The action was insane, and to English and American society offensive.
The world considered it had warmed an adder in its breast. Everybody had known her only because of her money, and now she had stripped herself of her money, and would expect to know them just the same!
Besides, what a shocking example! Ought big brewers, instead of ascending to the celestial regions of the Upper House, to strip themselves of their capital and build inebriate asylums? Ought big bankers, instead of going to court and marrying dukes’ daughters, to live on bread and cheese, and give their millions in pensions and bonuses? Ought big manufacturers, instead of receiving baronetcies, and having princes at their shooting parties, to go in sackcloth and ashes, and spend all their profits in making the deadly trades healthy? Were all the titled railway directors to pull off their Bath ribbons, and melt down the silver spades with which they had cut the sods of new lines, in order to give all they possess to maimed stokers, or dazed signalmen, or passengers who had lost their legs or their arms in accidents?
Forbid it, heaven!
Society shook on its very foundations. Never had there been set precedent fraught with such disastrous example. It was something worse than socialism; they could not give it a name. Socialism knocked you down and picked your pocket: but this act of hers was a voluntary eating of dust. She, who had supposed that she would be able to do what she choose with her inheritance unremarked, was astonished at the storm of indignation raised by the intolerable example she was considered to have set. American capitalists were as furious as English aristocracy and plutocracy, and the chief organs of the American press asked her if she could seriously suppose that anybody would take the trouble to put money together if they had to give it away as soon as they got it?
The publicity and hostility roused in two nations by an act which she had endeavored to make as private as possible disconcerted her exceedingly, and the encomiums she received from anonymous correspondents were not more welcome.
What most annoyed her were the political deductions and accusations which were roused by her action and roared around it. She was claimed by the Collectivists, praised by the Positivists, seized by the Socialists, and admired by the Anarchists. She was supposed to belong to every new creed to which the latter years of the nineteenth century has given birth, and such creeds are multitudinous as ants’ eggs in an ant-hill. A ton weight of subversive literature and another ton weight of begging letters were sent to her, and she was requested to forward funds for a monument to Jesus Ravachol and Harmodius-Caserio.
The Fabian philosophers wept with joy over her; but the upholders of property said that nothing more profoundly immoral than this dispersion of wealth had ever been accomplished since Propriété Nationale was written on the façade of the Tuileries. Tolstoi dedicated a work to her; Cuvallotti wrote her an ode; Brunetière consecrated an article to her, Mr. Mallock stigmatized her action as the most immoral of the age, whilst Auberon Herbert considered it the most admirable instance of high spirited individualism; Mr. Gladstone wrote a beautiful epistle on a postcard, and Mr. Swinburne a poem in which her charity was likened to the sea in a score of magnificent imageries and rolling hexameters.
She was overwhelmed with shame at her position and was only sustained in the pillory of such publicity by the knowledge that the world forgets and discards as rapidly as it adores and enthrones. She felt that she deserved as little the praises of those who lauded her generosity as she did the censure of others who blamed her for subversive designs and example. Her strongest motive power had been the desire to atone, in such measure as possible, for the evil her father had done, and to rid herself of an overwhelming burden. Deep down in her soul, too, scarcely acknowledged to herself, was the desire that the Duchess of Otterbourne’s brother should know that, if she could not understand the finer gradations of honor as old races can do, she yet had nothing of that mercenary passion which a woman of his own race showed so unblushingly.
She longed, with more force than she had ever wished for anything, that Hurstmanceaux should be justified in that higher appreciation of her which his letter had expressed.