His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

CHAPTER V.

"For thee I'll lock up all the gates of love,
And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang,
To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,
And never shall it more be gracious.
O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again."

Grace Perivale could hardly live through the day, while she was waiting for the appearance of the family solicitor. Since Lady Morningside's visit she had been on fire with impatience to do something, wise or foolish, futile or useful, towards clearing her character. She had been all the more eager, perhaps, because in her morning ride she had seen a man whose scorn—or that grave distance which she took for scorn—pained her more than the apostasy of all her other friends.

She had ridden in the park with "the liver brigade" three or four mornings a week, since her return from Italy, and she had found some trouble in keeping the men she knew at a distance. They all wanted to be talkative and friendly, praised her mount, hung at her side till she froze them by her brief answers, warned them that her horse hated company, that her mare was inclined to kick other horses, and then, with a light touch of her whip, cantered sharply off, and left the officious acquaintance planted.

"One can't expect her to be amiable when our wives and daughters are so d——d uncivil to her," mused one of her admirers.

Some among the husbands and brothers of her friends had taken sides for her, and argued that the story of her intrigue with Rannock was not proven; but the women had heard it too often and from too many quarters to doubt. They sighed, and shook their heads, and deplored that it was impossible to go on knowing a woman of whom such a story was told.

They might not have believed it, they argued, had she not obviously been head over ears in love with Rannock last season. They had always been about together—at Ascot, Goodwood, at all the classical concerts, at the opera. True, she had seldom been alone with him. There had generally been other women and other men of the party; but Rannock had undoubtedly been the man.

That one man whose opinion Grace cared for, whose good word might have been balm in Gilead, was not a man of fashion. Arthur Haldane was a student, and he only appeared occasionally in the haunts of the frivolous, where he was not above taking his recreation, now and then, after the busy solitude of his working days and nights. He was a Balliol man, had known and been cherished by Jowett in his undergraduate days, and had taken a first in classics. He might have had a fellowship had he desired it, but he wanted a more stirring part in life than the learned leisure of a college. He was a barrister by profession, but he had not loved the law, nor the law him; and, having an income that allowed him not to work for daily bread, after about a dozen briefs spaced over a year and a half, he had taken to literature, which had been always his natural bent, and the realm of letters had received him with acclaim. His rivals ascribed his success to luck, and to a certain lofty aloofness which kept his work original. He never wrote with an eye to the market, never followed another man's lead, nor tried to repeat his own successes, and never considered whether the thing he wrote was wanted or not, would or would not pay.

He was a prodigious reader, but a reader who dwelt in the past, and who read the books he loved again and again, till all that was finest in the master-minds of old was woven into the fabric of his brain. He seldom looked at a new book, except when he was asked to review one for a certain Quarterly to which he had contributed since the beginning of his career. He was the most conscientious of reviewers; if he loved the book, the most sympathetic; if he hated it, the most unmerciful.

One only work of fiction, published before he was thirty, had marked him as a writer of original power. It was a love story, supposed to be told by the man who had lived it, the story of a man who had found a creature of perfect loveliness and absolute purity in one of the darkest spots on earth, had snatched her unstained from the midst of pollution, had placed her in the fairest environment, watched the growth of her mind with the tenderest interest, looked forward to the blissful day when he could make her his wife, and then, when she had ripened into a perfect woman, had seen her ruin and untimely death, the innocent victim of a relentless seducer.