If Only etc.

If Only etc.
by Francis Clement
Philips and Augustus Harris

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Title: If Only etc.
Author: Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
Release Date: March 1, 2005 [EBook #15219]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ETC. ***

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IF ONLY

ETC.
BY
F.C. PHILIPS
AUTHOR OF "AS IN A LOOKING GLASS," ETC. ETC.

LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1904.

TO
MY OLD FRIEND AND COLLABORATOR,
SYDNEY GRUNDY,
I DEDICATE THESE PAGES.
F.C. PHILIPS.

CONTENTS.

IF ONLY
ONE CAN'T ALWAYS TELL
SONGS. AFTER VICTOR HUGO, ARMAND SILVESTRE,
CHARLES ROUSSEAU AND THE VICOMTE DE BORELLI
LOVE WENT OUT WHEN MONEY WAS INVENTED

A PUZZLED PAINTER. (WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH
THE LATE SIR AUGUSTUS HARRIS)
* * * * *

IF ONLY.
CHAPTER I.
There is a vast deal talked in the present day about Freewill. We like to
feel that we are independent agents and are ready to overlook the fact
that our surroundings and circumstances and the hundred and one
subtle and mysterious workings of the fate we can none of us escape,
control our actions and are responsible for our movements, and make
us to a great extent what we are.
A man is not even a free agent when he takes the most important step
of his whole life, and marries a wife. He is impelled to it by
considerations outside of himself; it affects not only his own present
and future, but that of others, very often, and he must be guided
accordingly.
Emerson says; "The soul has inalienable rights, and the first of these is
love," but he does not say marriage. Love is the business of the idle and
the idleness of the busy, but marriage is quite another affair--a grave
matter, and not to be undertaken lightly, since it is the one step that can
never be retraced, save through the unsavoury channels of shame and
notoriety, or death itself.
But perhaps Jack Chetwynd was hampered with fewer restraining
influences than most men, for he was alone in the world, without kith
or kin, and might be fairly allowed to please himself, and pleasing
himself in this case meant leading to the altar, or rather to the Registry
Office, Miss Bella Blackall, music-hall singer and step dancer.
It was unquestionably a case of love at first sight. The girl was barely

seventeen, and her girlishness attracted him quite as much as her beauty,
which was exceptional. There was nothing meretricious about it, for as
yet she owed nothing to art--brown hair, warm lips, soft blue eyes, and
a complexion like the leaf of a white rose--a woman blossom. Then, too,
she was a happy creature, full of life and happiness and bubbling over
with childish merriment--no one could help liking her, he told himself,
but it was something warmer than that. What makes the difference
between liking and love? It is so little and yet so much. There was an
air of refinement about her, too, which to his fancy seemed to protest
against the vulgarities of her surroundings. He thought he could discern
the stuff that meant an actress in her, and prophesied that she would
before long be playing Juliet at the Haymarket. He was still at the age
when the habit is to discover geniuses in unlikely places, especially
when the women are pretty. He raved about her when he adjourned
with his companions to the bar, and they chaffed him a good deal to his
face and sneered at him behind his back. He was there the next night,
and the night, after and by-and-by he managed to get introduced to her.
She was prettier off the stage than on, and her manner was charming,
and her voice delicious with its racy accent.
She was an American, and had been in London only a few months; and
he was duly taken to a second-rate lodging in a side street near the
Waterloo Road, and presented to "Ma,"--a black satined and beaded
type of the race. There was also a sister, whom, truth to tell, he objected
to more than her maternal relative, for she was distinctly professional,
not to say loud, and the little mannerisms which were so taking in his
inamorata were very much the reverse in Miss Saidie Blackall.
Still, he told himself, he was not