This Mortal Coil

This Mortal Coil
A Novel
by Grant Allen

CHICAGO
THE HENNEBERRY COMPANY 554 WABASH AVENUE

CONTENTS.
* Chapter I. Bohemia
* Chapter II. Down Stream
* Chapter III. Arcadia
* Chapter IV. Buridan's Ass
* Chapter V. Elective Affinities
* Chapter VI. Which Lady?
* Chapter VII. Friends in Council
* Chapter VIII. The Roads Divide
* Chapter IX. High-water
* Chapter X. Shuffling It Off
* Chapter XI. Sink or Swim?
* Chapter XII. The Plan in Execution
* Chapter XIII. What Success?
* Chapter XIV. Live or Die?
* Chapter XV. The Plan Extends Itself
* Chapter XVI. From Information Received
* Chapter XVII. Breaking a Heart
* Chapter XVIII. Complications
* Chapter XIX. Au Rendezvous des Bons Camarades
* Chapter XX. Events March
* Chapter XXI. Clearing the Decks
* Chapter XXII. Holy Matrimony
* Chapter XXIII. Under the Palm-trees
* Chapter XXIV. The Balance Quivers
* Chapter XXV. Clouds on the Horizon
* Chapter XXVI. Reporting Progress
* Chapter XXVII. Art at Home
* Chapter XXVIII. Rehearsal
* Chapter XXIX. Accidents Will Happen
* Chapter XXX. Thfe Bard in Harness
* Chapter XXXI. Coming Round
* Chapter XXXII. On Trial
* Chapter XXXIII. An Artistic Event
* Chapter XXXIV. The Strands Draw Closer
* Chapter XXXV. Retribution
* Chapter XXXVI. The Other Side of the Shield
* Chapter XXXVII. Proving His Case
* Chapter XXXVIII. Ghost or Woman?
* Chapter XXXIX. After Long Grief and Pain
* Chapter XL. At Rest at Last
* Chapter XLI. Rediviva!
* Chapter XLII. Face to Face
* Chapter XLIII. At Monte Carlo
* Chapter XLIV. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Make Your Game!"
* Chapter XLV. Pactolus Indeed!
* Chapter XLVI. The Turn of the Tide
* Chapter XLVII. Fortune of War
* Chapter XLVIII. At Bay
* Chapter XLIX. The Unforeseen
* Chapter L. The Cap Martin Catastrophe
* Chapter LI. Next of Kin Wanted
* Chapter LII. The Tangle Resolves Itself

THIS MORTAL COIL
CHAPTER I.
BOHEMIA.
Whoever knows Bohemian London, knows the smokingroom of the Cheyne Row Club. No more comfortable or congenial divan exists anywhere between Regent Circus and Hyde Park Corner than that chosen paradise of unrecognized genius. The Cheyne Row Club is not large, indeed, but it prides itself upon being extremely select too select to admit upon its list of members peers, politicians, country gentlemen, or inhabitants of eligible family residences in Mayfair or Belgravia. Two qualifications are understood to be indispensable in candidates for membership: they must be truly great, and they must be unsuccessful. Possession of a commodious suburban villa excludes ipso facto. The Club is emphatically the headquarters of the great Bohemian clan: the gatheringplace of unhung artists, unread novelists, unpaid poets, and unheeded social and political reformers generally. Hither flock all the choicest spirits of the age during that probationary period when society, in its slow and lumbering fashion, is spending twenty years in discovering for itself the bare fact of their distinguished existence. Here Maudle displays his latest designs to Postlethwaite's critical and admiring eye; here Postlethwaite pours his honeyed sonnets into Maudle's receptive and sympathetic tympanum. Everybody who is anybody has once been a member of the "dear old Cheyne Row:" Royal Academicians and Cabinet Ministers and Society Journalists and successful poets still speak with lingering pride and affection of the days when they lunched there, as yet undiscovered, on a single chop and a glass of draught claret by no means of the daintiest.
Not that the Club can number any of them now on its existing roll-call: the Cheyne Row is for prospective celebrity only; accomplished facts transfer themselves at once to a statelier site in Pall Mall near the Duke of York's Column. Rising merit frequents the Tavern, as scoffers profanely term it: risen greatness basks en the lordly stuffed couches of Waterloo Place. No matt, it has been acutely observed, remains a Bohemian when he has daughters to marry. The pure and blameless ratepayer avoids Prague. As soon as Smith becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, as soon as Brown takes silk, as soon as Robinson is elected an Associate, as soon as Tompkins publishes his popular novel, they all incontinently with one accord desert the lesser institution in the Piccadilly byway, and pass on their names, their honors, their hats, and their subscriptions to the dignified repose of the Athenaeum. For them, the favorite haunt of judge and bishop: for the young, the active, the struggling, and the incipient, the chop and claret of the less distinguished but more lively caravanserai by the Green Park purlieus.
In the smoking-room of this eminent and unsuccessful Bohemian society, at the tag-end of a London season, one warm evening in a hot July, Hugh Massinger, of the Utter Bar, sat lazily by the big bow window, turning over the pages of the last number of the "Charing Cross Review."
That he was truly great, nobody could deny. He was in very fact a divine bard, or, to be more strictly accurate, the author of a pleasing and melodious volume of minor poetry. Even away from the Cheyne Row Club, none but the most remote of country-cousinssay from the wilder parts of