His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

The tragic story—which involved a close study of two strongly contrasted characters, the deep-thinking and ambitious man, and the child of nature whose every thought was poetry, whose every word was music—had stirred the hearts of novel-readers, and had placed Arthur Haldane in the front rank of contemporary novelists; but he had produced no second novel, and many of his feminine admirers declared that the story was the tragedy of his own life, and that, although he dined out two or three times a week in the season, he was a broken-hearted man.

Perhaps it was this idea that had first interested Lady Perivale. She saw in Arthur Haldane the man of one book and one fatal love. She longed to question him about his Egeria of the slums, the girl of fourteen, exquisitely beautiful, whom he had torn from the clutches of a profligate mother, while her father was in a convict prison. She was quite ready to accept the fiction as sober truth, beguiled by that stern realism from which the writer had never departed, but through which there ran a vein of deep poetic feeling.

She was surprised to find no trace of melancholy in his conversation. He did not wear his broken heart upon his sleeve. His manner was grave, and he liked talking of serious things—books, politics, the agitated theology of the day—but he had a keen sense of humour, and could see the mockery of life. He was not as handsome as Rannock was, even in his decadence, but his strongly marked features had the stamp of intellectual power, and his rare smile lightened the thoughtful face like sudden sunshine. He was tall and well set up, had thrown the hammer in his Oxford days, and had rowed in the Balliol boat.

Lady Perivale had liked to talk to him, and had invited him to her best dinners, the smaller parties of chosen spirits, so difficult to bring together, as they were mostly the busiest people, so delightful when caught. It was at one of these little dinners, a party of six, that she beguiled Haldane into talking of the origin of his novel. The company was sympathetic, including a well-known cosmopolitan novelist, a painter of manners and phases of feeling, and all the intricacies of modern life, the fine-drawn, the hypercivilized life that creates its perplexities and cultivates its sorrows.

"The average reader will give a story-spinner credit for anything in the world except imagination," he said. "I am sure Mr. Williams knows that"—with a smiling glance across the table at the novelist of many countries. "They will have it that every story is a page torn out of a life, and the more improbable the story the more determined are they that it should be real flesh and blood. Yet there is often a central fact in the web of fancy, an infinitesimal point, but the point from which all the lines radiate."

"And there was such a germ in your story?" Lady Perivale asked eagerly.

"Yes; there was one solid fact—a child—a poor little half-starved girl-child. I was passing through a wretched alley between the Temple and Holborn, when a dishevelled brat rushed out of a house and almost fell into my arms. A man had been beating her—a child of nine years old—beating her unmercifully with a leather strap. I went into the house, and caught him red-handed. He was her uncle. There was an aunt somewhere, out upon the drink, the man said, as if it was a profession. I didn't want to go through tedious proceedings—call in the aid of this or that society. The man swore the child was a bad lot, a thief, a liar. I bought her of him for a sovereign, bought her as if she had been a terrier pup, and before night I had her comfortably lodged in a cottage at Slough, with a woman who promised to be kind to her, and to bring her up respectably."

"Was she very pretty?" Lady Perivale asked, deeply interested.

"Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for herself—she was an ugly child, and has grown into a plain girl; but she is as frank and honest as the daylight, and she is doing well as scullery-maid in a good family. My Slough cottager did her duty. That, Lady Perivale, is the nucleus of my story. I imagined circumstances more romantic—dazzling beauty, a poetic temperament, a fatal love—and my child of the slums grew into a heroine."

"And that is the way novels are manufactured," said Mr. Williams; "but Haldane ought not to be so ready to tell the tricks of our trade."