He looked at her mildly, but with protesting eyes.
“Why are you so bitter?” he said. “Has not Fate after all been considerate with us? You can face the world again now, unsuspected, a spotless wife—no suspicion of our having loved not wisely but too well. Cannot you forgive me yet, Lucy? And after all I have done to safeguard your honour? Yet, if Providence had not thus mercifully intervened, I swear that I would have been a dutiful father to it—have acknowledged my own, and taken all the blame and burden of the sin. I can say no more.”
“Nor I,” she answered. “What does it matter now. The money—my money—that you’ve played to get—it’s all yours to use, and fling away if you like. Treat me as you will—I’m indifferent——” And she lay down resolutely, and composed herself to sleep.
As, chin in hand, he stands pondering her a little, curiously, fondly, cynically, we see the fog droop and engulf him, her, the bed, the room. Not for twenty years does it lift and roll itself up to the flies, to reveal the maturing of a drama of which this chapter is the prologue.
CHAPTER I.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
I suppose my days have been involved in as tragic circumstances as most. It is fair that the truth of them should be set down en grande tenue by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. There is such necessary omission and distortion in all trials of equity, that the plainest of their stories is grown a “Russian Scandal” before the senior counsel who engineered it has gone to his long home on the Bench. And this was an intricate story, which it is now my purpose, for the sake of myself and my own, to detail in full.
As to that story, it will be recalled that a Mr Richard Gaskett was, legally, its protagonist. Very well: I am that person.
At the first and from the first I was something less than nobody. My mother, as I regarded her, was of obscure origin, but of manners naturally quiet and refined. A habit of self-guarding, indeed, which dated probably from her social promotion, had come to make of her even a cold, colourless, impenetrable woman. She was very pretty, with a sort of passionless severity in her face, and in her attitude a custom of what Miss Burney would have called “repulsiveness,” meaning, as we read it, “repelling.” No gleam of demonstrativeness on her part lights my memory of her; from my first lispings I always, by her desire, called her Lady Skene.
As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had contracted a reckless mésalliance with the lady who now bore his name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding.
Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination, erudition are strange beasts to the popular view.