"One day, during the Easter vacation, I got a note from her asking me to supper at her house. Jack was invited too: we lodged8 together while my people were away.
"There is no need to dwell upon that supper. There were two or three women there of her own sort, or worse, and a dozen men from among the most profligate9 in London. The conversation was, I should think, bad even for that class; and she, the goddess of my idolatry, outstripped10 them all by the foul11, coarse shamelessness of her language and behavior. Before the entertainment was half over, I rose and took my leave, accompanied by Jack and another man,— Legard was his name,—who I presume was bored. Just as we had passed through into the anteroom, which lay beyond the one in which we had been eating, Delia followed us, and laying her hand on Jack's arm, said that she must speak with him. Legard and I went into the outer hall, and we had not been there more than a minute when the door from the anteroom opened, and we heard Delia's voice. I remember the words well,—that was not the only occasion on which I was to hear them. 'I will keep the ring as a record of my love,' she said, 'and understand, that though you may forget, I never shall.' Jack came through, the door closed, and as we went out I glanced towards his left hand, and saw, as I expected to see, the absence of the ring which he usually wore there. It contained a gem12 which my mother had picked up in the East, and I knew that he valued it quite peculiarly. We always called it Jack's talisman14.
"A miserable15 time followed, a time for me of agonizing16 wonder and doubt, during which regret for my dead illusion was entirely17 swallowed up in the terrible dread18 of my brother's degradation19. Then came the announcement of his engagement to Lady Sylvia Grey; and a week later, the very day after I had finally returned to London from Oxford, I received a summons from Delia to come and see her. Curiosity, and the haunting fear about Jack, which still hung round me, induced me to consent to what otherwise would have been intolerably repellent to me, and I went. I found her in a mad passion of fury. Jack had refused to see her or to answer her letters, and she had sent for me, that I might give him her message,—tell him that he belonged to her and her only, and that he never should marry another woman. Angry at my interference, Jack disdained20 even to repudiate21 her claims, only sending back a threat of appealing to the police if she ventured upon any further annoyance22. I wrote as she told me, and she emphasized my silence on the subject by writing back to me a more definite and explicit23 assertion of her rights. Beyond that for some weeks she made no sign. I have no doubt that she had means of keeping watch upon both his movements and mine; and during that time, as she relinquished24 gradually all hopes of inducing him to abandon his purpose, she was being driven to her last despairing resolve.
"Later, when all was over, Jack told me the story of that spring and summer. He told me how, when he found me immovable on the subject, he had resolved to stop the marriage somehow through Delia herself. He had made her acquaintance, and sought her society frequently. She had taken a fancy to him, and he admitted that he had availed himself of this fact to increase his intimacy25 with her, and, as he hoped ultimately, his power over her. But he was not conscious of ever having varied26 in his manner towards her of contemptuous indifference27. This contradictory28 behavior,—his being constantly near her, yet always beyond her reach,—was probably the very thing which excited her fancy into passion, the one strong passion of the poor woman's life. Then came his deliberate demand that she should by her own act unmask herself in my sight. The unfortunate woman tried to bargain for some proof of affection in return, and on this occasion had first openly declared her feelings towards him. He did not believe her; he refused her terms; but when as her payment she asked for the ring which was so especially associated with himself, he agreed to give it to her. Otherwise hoping, no doubt against hope, dreading29 above all things a quarrel and final separation, she submitted unconditionally30. And from the time of that evening, when Legard and I had overheard her parting words, Jack never saw her again until the last and final catastrophe31.
"It was in July. My parents had returned to England, but had come straight on here. Jack and I were dining together with Lady Sylvia at her father's house—her brother, young Grey, making the fourth at dinner. I had arranged to go to a party with your mother, and I told the servants that a lady would call for me early in the evening. The house stood in Park Lane, and after dinner we all went out on to the broad balcony which opened from the drawing- room. There was a strong wind blowing that night, and I remember well the vague, disquieted32 feeling of unreality that possessed33 me,— sweeping34 through me, as it were, with each gust35 of wind. Then, suddenly, a servant stood behind me, saying that the lady had come for me, and was in the drawing-room. Shocked that my aunt should have troubled herself to come so far, I turned quickly, stepped back into the room, and found myself face to face with Delia. She was fully36 dressed for the evening, with a long silk opera-cloak over her shoulders, her face as white as her gown, her splendid eyes strangely wide open and shining. I don't know what I said or did; I tried to get her away, but it was too late. The others had heard us, and appeared at the open window. Jack came forward at once, speaking rapidly, fiercely; telling her to leave the house at once; promising37 desperately38 that he would see her in his own rooms on the morrow. Well I remember how her answer rang out,—
"'Neither to-morrow nor another day: I will never leave you again while I live.'
