M. E. Braddon

“ No, there were not many women made in that mould. The splendid hazel eyes—les yeux d'or—the burnished gold in the dark-brown hair, the perfect eyelids and long auburn lashes, the delicate aquiline nose and short upper lip with its little look of hauteur, the beautifully-modelled chin with a dimple in it, and the marble white of a throat such as sculptors love—no, that kind of woman is not to be matched as easily as a skein of silk.
"I think, Lady Perivale, the first and most important step is to discover the identity of this person who has been mistaken for you," Mr. Harding said gravely. ”

“ The street door was painted sky-blue, the hall and staircase were white, the rich colouring of the wall-papers made a vivid background to the sober tones of the old furniture, and in the dainty drawing-room, with its apple-blossom chintz and exquisite Chelsea china, the daintiest thing was old Mrs. Rannock, with her pink-and-white complexion, silvery hair, patrician features and bearing, tall and slender figure, rich brocade gown, and Honiton cap with lappets that fell almost to her waist.
She was an ideal old lady, grande dame in every detail. ”

“ Nonsense, Sue!" cried Lady Perivale, flinging down a volume of "The Ring and the Book," which she had been nursing all the afternoon.
"And as we are supposed to dine at eight, I think we ought to go home and put on our tea-gowns," pursued Sue, sedately.
Can there be such happiness in life; bliss that annihilates thought and time? Grace blushed crimson, ashamed of having been so happy.
Mr. Haldane bade them good night at the bottom of the garden steps, where his outrigger was waiting for him. ”

“ Don't stay in this odious London, where people have no hearts. Why not go to your Northern castle, and live there quietly till the mystery clears itself, as no doubt it will soon?"
"Go?" cried Lady Perivale, starting up out of the drooping attitude in which she had given way to her distress. "Beat a retreat? Why, if Grosvenor Square were a fiery furnace I would stay and face those wretches—those false, false friends—till I made them know the kind of woman I am!"
"Well, dear, perhaps that is best—if you can stand it," Susan answered, rather sadly.
"But where is Colonel Rannock? ”

“ Haldane was silent. His fingers were itching for a stout malacca and for a scoundrel's back upon which to exercise it. He would have given so much to focus the malignant slander that had followed the woman he loved, and had made even him, her adoring lover, begin to doubt her, with a wavering faith of which he was now so deeply ashamed.
Oh, to have some one to punish with sharp physical pain, some craven hound to offer up as a sacrifice to his own remorse! ”

“ A strong man struck down in the prime of life. Think of that unburied corpse, lying hidden on the solitary shore, the waters rolling over it as the tide rose and fell—unknown, unhonoured. If you loved him, you must want to avenge his murder."
"I ain't going to peach upon Jim Bolisco," she said doggedly. "And if I was capable of it, my evidence would be no good."
"Why not?" asked Faunce, startled.
"Because he's my husband; and a wife can't give away her husband. That's law, ain't it, Faunce?" ”

“ She was Grace's senior by more than ten years. She was good-looking in her strong and rather masculine way—her complexion of a healthy darkness, unsophisticated by pearl-powder, her features rugged, but not ugly, her eyes bright and shrewd, but capable of tenderness, her gown and hat just the right gown and hat for a woman who walked, or rode in an omnibus or a hansom.
"Well, Sue, what's the news?" asked Grace, pouring out her visitor's tea. "Is it a particularly dull season? Is nobody entertaining?" ”

“ Faunce proved a kind friend to the unhappy woman whose days and nights were haunted by the image of her murdered lover. Broken in spirits, all the evil ways of her dissipated youth wreaking their revenge upon health and beauty, the physician to whom Faunce took her pronounced her doom. The hand of death was upon her. It was only a question of time.
"If she stays in London she will hardly last through the winter," he told Faunce. "I should recommend Bournemouth or Ventnor—Ventnor for choice. And she may rub along through next summer. But you must stop the morphia habit." ”

