The Plot

The Plot by Edgar Saltus (1855)

At a Nice cosmopolitan club, the narrator, after dining, asks a servant for the Figaro and learns another gentleman is reading it. This monocled Englishman, previously glimpsed on the Promenade des Anglais and at baccarat, offers the paper and strikes up conversation, noting the narrator's unopened novel by Eric Hereward. Spencer Poole, an English acquaintance, joins them and leads them into the gaming room, where members play at a long table heaped with money and cards. The narrator steps onto a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, where a lit warship rides at anchor with music drifting from it. The monocled man follows, questions the narrator on gambling and fate, and, on being told the narrator believes as one metes to others so it is measured unto him, launches into a tale to illustrate the principle. He describes Janet Mar, a beautiful young woman who came to Stratton, a Surrey village, with her twin brother Hubert after their father's death left them of slender means. Janet gave lessons in French and music; Hubert wrote in Fleet Street. Despite poverty, they were devoted to each other and to their work. Janet fell in love with Lord Cullen, a nobleman whose decaying, elm-shadowed Tudor estate had come to him encumbered. Cullen returned her feelings until a wealthy widow, whose astronomer husband had died of sunstroke, came into view as a richer match. Wanting to free himself from Janet without appearing the villain, Cullen pleaded poverty; Janet, undeterred, professed indifference to money. Unable to shake her devotion by that means, Cullen instead wrote her a curt letter of dismissal. Alone with her grief, Janet stabbed herself through the heart with a hatpin, leaving a note forgiving Cullen and asking God's forgiveness for herself. Hubert, finding her dead, took a pistol to Cullen, whom he found sitting beneath one of the estate's old elms reading Punch. Hubert fired point-blank; Cullen fainted from the shock, the bullet only grazing him and lodging in the elm tree. Believing he had killed Cullen, Hubert turned the pistol on himself and died. Cullen survived, but later developed a superstitious loathing for the elm before which he had been shot at, and, though the estate was entailed and he had no legal right to fell it, he bored a hole in the trunk and set an explosive charge to destroy it. The blast detonated the bullet still lodged inside, which was driven through Cullen's throat, severing his carotid artery and killing him. The narrator questions whether this outcome was truly fate, given that Janet and Hubert died while Cullen alone had wronged them; his companion answers only that Cullen may have been merely the instrument of debts incurred in some anterior existence. The man then excuses himself, explaining he is expected at a dance aboard the warship, the Thunderer, and departs, pausing to speak briefly to Spencer Poole on his way out. When the narrator asks Poole who the man was, Poole identifies him as Eric Hereward, the novelist, and remarks that the narrator has evidently just been treated to one of Hereward's plots, as Poole himself once was.

By Edgar Saltus · First published 1855 · Genre: Philosophical Fiction, Gothic Fiction, Romantic Tragedy · 4,365 words

First lines

"Has the Figaro come yet?"

It was at Nice, in the reading room of a cosmopolitan club. A little before, I had dined on dishes that a poet had prepared. Now, for after course, and although I had a novel under my arm, I wanted to look at a paper.

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The Plot is listed on Textopian as a short story by Edgar Saltus, dated 1855 CE.

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decadent fiction · American literature · short story · 19th century · Gilded Age · social satire · psychological drama · moral ambiguity · gothic · conte cruel · turn-of-the-century · refined prose

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