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                            _Love's Usuries_

                                   BY

                             LOUIS CRESWICKE
                   _Author of "Magnetism and Mystery"_


                                 London
                             HENRY J. DRANE
                             SALISBURY HOUSE
                  SALISBURY SQUARE, FLEET STREET, E.C.



    [_Several of the following stories are reprinted by kind
    permission of the Editor of_ "BLACK AND WHITE," _in which
    journal they originally appeared. "On the Eve of the Regatta"
    is reprinted by kind permission of the Editor of_ "THE
    GENTLEWOMAN."]



    TO

    H. F. PREVOST BATTERSBY,

    IN APPRECIATION
    OF MUCH GOOD FELLOWSHIP.



  Is happiness courted in vain?
  A will o' the wisp--nothing more?
  A bubble? a dream? a refrain?
  Is happiness courted in vain
  A certain begetter of pain--
    A fruit with an asp at the core?
  Is happiness courted in vain
    A will o' the wisp----Nothing more!



CONTENTS


                                        PAGE
  LOVE'S USURIES                           7
  A QUAINT ELOPEMENT                      25
  TROOPER JONES OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE      53
  THE "CELIBATE" CLUB (DIALOGUE)          70
  IN THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP               78
  SOME CRAZY PATCHWORK                    94
  "THE SOUL OF ME"                       112
  IN A CORNFIELD (DIALOGUE)              131
  ON THE EVE OF THE REGATTA              136
  PEACH BLOOM                            151
  TWIN SOULS (DIALOGUE)                  176
  PAIN'S PENSIONERS                      182
  FOR LOVE OR SCIENCE?                   201
  ROMANCE OF THE COULISSES               228




Love's Usuries.

  "The star of love is a flower--a deathless token,
  That grows beside the gate of unseen things."


Among friends, parting for a lengthy spell has its disadvantages. They
age in character and physique, and after the reconnoitre there is a
pathetic consciousness of the grudging confessions which time has
inscribed on the monumental palimpsest. My meeting with Bentham after a
severance of years was bleak with this pathos. But he was gay as ever,
and better dressed than he used to be in the old art school days, with a
self-respecting adjustment of hat and necktie that had been unknown in
Bohemia; for he was no longer a boy, but a man, and a noted one, and
fortune had stroked him into sleekness. The gender of success must be
feminine: she is so capricious. Hitherto her smiles have been for
veterans grown hoary in doing; now she opens her arms for youngsters
grown great merely by daring. Bentham, it must be owned, had dared
uncommonly well, and success had pillowed his head in her lap while she
twined the bay with her fingers. But lines round his mouth and fatigued
cynicism on the eyelids betrayed the march of years, and, more, the
thinker, who, like most thinkers, plumbs to exhaustion in a bottomless
pit. For all that he was excellent company. On his walls hung
innumerable trophies of foreign travel and unique specimens of his own
art-bent and with these, by gesture or by anecdote, he gave an
unconscious synopsis of the skipped pages in our friendship's volume.

"This," he said, "is the original of 'Earth's Fair Daughters,' the
canvas that brought me to the front; and here"--handing an album--"is
the presentment of my benefactress."

"Benefactress?" I queried.

"Yes. I don't attempt to pad you with the social tarra-diddle that
genius finds nuggets on the surface of the diggings. Fame was due to
myself, and fortune to Mrs Brune--a dear old creature who bought my
pictures with a persistence worthy a better cause. She died, leaving me
her sole heir."

"And hence these travels?"

"Yes. When I lost sight of you in Paris I hewed a new route to notice. I
played at being successful, bought my own pictures through
dealers--_incog._, of course--at enormous prices. That tickled the ears
of the Press."

"But how about commission?"

"Oh, the dealers earned it, and my money was well invested. I became
talked about. The public knew nothing of my talent, and people love to
talk of what they understand least."

"You belittle yourself, Bentham. You felt your work was sound--that you
were bound to become great."

"True; otherwise I could not have stooped to play the charlatan. Without
it my work might as well have been rotten for all the public could
judge. Charlatanism is the only 'open sesame' to the world's cave, once
you get inside you may be as honest as you please. All is fair in love
or art or war, and there is a consolation in knowing that one's aim is
Jesuitical, and not merely base. Had it not been for Mrs Brune--good
soul--and the gambling instinct, I might be still, like you and Grey's
'gem of purest ray serene,' flashing my facets in the desert."

From Mrs Brune's portrait he devolved on one or two others of persons
distinguished in the art sphere, whose autographs, with cordial or
extravagant expressions of devotion, scrambled octopus-wise over the
card.

