God's Good Man - Marie Corelli (i want to read a book .txt) 📗

in no quarter of the world is religious hypocrisy and sham so openly manifested as in the English provinces, and especially in the small towns, where, notwithstanding the fact that all the Sundays are passed in persistent church and chapel going, the result of this strenuous sham piety is seen in the most unchristian back-biting and mischief-making on every week-day.

But St. Rest was not a town. It was a tiny village apart,—utterly free from the petty pretensions of its nearest neighbour, Riversford, which considered itself almost ‘metropolitan’ on account of its modern red-brick and stucco villas into which its trades- people ‘retired’ as soon as they had made enough money to be able to pretend that they had never stood behind a counter in their lives. St. Rest, on the contrary, was simple in its tastes,—so simple as to be almost primitive, particularly in its religious sentiments, which the ministry of John Walden had, so far, kept faithful and pure. Its atmosphere was therefore utterly at variance with the cheap atheism of the modern world, and it was this discordancy which struck so sharply on Maryllia’s emotional nature and gave her such a sense of unaccustomed pain.

At the Manor there were a few other visitors who had not attended church,—none of them important, except to themselves and the society paragraphist,—none of them distinguished as ever having done anything particularly good, or useful in the world,—and none of them possessing any very unconventional characteristics, with the exception of two very quaint old ladies, who were known somewhat irreverently among their acquaintances as the ‘Sisters Gemini.’ They were of good birth and connection, but, being cast adrift as wrecks on the shores of Time,—the one as a widow, the other as a spinster,—had sworn eternal friendship on the altar of their several disillusioned and immolated affections. In the present day we are not overtroubled by any scruples of reverence for either old widowhood or old spinsterhood; and the ‘Sisters Gemini’ had become a standing joke with the self-styled ‘wise and witty’ of London restaurants and late suppers. Lady Wicketts and Miss Fosby were their actual names, and they were happily unconscious of the unfeeling sobriquet bestowed upon them when they were out of hearing. Lady Wicketts had once been a reigning ‘beauty,’ and she lived on the reputation of that glorious past. Miss Fosby aided and abetted her in this harmless self-deception. Lady Wicketts had been painted by all the famous artists of her era, from the time of her seventeeth birthday to her thirtieth. She had been represented as a ‘Shepherdess,’ a ‘Madonna,’ a ‘Girl with Lilies,’ a ‘Lady with a Greyhound,’ a ‘Nymph Sleeping,’ and more briefly and to the purpose, as ‘Portrait of Lady Wicketts,’ in every exhibition of pictures that had been held during her youth and prime. Miss Fosby carried prints and photographs of these works of art everywhere about with her. She would surprise people by casually taking one of them out of her album and saying softly “Isn’t that beautiful?”

And then, if the beholders fell into the trap and uttered exclamations of rapture at the ‘Shepherdess’ or the ‘Madonna,’ or whatever allegorical subject it happened to be, she would smile triumphantly and say-‘Lady Wicketts!’—to all appearance enjoying the violent shock of incredulous amazement which her announcement invariably inflicted on all those who received it.

“Not possible!” they would murmur—“Lady Wicketts---!”

“Yes,—Lady Wicketts when she was young,”—Miss Fosby would say mildly—“She was very beautiful when she was twenty. She is sixty- seven now. But she is still beautiful,—don’t you think so? She has such an angelic expression! And she is so good—ah!—so very goodl There is no one like Lady Wicketts!”

All this was very sweet and touching on the part of Miss Fosby, so far as Miss Fosby alone was concerned. To her there was but one woman in the world, and that was Lady Wicketts. But the majority of people saw Lady Wicketts in quite another light. They knew she had been, in her time, as unprincipled as beautiful, and that she had ‘gone the pace’ more openly than most of her class. They beheld her now without spectacles,—an enormously fat woman, with a large round flaccid face, scarred all over by Time’s ploughshare with such deep furrows that one might have sown seed in them and expected it to grow.

But Miss Fosby still recognised the ‘Shepherdess,’ the ‘Madonna’ and the ‘Girl with Lilies,’ in the decaying composition of her friend, and Miss Fosby was something of a bore in consequence, though the constancy of her devotion to a totally unworthy object was quaintly pathetic in its way. The poor soul herself was nearer seventy than sixty, and she was quite as lean as her idol was fat,—she had never been loved by anyone in all her life, but,—in her palmy days,—she had loved. And the necessity of loving had apparently remained a part of her nature, otherwise it would have been a sheer impossibility for her to have selected so strange a fetish as Lady Wicketts for her adoration. Lady Wicketts did not, in any marked way, respond to Miss Fosby’s tenderness,—she merely allowed herself to be worshipped, just as in her youth she had allowed scores of young bloods to kiss her hand and murmur soft nothings in her then ‘shell-like’ ear. The young bloods were gone, but Miss Fosby remained. Better the worship of Miss Fosby than no worship at all. Maryllia had met these two old ladies frequently at various Continental resorts, when she had travelled about with her aunt,— and she had found something amusing and interesting in them both, especially in Miss Fosby, who was really a good creature,—and when in consultation with Cicely as to who, among the various people she knew, should be asked down to the Manor and who should not, she had selected them as a set-off to the younger, more flippant and casual of her list, and also because they were likely to be convenient personages to play chaperones if necessary.

