Nell, of Shorne Mills

by Charles Garvice

We have cast off the old creeds like so many shackles; we are so finely educated, so cultivated, that we have learned to do more than laugh at sentiment; we regard it with a contemptuous pity.

There is only one thing which we value, and that is Pleasure. Some persons labor under the mistaken notion that Money is the universal quest; but it is not so. The Golden God is set up in every market place, it stands at every street corner; but it is not for himself that the crowd worship at the feet of the brazen image, but because he can buy so much.

It is Money which nowadays holds the magician's rod. With a wave he can give us rank, luxury, power, place, influence, and beauty. This is the creed, the religion, which we teach our children, which is continually in our hearts if not on our lips; and it is the creed, the religion, in which Lady Lucille was reared.

Her history is a public one. It is the story of how many fashionable women? Her father, Lord Turfleigh, was an Irish peer. He had inherited a historic title, and thousands of acres which he had scarcely seen, but which he had helped to incumber. All the Turfleighs from time immemorial had been fast and reckless, but this Turfleigh had outpaced them all, and had easily romped in first in the race of dissipation. As a young man his name had been synonymous with every kind of picturesque profligacy. Every pound he could screw out of the land, or obtain at ruinous interest from the Jews, had been spent in what he and his kind call pleasure.

He had married for money, had got it, and had spent it, even before his patient and long-suffering wife had expiated the mistake of her life in the only possible way. She had left Lady Lucille behind, and the girl had matriculated and taken honors in her father's school.

To Lady Lucille there was only one thing in life worth having—money; and to obtain this prize she had been carefully nurtured and laboriously taught. Long before she left the nursery she had grown to understand that her one object and sole ambition must be a wealthy and suitable marriage; and to this end every advantage of mind and body had been trained and cultivated as one trains a young thoroughbred for a great race.

She had been taught to laugh at sentiment, to regard admiration as valueless unless it came from a millionaire; to sneer at love unless it paced, richly clad and warmly shod, from a palace. She had graduated in the School of Fashion, and had passed with high honors. There was no more beautiful woman in all England than Lady Lucille; few possessed greater charm; men sang her praises; artists fought for the honor of hanging her picture in the Academy; the society papers humbly reported her doings, her sayings, and her conquests; royalties smiled approvingly on this queen of fashion, and not a single soul, Lady Lucille herself least of all, realized that this perfection was but the hollow husk and shell of beauty without heart or soul; that behind the lovely face, within the graceful form, lurked as selfish and ignoble a nature as that which stirs the blood of any drab upon the Streets.

"Drake!" she said. "Why! I'd no idea! What are you doing here?"

He motioned her to a seat with a wave of his pipe, and she sank down on the stone slab, after a careful glance at it, and eyed him curiously but with still a trace of her first embarrassment.

She looked a perfect picture, as she sat there, with the steep, descending wall, the red Devon cliffs, the blue, glittering sea for her background; a picture which might have been presented with a summer number of one of the illustrated weeklies; and all as unreal and as unlike life as they are. It is true that she wore a yachting costume exquisitely made and perfectly fitting; and Drake, as he looked at it, acknowledged its claims upon his admiration, but he knew it was all a sham, and, half unconsciously, he compared it with the old worn skirt and the serviceable jersey worn by Nell, who had gone up the hill—how long ago was it? Nell's face and hands were brown with the kiss of God's sun; Lady Lucille's face was like a piece of delicate Sèvres, and her hands were incased in white kid gauntlets. To him, at that moment, she looked like an actress playing in a nautical burlesque at the Gaiety; and, for the first time since he had known her, he found himself looking at her critically, and, notwithstanding her faultless attire—faultless from a fashionable point of view—with disapproval.