"And here," he said, handling an album bound in chicken skin, adorned
with the grace of Watteau's rurality--"here are my Flower Martyrs."

"What does that mean?" asked I, knowing him for an eccentric of
eccentrics.

"Don't you remember the quotation, 'Butchered to make a Roman holiday?'
It struck me once I should like to make an index of the flower lives
that had been sacrificed on the Altar of Selfishness."

"And this is the index?"

"No, not exactly. I soon tired of the experiment, for there was such
wholesale murder it was impossible to keep pace with it. I then confined
myself to the martyrs, the veritable martyrs broken on the rack of human
emotion. Here are a few--with remarks and dates--they have each a little
history of love or heroism or----" he shuffled for a term.

"Lunacy," I offered.

"Yes, that is the best word. They convey little histories of lunacy--my
own and others."

"May I inspect them?"

"You may," he conceded, throwing himself into an arm-chair and looking
over his elbow at the open page. "First," he said, "some rose leaves."
He coughed slightly, and stirred the fire with caution, as though it
shaped some panorama he feared to disarrange. Then he began his story:--

"First some rose leaves shaken into the finger-glass of a great
actress--you know Lalage?--on the night when all Paris was intoxicated
by her. It was my supper, and she honoured me. Many men would gladly
have been that rose--to lay down its life for a touch of her
finger-tips: several have parted with all that life holds dear for less
than that."

He struck a match and lit a cigarette, throwing the case to me, and then
proceeded:--

"The bowls were fragrant with attar, and those petals like fairy boats
skimmed over the scented surface of the water. They seemed very red
then, but they are faded enough now."

He again stared at the fire as though to assist his memory by its
pictures.

"Lalage is a great artist, and like all great artists her contact brings
completeness and a sense of fulfilment to everything--colour, purpose,
expression. I had just heard her in the _role_ of Chimene, in the
wonderful scene when, not daring to avow her love for Rodrigue, she
should have uttered '_Va-je ne te hais point_,' and where she merely
stood with moving lips--powerless to articulate from the suppressed
immensity of her passion. We, of the audience, by one consent seemed to
shiver--to shudder as though a polar breeze had swept over the tropic
night--so tragic, so real, so ardent, this unspeakable, this unspoken
confession."

"And what of Mons. Redan?" I questioned.

"The Count that turned actor? He played the part of Rodrigue, and he
told me afterwards that there were times when a sob would choke him as
he listened."

"And Redan loved her?"

"Loved? Oh, pale, anaemic, wan-complexioned word to run in leash with
Redan. He loved her so much that he was willing to barter name,
possessions, career for the warmth of her lips."

"And she?"

"And she----" he said, suddenly disturbing his fire panorama with a dash
of the poker. "Well, she took them."

There was silence for a moment or two as I turned the page--silence that
was accentuated by the falling ash, which dropped white and weightless
like the thousand lives that sink daily to dust exhausted with hope
deferred. Then he eyed the vegetable mass that faced me.

"A camellia," he explained, "crushed and brown. It was plucked from the
dead breast of a woman. It was the solitary witness of the last act of a
tragedy. The Prince K. was more than a kind patron--an almost friend to
me. He valued my apprehension of art, and shadowed me from the hour I
first began to paint little Gretchen carrying her father's cobblings to
their owners. He bought the picture, and ceaselessly employed me to make
sketches of her in some way or another--as a queen--as a boy--as a
_danseuse_. He loved to see her in all disguises, for she had the true
model's faculty for lending herself to, and developing every pose. Then
came the question of marriage--it is inevitable when a man meets a girl
with eyes like altar lights, clear and holy beacons of God. Marriage,
between a prince of the blood and the child of a shoemaker!"

Bentham gave vent to a low laugh, which was quite devoid of merriment.
It is the trick of those who spend their lives in plumbing the
unfathomable; it translates the meagreness and vacuity of their lore.

"Of course the family was outraged," he went on; "his mother appealed,
grovelled on her knees, so it is said, and in the end he gave way. He
agreed to part from his beloved. But he asked that she might sit for me,
and would sometimes muse for hours over the latest travail of my brush.
Then he became engaged to the Countess Dahlic--there is no accounting
for the moral weakness of men under family pressure--and the wedding day
was fixed. All this time he had kept his word. He had never spoken to or
seen Gretchen, and she, poor child, was dying--yes, dying slowly--not as
we die, but fading like twilight, imperceptibly, fainting like high
purpose, blighted by the coarse breath of the million."

He knocked the end off his cigarette and stared for a while at the
gas-smoked ceiling.

