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                     =The Island of Fantasy=
                               A Romance

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                             By FERGUS HUME

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_Author of “When I Lived In Bohemia,” “The Mystery of a Hansom Cab,”
“The Man Who Vanished,” etc_.

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                      Sorrow and weariness,
                      Heartache and dreariness,
                        None should endure;
                      Scale ye the mountain peak,
                      Vale ’o the fountain seek,
                        There is the cure.




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                        _R. F. FENNO & COMPANY_
                9 and 11 East Sixteenth Street, New York
                                  1905

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                            COPYRIGHT, 1892,

                                   BY

                       UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY

                                  ---

                        [_All rights reserved_]








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                         THE ISLAND OF FANTASY.

                  ------------------------------------

                               CHAPTER I.
                            A MIND DISEASED.

            Your Eastern drugs, your spices, your perfumes,
            Are all in vain;
            They cannot snatch my soul from out its glooms,
            Nor soothe the brain.
            My mind is dark as cycle-sealèd tombs,
            And must remain
            In darkness till the light of God illumes
            Its black inane.


It was eight o’clock on a still summer evening, and, the ladies having
retired, two men were lingering in a pleasant, indolent fashion over
their wine in the dining-room of Roylands Grange. To be exact, only the
elder gentleman was paying any attention to his port, for the young man
who sat at the head of the table stared vaguely on his empty glass, and
at his equally empty plate, as if his thoughts were miles away, which
was precisely the case. Youth was moody, age was cheerful, for, while
the former indulged in a brown study, the latter cracked nuts and sipped
wine, with a just appreciation of the excellence of both. Judging from
this outward aspect of things, there was something wrong with Maurice
Roylands, for if reverend age in the presentable person of Rector
Carriston could be merry, there appeared to be no very feasible reason
why unthinking youth should be so ineffably dreary. Yet woe was writ
largely on the comely face of the moody young man, and he joined but
listlessly in the jocund conversation of his companion, which was
punctuated in a very marked manner by the cracking of filberts.

Outside, a magical twilight brooded over the landscape, and the chill
odors of eve floated from a thousand sleeping flowers into the mellow
atmosphere of the room, which was irradiated by the soft gleam of many
wax candles rising white and slender from amid the pale roses adorning
the dinner-table. All was pleasant, peaceful, and infinitely charming;
yet Maurice Roylands, aged thirty, healthy, wealthy, and not at all
bad-looking, sat moodily frowning at his untasted dessert, as though he
bore the weight of the world on his shoulders.

In truth, Mr. Roylands, with the usual self-worship of latter-day youth,
thought he was being very hardly treated by Destiny, as that
all-powerful goddess had given him everything calculated to make a
mortal happy, save the capability of being happy. This was undeniably
hard, and might be called the very irony of fate, for one might as well
offer a sumptuous banquet to a dyspeptic, as give a man all the means of
enjoyment, without the faculty of taking advantage of such good fortune.
Roylands had considerable artistic power, an income of nearly six
thousand a year, a fine house, friends innumerable—of the summer season
sort; yet he neither cared about nor valued these blessings, for the
simple reason that he was heartily sick of them, one and all. He would
have been happier digging a patch of ground for his daily bread, than
thus idling through life on an independent income, for Ennui, twin
sister of Care, had taken possession of his soul, and in the midst of
all his comforts he was thoroughly unhappy.

The proverb that “The rich are more miserable than the poor,” is but a
trite one on which to preach a sermon, for did not Solomon say all that
there was to be said in the matter? It was an easier task to write a new
play on the theme of Hamlet, than to compose a novel discourse on the
“All is vanity” text; for on some subjects the final word has been said,
and he who preaches thereon says nothing new, but only repeats the ideas
of former orators, who in their turn doubtless reiterated the sayings of
still earlier preachers, and so on back to Father Adam, to whom the wily
serpent possibly delivered a sermon on the cynically wise saying
illustrated so exhaustively by Solomon ben David. Therefore, to remark
that Maurice was miserable amid all his splendors is a plagiarism, and
they who desire to study the original version for themselves must read
Ecclesiastes, which gives a minute analysis of the whole question, with
cruelly true comments thereon.

