Produced by Mardi Desjardins & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net from page images generously made available by the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) THE SLANDERERS _By WARWICK DEEPING_ NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS • MCMV Copyright, 1904, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ Published February, 1905. TO MY GOOD FRIEND JAMES MACARTHUR Contents Part I Part II Part III Part IV THE SLANDERERS PART I I HAD Zeus Gildersedge been a man susceptible to the more beneficent influences of nature, history might have chronicled him as a man rich in the finer æstheticisms of the soul. The Hun was ever a Hun, though he stormed through the Vale of Tempe or gazed upon Lombardic lakes, splendid under a cloudless sky. Worthy follower of some commercial Attila was Zeus Gildersedge, a being granite to all nobler truths, impervious, irresponsive, unimpressionable, mute. Orpheus would have abandoned him in despair. A fabulist might have classed him with Lot’s wife petrified in the plain beyond Sodom. Zeus Gildersedge, misanthrope and consumer of opium, maintained a monasticism in his vices and kept the world at bay behind the red-brick wall that bounded his patrimony. Imagine an antique, gabled house perched on a hill overlooking the sea, a house of quaint archaicness, warm of bosom, opulent in roof and the glittering lozenges of its casements, girdled with a belt of cypresses and yews. The place had derived a profuse and negligent picturesqueness from its master’s avarice. Roses bloom even for a miser, and Zeus Gildersedge was content to suffer the magnanimity of nature. Ivy festooned the casements; wistaria panoplied the porch; roses, red and white, reared the banners of Junetide on the walls. The garden was a delectable wilderness, a dusky pleasaunce smothered with flowering shrubs that claimed a lusty and superabundant liberty. From the garden green downs dipped southward to black cliffs and an opalescent sea. North, east, and west upland and wooded valley stretched dim and variable as a region of romance.