"At the same instant she drew something swiftly from under her cloak, there was the sound of a pistol shot and she lay dead at our feet, her blood splashing upon Jack's shirt and hands as she fell."
Alan paused in his recital40. He was trembling from head to foot; but he kept his eyes turned steadily41 downwards42, and both face and voice were cold—almost expressionless.
"Of course there was an inquest," he resumed, "which, as usual, exercised its very ill-defined powers in inquiring into all possible motives43 for the suicide. Young Grey, who had stepped into the room just before the shot had been fired, swore to the last words Delia had uttered; Legard to those he had overheard the night of that dreadful supper: there were scores of men to bear witness to the intimate relations which had existed between her and Jack during the whole of the previous spring. I had to give evidence. A skillful lawyer had been retained by one of her sisters, and had been instructed by her on points which no doubt she had originally learnt from Delia herself. In his hands, I had not only to corroborate44 Grey and Legard, and to give full details of that last interview, but also to swear to the peculiar13 value which Jack attached to the talisman ring which he had given Delia; to the language she had held when I saw her after my return from Oxford; to her subsequent letter, and Jack's fatal silence on the occasion. The story by which Jack and I strove to account for the facts was laughed at as a clumsy invention, and my undisguised reluctance45 in giving evidence added greatly to its weight against my brother's character.
"The jury returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, the result of desertion by her lover. You may imagine how that verdict was commented upon by every Radical46 newspaper in the kingdom, and for once society more than corroborated47 the opinions of the press. The larger public regarded the story as an extreme case of the innocent victim and the cowardly society villain48. It was only among a comparatively small set that Delia's reputation was known, and there, in view of Jack's notorious and peculiar intimacy, his repudiation49 of all relations with her was received with contemptuous incredulity. That he should have first entered upon such relations at the very time when he was already courting Lady Sylvia was regarded even in those circles as a 'strong order,' and they looked upon his present attitude with great indignation, as a cowardly attempt to save his own character by casting upon the dead woman's memory all the odium of a false accusation50. With an entire absence of logic51, too, he was made responsible for the suicide having taken place in Lady Sylvia's presence. She had broken off the engagement the day after the catastrophe, and her family, a clan52 powerful in the London world, furious at the mud through which her name had been dragged, did all that they could to intensify53 the feeling already existing against Jack.
"Not a voice was raised in his defense54. He was advised to leave the army; he was requested to withdraw from some of his clubs, turned out of others, avoided by his fast acquaintances, cut by his respectable ones. It was enough to kill a weaker man.
"He showed no resentment55 at the measure thus dealt out to him. Indeed, at the first, except for Sylvia's desertion of him, he seemed dully indifferent to it all. It was as if his soul had been stunned56, from the moment that that wretched woman's blood had splashed upon his fingers, and her dead eyes had looked up into his own.
"But it was not long before he realized the full extent of the social damnation which had been inflicted57 upon him, and he then resolved to leave the country and go to America. The night before he started he came down here to take leave. I was here looking after my parents—George, whose mind was almost unhinged by the family disgrace, having gone abroad with his wife. My mother at the first news of what had happened had taken to her bed, never to leave it again; and thus it was in my presence alone, up there in my father's little study, that Jack gave him that night the whole story. He told it quietly enough; but when he had finished, with a sudden outburst of feeling he turned upon me. It was I who had been the cause of it all. My insensate folly58 had induced him to make the unhappy woman's acquaintance, to allow and even encourage her fatal love, to commit all the blunders and sins which had brought about her miserable ending and his final overthrow59. It was by means of me that she had obtained access to him on that dreadful night; my evidence which most utterly60 damned him in public opinion; through me he had lost his reputation, his friends, his career, his country, the woman he loved, his hopes for the future; through me, above all, that the burden of that horrible death would lie for ever on his soul. He was lashing39 himself to fury with his own words as he spoke61; and I stood leaning against the wall opposite to him, cold, dumb, unresisting, when suddenly my father interrupted. I think that both Jack and I had forgotten his presence; but at the sound of his voice, changed from what we had ever heard it, we turned to him, and I then for the first time saw in his face the death-look which never afterwards quitted it.
"'Stop, Jack,' he said; 'Alan is not to blame; and if it had not been in this way, it would have been in some other. I only am guilty, who brought you both into existence with my own hell- stained blood in your veins62. If you wish to curse anyone, curse your family, your name, me if you will, and may God forgive me that you were ever born into the world!'"
Alan stopped with a shudder63, and then continued, dully, "It was when I heard those words, the most terrible that a father could have uttered, that I first understood all that that old sixteenth- century tale might mean to me and mine,—I have realized it vividly64 enough since. Early the next morning, when the dawn was just breaking, Jack came to the door of my room to bid me good-by. All his passion was gone. His looks and tones seemed part and parcel of the dim gray morning light. He freely withdrew all the charges he had made against me the night before; forgave me all the share that I had had in his misfortunes; and then begged that I would never come near him, or let him hear from me again. 'The curse is heavy upon us both,' he said, 'and it is the only favor which you can do me.' I have never seen him since."
