I
HAD Zeus Gildersedge been a man susceptible to the more beneficent influences of nature, history might have chronicled him as a man rich in the finer æstheticisms of the soul.
The Hun was ever a Hun, though he stormed through the Vale of Tempe or gazed upon Lombardic lakes, splendid under a cloudless sky. Worthy follower of some commercial Attila was Zeus Gildersedge, a being granite to all nobler truths, impervious, irresponsive, unimpressionable, mute. Orpheus would have abandoned him in despair. A fabulist might have classed him with Lot’s wife petrified in the plain beyond Sodom.
Zeus Gildersedge, misanthrope and consumer of opium, maintained a monasticism in his vices and kept the world at bay behind the red-brick wall that bounded his patrimony. Imagine an antique, gabled house perched on a hill overlooking the sea, a house of quaint archaicness, warm of bosom, opulent in roof and the glittering lozenges of its casements, girdled with a belt of cypresses and yews. The place had derived a profuse and negligent picturesqueness from its master’s avarice. Roses bloom even for a miser, and Zeus Gildersedge was content to suffer the magnanimity of nature. Ivy festooned the casements; wistaria panoplied the porch; roses, red and white, reared the banners of Junetide on the walls. The garden was a delectable wilderness, a dusky pleasaunce smothered with flowering shrubs that claimed a lusty and superabundant liberty. From the garden green downs dipped southward to black cliffs and an opalescent sea. North, east, and west upland and wooded valley stretched dim and variable as a region of romance.
Gold, opium, tobacco, and claret—these were the genii who watched over Zeus Gildersedge’s autumn years. He was mean in a cosmopolitan sense, save in the satisfying of his especial sins. In his youth and prime he had been a brisk swashbuckler in the mercenary wars of commerce. He had lived between the boards of his ledger, had married a wife, and begotten one child. He had buried the one and stood half in awe of the other. Now, at sixty, he lurked like a decapod in his solitary den, and stretched out his lean, hungry tentacles to grip rentals, dividends, and the like into his mercenary maw. A hard, flint-eyed old ragamuffin, tough for all his wine-bibbing, with a soul of leather and a heart of clay, he was never seen abroad save when he trudged five miles down-hill in his green coat and greasy hat to deposit pelf in the bank at Rilchester or to collect the rentals of sundry squalid cottages he owned in that town. You might see him on a Monday morning standing at cottage doors and ciphering solemnly in a dirty, little, blue-leaved ledger. He never gave away a halfpenny. If he favored any one with a letter, he never stamped the envelope. As for charities, he looked on them as the sentimental hobbies of a fond and spendthrift public. There was no parson in Christendom who could have wheedled a donation out of him, pleaded he ever so plausibly.
It would be but a reasonable inference that such a father should possess something peculiar in the way of a child, and Joan Gildersedge might have been apostrophized as the supremest possible contrast to her sire. Under the gray thatch of the one lurked much that was ignoble in the mind—avarice, an ignorant insolence, a coarse and blasphemous infidelity. Zeus Gildersedge personified much that was brutally typical of a British Midas. His daughter, with a strong and innocent perversity of soul, might have given Shakespeare a Virgilia and to civilization a star that could have regenerated a decaying chivalry.
The girl had received no education in the scholastic sense. She had escaped certain of the tawdry and superficial embellishments of civilization. From her meagre mine of literature—meagre numerically, but boasting intrinsic opulence—the girl had culled a strange medley of facts and sentiments. Shakespeare had unbosomed to her a god-man speaking to a precocious child. She had dreamed through The Faerie Queene and Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. History had bulked largely in her calendar. She could have described to you the campaigns of Julian the Apostate, the Pandects of Justinian, the life of Savonarola, done to death in Medicean Florence. She was innocently wise, yet supremely ignorant, nor had she ever entered a church. A pure pagan, religion had never created in her a false and penitential humility, an erotic brooding upon the supposed shortcomings of her own nature. She was cheerfully positive, not a mawkish and emotional negation of sense. With the ingenious idealism of a child she estimated the world generously and boasted of no instinctive cynicism. Evil was a quality to be studied vaguely and dispassionately in books. No harm had touched her heart, nor had she learned to mistrust others. She had read of murder, adultery, theft, and the like. She supposed these things to exist, yet even intuition had not prompted her to project sin into the narrow and visible world that girded her youth.
Fortunately for Joan Gildersedge, she had arrived at no candid comprehension of her father’s character. He was the only old man experience had as yet apportioned to her, and she could claim no examples to contradict the habitual surliness of age. Zeus Gildersedge’s perpetual plaint was that of dire poverty, a protestation that his daughter had come to consider as inevitable as sunrise. True, he was morose, shabby, hard, reticent, and unlovely. Yet these very shortcomings had no air of strangeness for the girl. She had grown up under the shadow of avarice and ethical annihilation, and had come to consider such things among the natural phenomena of nature. She was neither particularly happy nor particularly miserable. None of the common experiences of girlhood had been hers. She had known neither love nor sympathy, friendship nor pleasure, brimming life nor the lack of it. And yet in the May of her girlhood she evidenced the example of a soul evolving within itself, of an individuality bourgeoning spontaneously under the sun, a stately plant starting into purple and red amid ruins and solitude. Unconscious of the inevitable law working in her own being, she followed her fashionless instincts, unknown of others, unknown even of herself.
Picture a low-ceilinged, mullion-windowed room, hung with faded red curtains, carpeted with gray drugget, embellished with sundry oil-paintings of dingy landscapes and impossible rusticities. Four high-backed oak chairs stood stiffly round the heavy mahogany table. A tattered rug thresholded the fireless grate. An escritoire stood against one wall, a melancholy bookcase against another. A cheap French clock on the mantel-piece chided the prodigal hours. On either side Romanesque warriors in bronze straddled impetuous chargers.
By a window, whose lozenged panes were swept by festoons of ivy, Zeus Gildersedge sat in a cane-backed arm-chair. An antique round table stood beside him, bearing a decanter of claret, a small phial of laudanum, a couple of glasses, a tobacco-jar, ink-pot, and quill pen. He was a short, spare man, clad in rusty gray, collarless, dishevelled, unkempt as to beard and poll. The slant light of the western sun seemed to impress a peculiar pallor upon his waxen face. There were numberless wrinkles about his gray eyes, with their minutely contracted pupils. His mouth ran a hard, tense, anæmic line under his large nose. Eyebrows and beard were bushy, leonine, barbaric. A lethargic arrogance appeared to possess the man, a mean, self-centred torpor that seemed in actual harmony with the atmosphere of the room.