"Then--one day when the marriage was close at hand, when flags hung from
the housetops and garlands across the streets, there was a stir in the
house of the cobbler. Gretchen had been sitting to me as a Spanish maid
in a mantilla, with a camellia in her hair and on her chest. Dressed so,
she was found locked in the arms of the Prince. Both were dead--and the
camellia was crushed to brown as you see. It came into my possession
with the lace which belonged to me--an art property that is now too
entangled with the human and with the divine ever to be used lightly
again."

"A sad story," I sighed, turning the leaf. "Poor child, so young and
pretty and----"

"Good," he added. "It is astonishing to calculate the amount of virtue
which lurks about unlabelled by the wedding ring."

       *       *       *       *       *

"That," he said, turning over a fresh page, "was once a bunch of
violets; it should have belonged to Jacquaine."

"Who was Jacquaine?"

"She was a romantic creature, full of music and passionate inspiration;
but she had one fault, that of inventing ideals. Don't you find that
most women come to grief over this pastime?"

He scarcely demanded a reply, but went on as though thinking aloud.

"She made a deity of her husband, who was a clever 'cellist, but merely
a man. When he became dazzled with a vulgar, opulent, overblown person,
Jacquaine would not view it as a temporary fascination. Her soul was not
adapted to the analysis of triviality. She ran away from him.
Husband-like, he was too proud or pig-headed--I won't venture to decide
which--to chase her. Meanwhile, with the perversity of woman, she pined
for him, and haunted every concert room to hear the voice of his art. By
degrees the very intensity of her soul's longing seemed to creep into
his hands and sob its despair through his fingers. His technical skill
came forth through a halo, as though crowned with the fire of her
thought which surrounded and encompassed it. Of course, the world saw
but the amplification of his artistic faculty, and his fortune was made.
Then a beautiful charmer metaphorically wiped away his tears, for he had
yearned for his wife in the enigmatical fashion of weak creatures who
prefer to morally gamble and deplore their losses rather than save.
Jacquaine became poor as well as sorrowful; she pined for her husband's
love, but whenever she would have craved it, other women courted him.
Her talent waned as his expanded. At this juncture Broton, the
millionaire, who had always admired her, gave a big supper to Bohemia,
leaving her husband out. The entertainment was mightily enjoyable, for
Broton's wine was sound and his guests witty. When the fun was fast and
furious I happened to cross a drawing-room in search of brandy and
seltzer. Not a soul was there, but on the verandah I spotted our host
and Jacquaine. The earnestness of his expression and pose were a
contrast to his usual stolidity and to her apparently callous mood. He
was offering to her what showed like a bunch of violets enfolded in a
note. For the moment I fancied she had given acceptance, but suddenly
she sprang from the chair, threw the bouquet and paper on the floor, and
ruthlessly ground her heel into them. Then she stalked away--he
following and remonstrating."

"What happened?"

"Well, in my zest for flower history I leapt forward to rescue this
little bouquet and found that which I imagined to be a note was in fact
a cheque for L8000."

"Signed by him?"

"Yes; made payable to bearer."

"What did you do?"

"What I knew she would have desired. I enclosed it in an envelope
addressed to him and left it before daybreak at his own house."

"Without a word?"

"Without a word."

"And this is the bouquet?"

"Yes. It is the only souvenir I have of one who was dear to me. Whether
I loved because I pitied or pitied because I loved I cannot say. There
are some riddles which no one can solve."

"You never tried?"

"No. She was a noble woman, and her husband, too, was a decent fellow,
as far as men go. They were admirably fitted by nature for each other,
but matrimony dislocated them. That is another of the riddles that
frustrate us."

To avert further comment Bentham folded the page and lounged deeper into
his chair, as though overcome by fatigue.

Presently he resumed.

"That is a <DW29>. It was pressed in a book. It marked the place. We read
the poem together, she and I, that creature of warm wax pulsating with
childish naivetes and provoking contrariety. We read it together in the
orange gardens of the hotel looking out over a green transparency of
Mediterranean. I wonder if the scent of orange blossom, warmed by the
breath of the sea, is an intoxicant, if it soaks in at the pores and
quickens the veins to madness? Mine never seemed so palpitating with
delirium as in those days with her by my side, and the free heavens and
ocean for her setting. Yet she was ready to leave me without changing
the indefinitude which always accompanied her words and actions, to
leave me on the morrow--for I was anchored to a studio and some
commissions to which I was pledged. But though she had a certain prosaic
flippancy of speech which spelt discouragement, my heart refused a
literal translation of her idiom. On the last day I determined to sound
her, and subtly contrived to wrest her attention with this poem. We read
it together. Her soft cheek neared mine with a downy magnetism, and
vagrant fibrils of tawny hair danced with the wind against my ear. After
the second verse I placed this <DW29> as a mile-stone to colour our
travels on the open page. She assisted me to flatten the curling leaves,
and my huge hand extinguished her tiny one. Then I whispered--oh, never
mind what I whispered--it was a line of nature that the artistic reserve
of the poet had omitted. She closed the book and covered her face with
her hands to hide the trouble and the tears which puckered it. I made a
nest for her in my arms, but she fluttered free out into the orange
orchards and so to the house. All day I wandered about sore and sulky.
At night I tried to see her, and was informed she was ill. On the morrow
I was startled to find she had gone with her friends by the early
train."

