A Fool’s Paradise.

At Ashbourne preparations had already begun for the wedding in August. It was to be a wedding worthy a duke’s only daughter, the well-beloved and cherished child of an adoring father and mother. Kinsfolk and old friends were coming from far and wide to assist at the ceremony, for whom temporary rooms were to be arranged in all manner of places. The Duchess’s exquisite dairy was to be transformed into a bachelor dormitory. Lodges and gamekeepers’ cottages were utilised. Every nook and corner in the ducal mansion would be full.
“Why not rig up a few hammocks in the nearest pine plantation?” Rorie asked, laughing, when he heard of all these doings. “One couldn’t have a better place to sleep on a sultry summer night.”
There was to be a ball for the tenantry in the evening of the wedding-day, in a marquee on the lawn. The gardens were to be illuminated in a style worthy of the chateau of Vaux, when Fouquet was squandering a nation’s revenues on lamps and fountains and venal friends. Lady Mabel protested against all this fuss.
“Dear mamma, I would so much rather have been married quietly,’ she said.
“My dearest, it is all your papa’s doing. He is so proud of you. And then we have only one daughter; and she is not likely to be married more than once, I hope. Why should we not have all our friends round us at such a time?”
Mabel shrugged her shoulders, with an air of repugnance to all the friends and all the fuss.
“Marriage is such a solemn act of one’s life,” she said. “It seems dreadful that it should be performed in the midst of a gaping, indifferent crowd.”
“My love, there will not be a creature present who can feel indifferent about your welfare,” protested the devoted mother. “If our dear Roderick had been a more distinguished person, your papa would have had you married in Westminster Abbey. There of course there would have been a crowd of idle spectators.”
“Poor Roderick,” sighed Mabel. “It is a pity he is so utterly aimless. He might have made a career for himself by this time, if he had chosen.”
“He will do something by-and-by, I daresay,” said the Duchess, excusingly. “You will be able to mould him as you like, pet.”
“I have not found him particularly malleable hitherto,” said Mabel.
The bride elect was out of spirits, and inclined to look despondently upon life. She was suffering the bitter pain of disappointed hopes. “The Tragedy of a Sceptic Soul,” despite its depth of thought, its exquisite typography and vellumlike paper, had been a dire and irredeemable failure. The reviewers had ground the poor little aristocratic butterfly to powder upon the wheel of ridicule. They had anatomised Lady Mabel’s involved sentences, and laughed at her erudite phrases. Her mild adaptations of Greek thought and fancy had been found out, and held up to contempt. Her petty plagiarisms from French and German poets had been traced to their source. The whole work, no smooth and neatly polished on the outside, had been turned the seamy side without, and the knots and flaws and ravelled threads had been exposed without pity.
Happily the book was anonymous: but Mabel writhed under the criticism. There was the crushing disappointment of expectations that had soared high as the topmost throne on Parnassus. She had a long way to descend. And then there was the sickening certainty that in the eyes of her own small circle she had made herself ridiculous. Her mother took those cruel reviews to heart, and wept over them. The Duke, a coarse-minded man, at best, with a soul hardly above guano and chemical composts, laughed aloud at his poor little girl’s failure.
“It’s a sad disappointment, I daresay,” he said, “but never mind, my pet, you’ll do better next time, I’ve no doubt. Or if you don’t, it doesn’t much matter. Other people have fancied themselves poets, and have been deceived, before to-day.”
“Those horrid reviewers don’t understand her poetry,” protested the Duchess, who would have been hard pushed to comprehend it herself, but who thought it was a critic’s business to understand everything.
“I’m afraid I have written above their heads,” Lady Mabel said piteously.
Roderick Vawdrey was worst of all.
“Didn’t I tell you ‘The Sceptic Soul’ was too fine for ordinary intellects, Mab?” he said. “You lost yourself in an ocean of obscurity. You knew what you meant, but there’s no man alive who could follow you. You ought to have remembered Voltaire’s definition of a metaphysical discussion, a conversation in which the man who is talked to doesn’t understand the man who talks, and the man who talks doesn’t understand himself. You must take a simpler subject and use plainer English if you want to please the multitude.”
Mabel had told her lover before that she did not aspire to please the multitude, that she would have esteemed such cheap and tawdry success a humiliating failure. It was almost better not to be read at all than to be appreciated only by the average Mudie subscriber. But she would have liked someone to read her poems. She would have liked critics to praise and understand her. She would have liked to have her own small world of admirers, an esoteric few, the salt of the earth, literary Essenes, holding themselves apart from the vulgar herd. It was dreadful to find herself on a height as lonely as one of those plateaux in the Tyrolean Alps where the cattle crop a scanty herbage in summer, and where the Ice King reigns alone through the long winter.
“You are mistaken, Roderick,” Mabel said with chilling dignity; “I have friends who can understand and admire my poetry, incomprehensible and uninteresting as it may be to you.”
“Dear Mabel, I never said it was uninteresting,” Roderick cried humbly; “everything you do must be interesting to me. But I frankly own I do not understand your verses as clearly as I think all verse should be understood. Why should I keep all my frankness till after the first of August? Why should the lover be less sincere than the husband? I will be truthful even at the risk of offending you.”
“Pray do,” cried Mabel, with ill-suppressed irritation. “Sincerity is such a delightful thing. No doubt my critics are sincere. They give me the honest undisguised truth.”
Rorie saw that his betrothed’s literary failure was a subject to be carefully avoided in future.
“My poor Vixen,” he said to himself, with oh! what deep regret, “perhaps it was not one of the least of your charms that you never wrote poetry.”
Lord Mallow was coming to Ashbourne for the fortnight before the wedding. He had made himself wondrously agre............