For the rest, the people were of the usual type one has got accustomed to in what is termed ‘smart’ society nowadays,—listless, lazy, more or less hypocritical and malicious,—apathetic and indifferent to most things and most persons, save and except those with whom unsavoury intrigues might or would be possible,—sneering and salacious in conversation, bitter and carping of criticism, generally blase, and suffering from the incurable ennui of utter selfishness,—the men concentrating their thoughts chiefly on racing, gaining, and Other Men’s Wives,—the women dividing all their stock of emotions between Bridge, Dress, and Other Women’s Husbands. And when Julian Adderley, as an author in embryo, found himself seated at luncheon with this particular set of persons, all of whom were more or less well known in the small orbit wherein they moved, he felt considerably enlivened and exhilarated. Life was worth living, he said to himself, when one might study at leisure the little tell-tale lines of vice and animalism on the exquisite features of Lady Beaulyon, and at the same time note admiringly how completely the united forces of massage and self-complacency had eradicated every wrinkle from the expressionless countenance of Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay. These two women were, in a way, notorious as ‘leaders’ of their own special coteries of social scandalmongers and political brokers; Lady Beaulyon was known best among Jew financiers; Mrs. Courtenay among American ‘Kings’ of oil and steel. Each was in her own line a ‘power,’—each could coax large advances of money out of the pockets of millionaires to further certain ‘schemes’ which were vaguely talked about, but which never came to fruition,—each had a little bevy of young journalists in attendance,—press boys whom they petted and flattered, and persuaded to write paragraphs concerning their wit, wisdom and beauty, and how they ‘looked radiant in pink’ or ‘dazzling in pea green.’ Contemplating first one and then the other of these ladies, Julian almost resolved to compose a poem about them, entitled ‘The Sirens’ and, dividing it into Two Cantos, to dedicate the First Canto to Lady Beaulyon and the Second to Mrs. Courtenay.

“It would be so new—so fresh!” he mused, with a bland anticipation of the flutter such a work might possibly cause among society dove- cots—“And if ALL the truth were told, so much more risque than ‘Don Juan’!”

Glancing up and down, and across the hospitable board, exquisitely arranged with the loveliest flowers and fruit, and the most priceless old silver, he noticed that every woman of the party was painted and powdered except Maryllia, and her young protegee, Cicely. The dining-room of Abbot’s Manor was not a light apartment,- -its oak-panelled walls and raftered ceiling created shadow rather than luminance,—and though the windows were large and lofty, rising from the floor to the cornice, their topmost panes were of very old stained glass, so that the brightest sunshine only filtered, as it were, through the deeply-encrusted hues of rose and amber and amethyst squares, painted with the arms of the Vancourts, and heraldic emblems of bygone days. Grateful and beautiful indeed was this mysteriously softened light to the ladies round the table,—and for a brief space they almost LOVED Maryllia. For HER face was flushed, and quite uncooled by powder—‘like a dairymaid’s—she will get so coarse if she lives in the country always!’ Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay confided softly to Lord Charlemont, who vaguely murmured— ‘Ah! Yes! I daresay!’ quite without any idea of what the woman was talking about. Maryllia’s pretty hair too was ruffled, she having merely taken off her hat in the hall on her return from church, without troubling to go up to her room and ‘touch up’ her appearance as all the other ladies who had suffered from walking exercise had done,—and her eyes looked just a trifle tired. Adderley found her charming with this shade of fatigue and listlessness upon her,—more charming than in her most radiant phases of vivacity. Her peach-like skin, warmed as it was by the sun, was tinted with Nature’s own exquisite colouring, and compared most favourably with the cosmetic art so freely displayed by her female friends on either side of her. Julian began to con verses in his head, and he recalled the lines of seventeeth-century Eichard Crashaw:—

“A Face that’s best By its own beauty drest, And can alone command the rest.”

And he caught himself wondering why,—whenever he came near the Lady of the Manor,—he was anxious to seem less artificial, less affected, and more of a man than his particular ‘Omar Kayyam’ set had taught him to be. The same praiseworthy desire moved him in the company of John Walden, therefore sex could have nothing to do with it. Was it ‘Soul’?—that ‘breath of God’ which had been spoken of in the pulpit that morning?

He could not, however, dwell upon this rather serious proposition at luncheon, his thoughts being distracted by the conversation, if conversation it could be called, that was buzzing on either side of the table, amidst the clattering of plates and the popping of champagne corks. It was neither brilliant, witty nor impersonal,— brilliant, witty and impersonal talk is never generated in modem society nowadays. “I would much rather listen to the conversation of lunatics in the common room of an asylum, than to the inane gabble of modern society in a modern drawing-room”—said a late distinguished politician to the present writer—“For the lunatics always have the glimmering of an idea somewhere in their troubled brains, but modern society has neither brains nor ideas.” Fragmentary sentences, often slangy, and occasionally ungrammatical, seemed most in favour with the Manor ‘house-party,’—and for a time splinters of language flew about like the chips from dry timber under a woodman’s axe, without shape, or use, or meaning. It was a mere confused and senseless jabber—a jabber in