“ We are weak mortals, when we are civilized, and live in the best society, and that visit of Lady Morningside's, that hearty kindness from a motherly woman who had fashion and influence, exercised a soothing and a stimulating effect on Grace Perivale.
"I am a fool to sit quiet under such an atrocious calumny," she thought. "There must be some way of letting the world know that I was spending my winter alone in my Italian villa, while some short-sighted fools thought they saw me in Africa. It ought not to be difficult. I must get some one to help me, somebody who knows the world. ”

“ I have no father or brother to take my part; no man-friend who cares enough for me——" She stopped, with something like a sob in her voice. "I have nothing but my money."
"That is not a bad thing to begin the battle with, Lady Perivale," answered Faunce, with his shrewd smile; "but money is not quite such an important factor in my operations as most people think. If things cannot be found out in a fairly cheap manner they cannot be found out at all. When a detective tells you he has to offer large bribes to get information, you may take it from me that he is either a fool or a cheat. ”

“ They were of a humour to ramble over the world together; but in the mean time life was so sweet in the Thames backwaters, among flowering rushes and under dipping willows, and on the lawn at Runnymede Grange, that they seldom went as much as a mile afield. Lovers are like children at play in a garden, who dream of the days when they will be grown up and sail through blue skies in a balloon, to find where the world leaves off. ”

“ Could you have ever been a happy woman?"
"No, no, no," she wailed, "never again! I loved him! He was the only man I ever loved. I used him badly enough, God knows; but he was the only one, the only one. Poor old Tony was a good sort, and I made a fool of him and helped him to ruin himself, and I was sorry when he went off in a decline. Poor chap! He just chucked his life away. Too much fizz, and too much card-playing and late hours. Poor old Tony. He was only six and twenty when the doctors gave him over."
"But Rannock was the favourite," said Faunce. ”

“ There was only one thing, Faunce thought, that would make her difficult—a genuine attachment to Rannock. If she really loved him, as such women can love, it might be hard work to induce her to betray him, even though no fatal consequences to him hung upon her secrecy. He knew the dogged fidelity which worthless women sometimes give to worthless men.
The hotel was almost empty, so after a prolonged siesta Mr. Faunce dined with the manager in the restaurant, which they had to themselves, while half a dozen tourists made a disconsolate little group in the desolation of the spacious dining-room. ”

“ I know he's a cold-blooded murderer, and that while you and Rannock were walking by the water, Bolisco crept up behind you and struck him on the back of his head with a life-preserver—a blow that fractured his skull."
"Did any one see?" she gasped. "Oh, God, I've heard the dip of the oars as the boat crept up to the wall—I've heard it all through the night sometimes, in a dog's sleep—dip—dip—dip—and then a step on the pavement behind us, and then a crash, and the dull thud when Rannock fell. ”

“ They walked up and down the little avenue of limes till the golden light took a rosier glow and shone upon a lower level, and until Lady Perivale's servants thought she had gone home in somebody else's carriage, and forgotten that her own was waiting for her.
She told Haldane all that had happened to her since her return to London—her indignation, her contempt for her false friends, Lady Morningside's kindness, her engagement of Faunce, the detective, and her hope that she would be able to refute the slander in a court of law. ”

“ Faunce had said there would be a libel when it was wanted, and Faunce, who was an old friend of Brown Smith's, had produced the libel. Nobody was any the worse, and Society was deeply humiliated at discovering how cruelly it had misjudged a charming member of its own privileged body. Lady Morningside and her husband made their way to Lady Perivale directly the judge left his seat, and the old Marquis, with an old-fashioned gallantry that recalled "Cupid" Palmerston, bent over Grace's ungloved hand and kissed it: a demonstration that thrilled the smart hats and eye-glasses. ”

“ Grace fell in love with the spot because, although near the high-road to Genoa, it lay off the beaten track, and was purely Italian—no Swiss-German hotel, no English tourists. The villa was out of repair, and by no means beautiful; but some extent of land went with it—olive woods, lemon groves, old, old mulberry trees, festooned with vines that were looped from tree to tree, banks of carnations, a wilderness of roses.
Lady Perivale sent for the owner's agent, and bought land and villa as easily as she would have bought a bonnet. ”

