Tempest and Rimânez forthwith become friends—even more, chums inseparable; and soon we find Mr. Geoffrey Tempest very aptly playing the part he had formerly rallied against—that of a worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold, and gluttonously swallowing the evil and corrupting maxims of his fascinating friend. He eats the best of food, drinks the most expensive of wines, and rides in the most luxurious of carriages; his book is published and advertised and boomed at his own expense, and he has not a particle of sympathy for the poor or the suffering. “It often happens that when bags of money fall to the lot of aspiring genius, God departs and the devil walks in.” So asserts Rimânez—who ought to know; and so it proves in the case of his rich and ready disciple, Mr. Geoffrey Tempest. Nothing seems to disturb the serenity of the multi-millionaire in the early days of his new-found wealth and power—for the world bows before him—except a mysterious servant of the Prince’s, a man named Amiel, who cooks mysterious meals for his master and, imp of mischief, plays strange pranks upon his fellow-servants.
Soon Tempest, through the instrumentality of his princely friend, makes the acquaintance of the beautiful Lady Sibyl Elton. “No man, I think, ever forgets the first time he is brought face to face with perfect beauty in woman. He may have caught fleeting glimpses of many fair faces often,—bright eyes may have flashed on him like starbeams,—the hues of a dazzling complexion may now and then have charmed him, or the seductive outlines of a graceful figure;—all these are as mere peeps into the infinite. But when such vague and passing impressions are suddenly drawn together in one focus, when all his dreamy fancies of form and color take visible and complete manifestation in one living creature who looks down upon him, as it were, from an empyrean of untouched maiden pride and purity, it is more to his honor than his shame if his senses swoon at the ravishing vision, and he, despite his rough masculinity and brutal strength, becomes nothing but the merest slave to passion.” Thus Geoffrey Tempest when the violet eyes of Sibyl Elton first rest upon him.
The scene is a box at a theatre, the play of questionable character about a “woman with a past.” The picture is complete with the lady’s father—the Earl of Elton—bending forward in the box and eagerly gloating over every detail of the performance. There is assuredly no exaggeration in this portraiture. Such scenes can be witnessed every night during the season. Nor does Marie Corelli go beyond the unpleasing truth in asserting that novels on similar themes are popular amongst women and are a sure preparation for the toleration and applause by women of such plays.
The Earl of Elton is hard up, as his daughter knows, and she has been trained to manœuvre for a rich husband. The idea of a marriage for love is out of the question; she is too wary to brave “the hundred gloomy consequences of the res angusta domi,” as old Thackeray puts it. She is not the sort of girl who marries where her heart is, “with no other trust but in heaven, health, and labor,”—to quote the same mighty moralist.
As Prince Rimânez has explained to Tempest, Lady Sibyl is “for sale” in the matrimonial market, and Tempest determines to buy her; or, in other words, decides that he wants to marry her and that his millions will enable him to achieve that object. Poor Lady Sibyl! A victim of circumstances, it is impossible not to pity her! Cold, callous, heartless, calculating, corrupt, she is what her mother has made her—the mother herself being a victim of paralysis and sensuality, a titled, worn-out rouée.
“Madame, we want mothers!” Napoleon once said truly to one who sorrowed over the decadence of French manhood; and to the Countess of Elton might have been applied, with more justice than to the less sinful sisters from whom society sweeps its skirts, the name of wanton.
Tempest loses no time in pursuing what now becomes the main object of his life—marriage with Lady Sibyl Elton, who is quite ready to be wooed. Incidentally, the book contains stirring pictures of the times. There is a visit of Tempest and Rimânez to an aristocratic gambling-house, and Miss Corelli’s account of the scene there enacted is but a true description of what is going on constantly “in the West.” How often, when the Somerset House records of the wills of deceased men of note are revealed, do people marvel that So-and-so, with his vast income, was able to put by so little!
Very often it is the gaming-table that supplies the reason. For the gambling fever is raging in the world of to-day from peers, statesmen, lawyers, aye, and ministers, to the street-boys who stake their trifles on a race or a game of shove ha’penny. There are book-makers who, as the police records show, do not hesitate to accept penny bets on horse races from boys. There are “swell” boardinghouses, we know, in secluded country retreats, where roulette, rouge et noir, and baccarat are played nightly all the year round, not for pounds, but for hundreds of pounds, and the police of the districts concerned never disturb the accursed play. There are luxurious flats in London where similar play goes on, equally undisturbed by the police. And there are the gaming hells, such as Miss Corelli describes, where often may be seen men of distinction, whose names are familiar to every ear, destroying their peace, their prosperity, the happiness of themselves and their families, for the luck of the cards.
To such a place as this—where wealth and position were the only “open sesames”—went Tempest and Prince Rimânez. Both, so rich that it mattered not to them what resulted, play and win heavily, mainly from a Viscount Lynton. Rimânez here stays one of the only good impulses that came to Geoffrey Tempest after his accession to wealth. He would have forgiven the Viscount his ruinous losses. And so the play goes on, and then—a merry bet—Lynton plays with Rimânez at baccarat for a queer stake—his soul. Of course he loses, and Rimânez has but a short time to wait to collect the wager, for the mad young Viscount blows out his brains that night. Such is the history—less only the last specific bet—of many a young aristocrat’s suicide.
In the furtherance of his marriage scheme, Tempest purchases Willowsmere Court, in Warwickshire, a place which, in his palmy days, the Earl of Elton had owned, but which had subsequently got into the hands of the Jews. Near to Willowsmere lives Mavis Clare, the good angel of the story. It has been said “in print,” and it is popularly believed even now, notwithstanding positive denial, that Mavis Clare was intended to portray Miss Marie Corelli. It was an unwarrantable and unfair suggestion, because it implied to Miss Corelli that gross libel, often falsely attributed to her, of vanity and self-advertisement. In very truth, if she were vain it would be a sin easy to condone in one who has achieved so much. Yet, happily, she is so true a woman that vanity has no part in her character, and she is incapable of deliberately applying to herself the Mavis Clare description.