"And did you not hear from her?"

"Yes, she left a letter behind; I should like to show it you--to see
what you make of it."

He rose and from his bureau extracted a note; then he resumed his seat
and tossed me the almost illegible scrawl:--

    DEAR LIONEL,--All this time I have been too blessed--too
    supremely happy to face the truth. You do not know my real name
    nor my grievous history, and the more I love and honour you the
    harder becomes the revelation. I can endure it no more--so
    good-bye.

"And was that all?"

"Absolutely. I pressed the <DW29> in the poem, and vowed--such vows are
cheap--never to trust a woman again. But, after all, what claim have we
to view our love as a priceless gift when we invariably demand cent. per
cent. in kind? I have argued this out with myself, and realise that I
was her debtor, I was first an artist whom she had patronised and
then--a man whom she had----"

"Well?"

"I was going to say--ennobled. Don't you think there are some women who,
by power of faith, transmute even clay-footed idols into gold?"

I shook my head and prepared to turn over the leaf, but he made as
though to remove the book.

"That last one is a marguerite. It tells a very bald narrative--just a
common instance of man's blockheadedness and Fate's topsy-turvydom."

Bentham threw aside his cigarette and closed his eyes. He was looking
worn and old.

"I think I have told you all," he continued presently, "except about
these petals. They were gathered from the ground as her fingers shredded
them to discover whether I loved her _passionement_ or _pas du tout."_

"The same person?"

"No, another; she was what is called a coquette--an innocent girl baby,
who played with men's hearts as children probe sawdust dolls--from a
spirit of inquiry. For some silly wager she flirted with a man staying
in the hotel, an uncouth provincial clown whom I ignored. But it
maddened me. I started for the States to accept a commission that had
been offered--that my love for her had held in the balance--and--and I
never saw her alive again."

There was a long pause, during which the clock on the chimney ticked its
forever--never--without remorse. Gradually the synopsis became more
complete, for I could trace the outlines of the buried hours in
Bentham's grey, impassive face. Then he went on as though
soliloquising:--

"Now I return to it, England seems wider--its population smaller. It is
as if we lived in a great silence like that in the rarified atmosphere
of Swiss heights. Yet the streets are in a turmoil. Beaming girls and
bedizened harridans flaunt in the Row, carriages roll, and polite and
impolite jostle each other for gain or gaiety. There are great singers
at the Opera, great pictures on the Line, great festivities everywhere.
There is a _frou-frou_ of silken skirts, with the scent and the laughter
of happy women round and about me, from dawn till nightfall. Yet my soul
shivers somewhere outside. Shivers"--he repeated, shrinking into his
coat as though midsummer were March--"Why is it? I have lived and loved
and--as you know--recovered, but now--oh, Louis, is there anything so
mutely desolate as fresh spade prints on a grassless grave?"




A Quaint Elopement

  "Ah! little sweetheart, the romance
  Of life, with all its change and chance,
  Is but a sealed book to thee."


It took Ralph Hilyard over twelve hours to journey from Southampton to
St Malo on that momentous June night. The sea tossed and bounded and
roared, but he kept his footing on deck, well satisfied with Nature's
frenzied accompaniment to his own tempestuous thoughts. He was being
borne to the historic town where She, from infancy to womanhood, had
dwelt; he would meet those frank blue Breton eyes adjured for a
year--eyes, whose innocence in one less well descended might have spelt
ignorance--he would adore the graceful form, that, while clamouring of
beauty, hinted all unconsciously of the _haute noblesse_, the ghost of
which abides in St Malo to this moment, though the substance has long
since passed away. He would risk all for the encounter, he told himself.
Round the subject his mind had revolved for three hundred and sixty-four
days; on the three hundred and sixty-fifth his thoughts had sprung to
action--he had set sail.