"But you have heard of him!" I exclaimed; "what has become of him?"
Alan raised himself to a sitting posture65. "The last that I heard," he said, with a catch in his voice, "was that in his misery66 and hopelessness he was taking to drink. George writes to him, and does what he can; but I—I dare not say a word, for fear it should turn to poison on my lips,—I dare not lift a hand to help him, for fear it should have power to strike him to the ground. The worst may be yet to come; I am still living, still living: there are depths of shame to which he has not sunk. And oh, Evie, Evie, he is my own, my best-loved brother!"
All his composure was gone now. His voice rose to a kind of wail67 with the last words, and folding his arms on his raised knee, he let his head fall upon them, while his figure quivered with scarcely restrained emotion. There was a silence for some moments while he sat thus, I looking on in wretched helplessness beside him. Then he raised his head, and, without looking round at me, went on in a low tone: "And what is in the future? I pray that death instead of shame may be the portion of the next generation, and I look at George's boys only to wonder which of them is the happy one who shall some day lie dead at his brother's feet. Are you surprised at my resolution never to marry? The fatal prophecy is rich in its fulfillment; none of our name and blood are safe; and the day might come when I too should have to call upon my children to curse me for their birth,—should have to watch while the burden which I could no longer bear alone pressed the life from their mother's heart."
Through the tragedy of this speech I was conscious of a faint suggestion of comfort, a far-off glimmer68, as of unseen home-lights on a midnight sky. I was in no mood then to understand, or to seek to understand, what it was; but I know now that his words had removed the weight of helpless banishment69 from my spirit—that his heart, speaking through them to my own, had made me for life the sharer of his grief.
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1
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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2
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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3
calumnies
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| n.诬蔑，诽谤，中伤（的话）( calumny的名词复数 ) | |
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4
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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6
Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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7
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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8
lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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9
profligate
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| adj.行为不检的；n.放荡的人，浪子，肆意挥霍者 | |
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10
outstripped
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| v.做得比…更好，（在赛跑等中）超过( outstrip的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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11
foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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12
gem
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| n.宝石，珠宝；受爱戴的人 [同]jewel | |
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13
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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14
talisman
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| n.避邪物，护身符 | |
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15
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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16
agonizing
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| adj.痛苦难忍的；使人苦恼的v.使极度痛苦；折磨(agonize的ing形式) | |
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17
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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18
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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19
degradation
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| n.降级；低落；退化；陵削；降解；衰变 | |
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20
disdained
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| 鄙视( disdain的过去式和过去分词 )； 不屑于做，不愿意做 | |
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21
repudiate
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| v.拒绝，拒付，拒绝履行 | |
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22
annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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23
explicit
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| adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的 | |
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24
relinquished
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| 交出，让给( relinquish的过去式和过去分词 )； 放弃 | |
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25
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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26
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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28
contradictory
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| adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立 | |
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29
dreading
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| v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的现在分词 ) | |
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30
unconditionally
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| adv.无条件地 | |
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31
catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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32
disquieted
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| v.使不安，使忧虑，使烦恼( disquiet的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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33
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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35
gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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36
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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37
promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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38
desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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39
lashing
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| n.鞭打；痛斥；大量；许多v.鞭打( lash的现在分词 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
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40
recital
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| n.朗诵，独奏会，独唱会 | |
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41
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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42
downwards
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| adj./adv.向下的（地），下行的（地） | |
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43
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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44
corroborate
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| v.支持，证实，确定 | |
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45
reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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46
radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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47
corroborated
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| v.证实，支持（某种说法、信仰、理论等）( corroborate的过去式 ) | |
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48
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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49
repudiation
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| n.拒绝；否认；断绝关系；抛弃 | |
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50
accusation
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| n.控告，指责，谴责 | |
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51
logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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52
clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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53
intensify
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| vt.加强；变强；加剧 | |
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54
defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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55
resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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56
stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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57
inflicted
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| 把…强加给，使承受，遭受( inflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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58
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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59
overthrow
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| v.推翻，打倒，颠覆；n.推翻，瓦解，颠覆 | |
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60
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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61
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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62
veins
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| n.纹理；矿脉( vein的名词复数 )；静脉；叶脉；纹理 | |
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63
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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64
vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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65
posture
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| n.姿势，姿态，心态，态度；v.作出某种姿势 | |
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66
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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67
wail
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| vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸 | |
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68
glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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69
banishment
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| n.放逐，驱逐 | |
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