Name and Fame: A Novel

by Adeline Sergeant

Walcott was livid with rage.

"The cur!" he cried; "the lying hound! He has entirely fabricated the beginning and the end of this paragraph. There is no ground whatever for saying that a case may come into court. There is no 'lady in the case' at all. He has simply put on that tag to make his scrap of gossip worth another half-crown. Is it not abominable, Graham?"

"It is something more than abominable. To my mind this sort of thing is one of the worst scandals of the present day. But I felt sure there was nothing in it, and the few who guess that it refers to you will draw the same conclusion. Don't think any more about it!"

"A lie sticks when it is well told," said Walcott, gloomily. "There are plenty of men who would rather believe it than the uninteresting truth."

But the Grahams, relieved on the point that mainly concerned them, could not see much gravity in the rest of the concoction, and Walcott had scant pity from them. He went home disconsolate, little dreaming of the reception which awaited him there.

He occupied a floor in Montagu Place, Bloomsbury, consisting of three rooms: a drawing-room, a bed-room, and a small study; and, latterly, Mrs. Bundlecombe, whose acquaintance the reader has already made, had used a bed-room at the top of the house.

Alan's mother and Mrs. Bundlecombe had been sisters. They were the daughters of a well-to-do farmer in Essex, and, as will often happen with sisters of the same family, brought up and cared for in a precisely similar way, they had exhibited a marked contrast in intellect, habits of thought, and outward bearing. The one had absorbed the natural refinement of her mother, who had come of an old Huguenot family long ago settled on English soil; the other was moulded in the robust and coarse type of her father. Bessy was by preference the household factotum not to say the drudge of the family, with a turn for puddings, poultry, and the management of servants. Lucy clung to her mother, and books (though both were constant students of The Family Herald), and was nothing if not romantic. Both found some one to love them, and both, as it happened, were married on the same day. Their parents had died within a year of each other, and then the orphaned girls had come to terms with their lovers, and accepted a yoke of which they had previously fought shy. Bessy's husband was a middle-aged bookseller in the neighboring town of Thorley, who had admired her thrifty and homely ways, and had not been deterred by her want of intelligence. Lucy, though her dreams had soared higher, was fairly happy with a schoolmaster from Southampton, whose acquaintance she had made on a holiday at the seaside.

Alan, who was the only offspring of this latter union, had been well brought up, for his father's careful teaching and his mother's gentleness and imagination supplied the complementary touches which are necessary to form the basis of culture. The sisters had not drifted apart after their marriage so much as might have been expected. They had visited each other, and Alan, as he grew up, conceived a strong affection for his uncle at Thorley, who—a childless man himself—gave him delightful books, and showed him others still more delightful, who talked to him on the subjects which chiefly attracted him, and was the first to fire his brain with an ambition to write and be famous. Aunt Bessy was tolerated for her husband's sake, but it was Uncle Samuel who drew the lad to Thorley. In due time Alan began to teach in his father's school, and before he was twenty-one had taken his degree at London University. Then his mother died, and shortly afterwards he was left comparatively alone in the world.

Now, school-keeping had never been a congenial occupation to Alan, whose poetic temperament was chafed by the strict and ungrateful routine of the business. His father had been to the manner born, and things had prospered with him, but Alan by himself would not have been able to achieve a like success. He knew this, and was proud of his incapacity; and he took the first opportunity of handing over the establishment to a successor. The money which he received for the transfer, added to that which his father had left, secured him an income on which it was possible to live, and to travel, and to print a volume of poems. For a short time, at least, he lived as seemed best in his own eyes, and was happy.

When he was in England he still occasionally visited Thorley; and it was thus that Milly Harrington came to know him by sight. Her grandmother did not know the Bundlecombes, but Milly came to the conclusion that Alan was their son, and this was the tale which she had told to Sydney Campion, and which Sydney had repeated to his sister.