my man down across two continents. Then I was fool enough to put my hand too deep in his sky, and I suppose he thought--well, he blew his brains out that night, and then was I robbed."

Mrs. Warriner stared at him with a growing horror in her eyes. "You murdered him," she said slowly.

"We won't quarrel over words," said Wilbraham, callously.