Despised and rejected of men. The flush darkened on the young man’s cheek as he flung back his head with a rebellious and angry glance at the river’s northern bank, where the shining walls and towers of the city of Ormuzd seemed to overhang the gulf—the glance which an exile gives at the city which has driven him forth.
He had fled to the spot, stunned by one of those buffets which life is ever waiting to deal to those who have not learnt their lesson aright. And his ears still smarted with the scream of the newsboys who were proclaiming in every street that Lord Alistair Stuart had failed.
In London men like Alistair Stuart fail every day, and go under, leaving scarcely a ripple on the smooth surface of a society which hastens to forget all disagreeable things. But Lord Alistair’s catastrophe had been able to eclipse for one night the comedy of politics and the tragedy of war. For he happened to be one of the few in whom the world is interested, and when the world is interested in a man it will not suffer him to go down to sheol in peace. Its hisses are the reaction of its cheers, and those who court its notice put their lives to the hazard, like Esther when she went to touch the sceptre of Ahasuerus.
The world knew Alistair Stuart in two characters—as the brother and heir-presumptive of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, and as the lover of Molly Finucane.
To the outer world, for which newspapers are written and formal histories compiled, he was the brother of one of its most important citizens. The Duke of Trent was distinguished not only by his rank, but by his service to the State. By an ironical coincidence the same Gazette which revealed the fact that Lord Alistair Stuart had filed his petition also contained the notification that his brother had kissed hands as Secretary of State. It was impossible that the moralists of the pulpit and the press should overlook the striking example of the idle and industrious apprentice, and the younger brother’s disgrace was deepened by the elder’s triumph.
In that inner world whose newspapers are the boudoirs and the smoking-rooms, and which goes for its history to memoirs and chronicles of the back-stairs, the name of Alistair Stuart had gained celebrity in connection with a personage of whom the pulpit might not know, and the press might not tell.
Molly Finucane had achieved one of those reputations which have given certain women a place in history. In the ancient world she might have had princes to fight for her, and poets to sing her praise. In the modern world she was a figure of evil, regarded with a feeling like that which inspired the legends of the succubi. An element of mystery attached to her extraordinary career. It was said that she could neither dance nor sing, that she was astonishingly ignorant, and that her speech and ways smelt of the gutter. Even beauty was denied her. The men whom she had ruined themselves could not explain the secret of her power over them; she overcame her victims like a malarial fever. Some men could meet her day after day without succumbing; others lost themselves from the first; others again began by despising her as an ugly little street-girl, and ended by giving her their wives’ jewels.
How many had perished in the maelstrom of desire which she created none could say. But there was a ghastly story of the young Earl of St. Luc, who had put an end to his life at the age of twenty because his trustees refused him the means to set up an establishment for Molly Finucane. An ineffaceable impression had been made by the two contrasted pictures of the desolate mother weeping over her boy’s dead body, as it was dragged all stained and dripping from the moat surrounding the ancient keep of the St. Lucs, and of the wide-mouthed, stupid Irish girl, planted in a reek of tobacco smoke on a table crowded by tipsy youths, repeating to them in her cracked, shameless voice the latest and most brutally coarse refrain of the street.
It was a year, perhaps two years, since the tongue of scandal had first singled out the name of Alistair Stuart from among the rest of those who singed their wings in this fatal flame. Gradually it became known that Molly Finucane had given him a devotion which no other man had ever been able to buy with gold or blood or tears. For his sake she had refused at the last moment to take possession of the miniature palace furnished for her by the great Brazilian broker, Mendes; who had simply shrugged his shoulders and ordered the house to be kept vacant and ready for her. Stuart and she had gone to live together in a faded corner of Chelsea, in a house surrounded by elms with black trunks and yellow leaves.