When Roylands ten years before had gone to London, against the desire of
his father, to take up the profession—if it can be called so—of a
sculptor, he was full of energy and ambition. He had fully determined to
set the Thames on fire by the creation of statues worthy of Canova, to
make a great name in the artistic world, to become a member of the
Academy, to inaugurate a new era in the history of English sculpture;
so, with all this glory before him, he turned his back on the flesh-pots
of Egypt and went to dwell in the land of Bohemia. In order to bring the
lad to his senses, Roylands senior refused to aid him with a shilling
until he gave up the pitiful trade—in this country squire’s opinion—of
chipping figures out of marble. Supplies being thus stopped, Maurice
suffered greatly in those artistic days for lack of an assured income;
yet in spite of all his deprivations, he was very happy in Bohemia until
he lived down his enthusiasms. When matters came to that pass, the wine
of life lost its zest for this young man, and he became a victim to
melancholia, that terrible disease for which there is rarely—if any
cure. He lived because he did not agree with Addison’s Cato regarding
the virtues of self-destruction, but as far as actual dying went it
mattered to him neither one way nor the other. If he had done but little
good during his life, at least he had done but little harm, so, thinking
he could scarcely be punished severely for such a negative existence, he
was quite willing to leave this world he found so dreary, provided the
entrance into the next one was not of too painful a nature.

It is a bad thing for a young man to thus take to the pessimistic school
of philosophy as exemplified by Schopenhauer, as, having nothing to look
back at, nothing to look forward to, and nothing to hold on by, the
scheme of his life falls into a ruinous condition, so, being without the
safety anchor of Hope, he drifts aimlessly through existence, a nuisance
to himself and to every one around him. Maurice, listless and
despairing, did no more work than was absolutely necessary to earn a
bare subsistence, and lived his life in a semi-dreamy, semi-lethargic
condition, with no very distinct idea as to what was to be the ultimate
end of all this dreariness. When night fell he was then more at rest,
for in sleep he found a certain amount of compensation for the woes of
his waking hours. As to his modelling, he took a positive dislike to it,
and for this reason improved but little in his work during the last
years of his Bohemian existence. Profoundly disgusted, without any
positive reason, with himself, his art, the world, and his fellow-men,
heaven only knows what would have become of him, had not an event
happened which, by placing him in a new position, seemed to promise his
redemption from the gloomy prison of melancholia.

The event in question was none other than the death of his father, and
Maurice, as in duty bound, came down to the funeral. When the will of
the late Squire was read, it was discovered that, with the exception of
one or two trifling bequests, all the real and personal property was
left to his only son; thus this fortunate young man at the age of thirty
found himself independent of the world for the rest of his days,
provided always he did not squander his paternal acres, a thing he had
not the slightest intention of doing. Maurice had no leanings towards
what is vulgarly termed a “fast life,” for he detested horse-racing,
cared but little for wine, and neither cards nor women possessed any
fascination for him. Not that he was a model young man by any means, but
his tastes were too refined, his nature too intellectual, to admit of
his finding pleasure in drinking, gaming, and their concomitants. As to
love, he did not know the meaning of the word,—at least not the real
meaning,—which was rather a mistake, as it would certainly have given
him an interest in life, and perhaps have prevented him yielding so
readily to the influence of “black care,” which even the genial Venusian
knew something about, seeing he made her an equestrian.

Of course, he was sorry for the death of his father, but there had been
so little real sympathy between them, that he could not absolutely look
upon the event as an irreparable calamity. Maurice had always loved his
mother more than his father, and when she died as he was leaving home
for college he was indeed inconsolable; but he saw the remains of the
late Mr. Roylands duly committed to the family vault without any violent
display of grief, after which he returned to live the life of a country
gentleman at the Grange, and wonder what would be the upshot of this new
phase of his existence.

Solitude was abhorrent to him, as his thoughts were so miserable;
therefore, for the sake of having some one to drive away the evil
spirit, he invited his aunt, the Hon. Mrs. Dengelton, to stay at the
Grange for a week or so. She came without hesitation, and brought her
daughter Eunice also, upon which Maurice, finding two women more than an
unhappy bachelor could put up with, asked the new poet Crispin, for whom
he had a great liking, to come down to Roylands, which that young man
did very willingly, as he was in love with Eunice, a state of things
half guessed and wholly hated by Mrs. Dengelton, who much desired her
daughter to marry the new Squire.

On this special evening, the Rev. Stephen Carriston, Rector of