“ It would have been so easy to ask him to dinner, so easy to keep him till midnight, so easy to prolong the sweetness of golden hours. But Grace was discreet. They were not lovers, only friends. She wanted to spin to its finest thread this season of sweet uncertainty, these exquisite hours on the threshold of Paradise. And then Sue might think him a bore. Sue was not overfond of masculine society. She liked to put her feet on a chair after dinner, and she sometimes liked a cigarette.
"I never smoke before men," she told Grace. "They think we do it to please, or to shock them." ”

“ That outer world, the world of Mayfair and Belgravia, with its sordid interests and petty ambitions, the world of South African millionaires and new-made nobility, the world in which every smart personage was living in some other smart personage's house, and everybody who wasn't accredited with millions was suspected of being on the brink of insolvency; that élite, over-civilized and decadent world—dazzling and alluring in the phosphorescent radiance of decay—seemed so remote from all that makes happiness, that it could not be worth thinking about. ”

“ He walked from his rooms in Jermyn Street to Grosvenor Square every night, and paced the pavements within view of Lady Perivale's windows, steering clear of the houses where there were parties, with awnings, and blocks of bystanders, and policemen, and linkmen. He saw the lighted windows of the morning-room, and sometimes saw a graceful shadow flit across the blind, and knew that she was there, and alone. No masculine form ever passed between the lamp and the windows. ”

“ She has been made the subject of a slander so futile, so preposterous, that one marvels less at the malice of the writer than at his imbecility. A woman of gentle birth and exalted position, hemmed round and protected by all those ceremonial ramparts that are at once the restraint and privilege of wealth and social status, is supposed to have roamed the Continent with her paramour, braving public opinion with the brazen hardihood of the trained courtesan. ”

“ I remember him about town ten years ago—a Yorkshire baronet with large estates in the West Riding—a weak-kneed youth with a passion for the Fancy, always heard of at prize-fights, and entertaining fighting men, putting up money for private glove-fights; a poor creature, born to be the prey of swindlers and loose women."
Faunce looked back to that period of ten years ago, which seemed strangely remote, more by reason of the changes in ideas and fashions, whim and folly, than by the lapse of time. ”

“ Do you know that, ever since I read the 'Moonstone'—and I was little more than a child when I read that most enthralling book—I have been longing to meet a detective—a real detective?"
"I feel honoured, madam, for my profession. People are apt to think unkindly of our trade, though they can't do without us."
He was still standing with his hat in his hand, waiting for some sign from Lady Perivale.
"The world is full of injustice," she said. "Pray sit down, Mr. Faunce, and gratify my friend's curiosity about the mysteries of your art." ”

“ No mistaking her—as handsome a woman as you'd see in a day's journey; no mistaking him—a wrong 'un, but a damn good-looking demon, with the manners of Chesterfield and the morals of Robert Macaire, the sort of man most women admire."
"Only the wrong sort of women, I think," said Mordaunt, resuming his cue, the soldier having spaced his sentences with cannons and losers, and made a break of twenty while he talked. "I can't understand such a woman as Lady Perivale disgracing herself by an intrigue of that kind—least of all for such a man as Rannock. ”

“ You are not to suppose I ever cared about Colonel Rannock. I liked his playing, and his conversation amused me—and the more people told me that the Rannocks were unprincipled and disreputable, the more determined I was to be civil to him. One gets so tired of the good people who have never done wrong; and one doesn't take much account of a man's morals when he's only an acquaintance. ”

“ We have found a delicious villa at Tivoli, where we shall retire towards the end of May, and where our days and nights will be spent in a garden of roses and lilies, with a fountain that makes music all day long. In the mean time this city furnishes inexhaustible pleasures and interests, and life is so vivid and joyous that I feel as if I only began to live when I came here. ”