Her people, an austere mother--who loathed the name of the Republic and
rigidly clamped her door against both the bourgeoisie and our British
nation of shopkeepers--and her brother, Le Sieur de Quesne, a foolish
and thoroughly useless fine gentleman, occupied "La Chaumais," their
ancestral domain, near St Servan, on the river Rance. This domain was
almost as hermetically sealed as a convent, and far more gloomy. It
served to perfection as a prison for the peccant Leonie, when it was
discovered that, during a fortnight's stay with an aunt in Paris, she
had ventured to eye as a lover a portionless upstart, an artist who
worked for mere bread in the Quartier Latin. Here, for twelve months,
the poor delinquent was incarcerated. In this mouldy mansion she either
knitted or stared vacantly out at the rank unkempt grass and the
dilapidated fences, kept by poverty unrepaired, while her parent
reiterated stories of the grand old days when the tapestried chairs,
woefully faded, had been fresh and beauteous, and when the de Quesne
nobles had flitted from the splendours of the Tuilleries to hold rural
court within those blackened portals now so severe of aspect, so
melancholy and silent with the pulselessness of stagnation.

A sore punishment this for having confessed in her heart's _naivete_ a
passion for a hero of the brush, a vagrant in velveteen who painted
pictures and--vulgarian!--sold them to any patronising passer-by. It was
penalty dire enough for a _debutante_ who had but sipped Paris, it waxed
doubly dreadful to inquiring Eve within scent of the apple tree. There
were tears at first, sobs of despair, then dumb contumacy, and
latterly--when the spring weather returned again--kicks! But the pricks
of family pride were sharp to lunge against, and many drops of heart's
blood were spilt in the exercise. Restrictions only grew more rigid, and
the poor little damsel, who had tricoteed sombrely in the ancestral
dungeon during the winter, was, in summer, never permitted to roam
without the vigilant companionship of the substantial retainer
Valentine, a worthy who, from her elaborately starched _coiffe_ to the
heels of her _sabots_, was strongly imbued with a sense of conscientious
vassalage to "Madame," as Leonie's mother in these degenerate days
condescended to be styled.

But love, which laughs at iron bars, makes also mock at the effrontery
of blue blood. There came a day, not long after Ralph Hilyard's sudden
arrival at St Malo, when, Valentine's expansive back being for a moment
turned, a two-lined scribble on a shred of drawing paper was placed in
Mademoiselle de Quesne's hands.

It said curtly, with concise eloquence:--

"I want you. I can live without you no longer."

The opportunity presented itself in this wise. Though cut off from all
other pleasures of youth, Leonie was, at midsummer, for the short six
weeks' season, allowed to bathe in the sea, attended by the faithful
Valentine. She crossed daily to St Malo on the "_Pont Roulant_"--a
quaint structure that, moved by chains and steam, plies the water on
sand-embedded rails--and there joined in the acquatic gambols of the
merry crowd. With the strange inconsistency of the narrow, her
relatives, who had almost tabooed society, permitted her to indulge her
taste for swimming, a sport in which she excelled. This laxity probably
owed its origin to routine cultivated in the girl's childhood, and
retained--as were all the observances of Madame's distinguished
household--still intact and unchallenged.

At St Malo, as the tide ebbed, all the delightfully _insouciant_ and
cheery French world congregated. The sands near the giant rock that
marks the ideal resting-place of Chateaubriand were dotted with tents--a
perfect army of mushrooms--which served as disrobing shelters for the
bathers. From these emerged a brilliant throng of masqueraders of both
sexes, who tripped to the tide with varying degrees of elegant
assurance. As Leonie's lithe figure, with its natty tunic and cherry
waist-band, slipped from the tent (Valentine for the moment was
arranging the shed raiment) a gamin with bare limbs and furled shrimping
net lurched up against her. There was unusual audacity in the eye of the
youngster, but the disrespect was forgiven when a missive, crunched in
his plump palm, was transferred to hers.

She clasped her hands, drew a long breath of rapturous surprise, and
devoutly whispered:--

"_Que Dieu soit beni!_"

The Catholic and Breton temperament is so finely interwoven that even
this sudden overstepping of family restrictions had to her its pious
side. She could there and then, in effervescent thankfulness, have knelt
to worship all the infinitesimal saintlings of whom her lover had never
heard, but who, with her, were active pioneers to mercy. Besides this,
love, which, when real, touches the religious string in every breast,
had so long played an accompaniment to prayer and worship, that her
first action was almost mechanically devotional. Her second, in
contrast, was crudely mundane. Valentine, complacency beaming from her
triple chins, loomed expansively in the doorway of the tent, so Leonie,
slipping the billet in her mouth, sped for protection to the ocean, the
only haven where she could be free from company and espionage.

She battled against the waves till she neared the protective raft in
deep water where timorous bathers never ventured. Then she hoisted
herself up, took the scrap of paper