From Out the Vasty Deep
By Marie Belloc Lowndes
“I don’t like this place, and I don’t care for your fine friend, Mr. Varick—” Such was the very unpleasant observation that the speaker’s unlucky host overheard.
There was instant silence when he pushed open the door, and Helen, with heightened colour, looked up and exclaimed: “My uncle has to go back to London this morning. Isn’t it unfortunate? He’s had a letter from an old friend who hasn’t been in England for some years, and he feels he must go up and spend Christmas with him instead of staying with us here.”
Varick was much taken aback. He didn’t believe in the old friend. His mind at once reverted to what had happened the night before. It was the séance that had upset Mr. Burnaby—not a doubt! Without being precisely unpleasant, the guest’s manner this morning was cold, icy—and Varick himself was hard put to it to hide his annoyance.
He had taken a great deal of trouble in the last few months to conciliate this queer, disagreeable, rather suspicious old gentleman, and he had thought he had succeeded. The words he had overheard when approaching the dining room showed how completely he had failed. And now Bubbles Dunster, with her stupid tomfoolery, was driving Mr Burnaby away!
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Marie Belloc Lowndes
Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Lowndes (née Belloc; 5 August 1868 – 14 November 1947), who wrote as Marie Belloc Lowndes, was a prolific English novelist and sister of author Hilaire Belloc.
Active from 1898 until her death, she had a literary reputation for combining exciting incidents with psychological interest. Four of her works were adapted for the screen: The Chink in the Armour (1912; adapted 1922), The Lodger (1913; adapted several times), Letty Lynton (1931; adapted 1932), and The Story of Ivy (1927; adapted 1947). The Lodger was also adapted as a 1940 radio drama and 1960 opera.
Personal life
Born in George Street, Marylebone, London and raised in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, Belloc was the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and English feminist Bessie Parkes. Her younger brother was Hilaire Belloc, whom she wrote of in her last work, The Young Hilaire Belloc (published posthumously in 1956).
Belloc’s paternal grandfather was the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the theologian/philosopher Joseph Priestley. Her mother died in 1925, 53 years after her father.
1896, Belloc married Frederick Sawrey A. Lowndes (1868–1940).
Career
She published a biography, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales: An Account of His Career, in 1898. From then on, novels, reminiscences and plays appeared at the rate of one per year until 1946. She produced over forty novels – mainly mysteries, well-plotted and occasionally based on real-life crime, though she resented being classed as a crime writer. She created the French detective Hercules Popeau, roughly contemporaneously to Agatha Christie’s creation of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
Her mother died in 1925, fifty-three years after her father. In the memoir, I, too, Have Lived in Arcadia, published in 1942, she told the story of her mother’s life, compiled mainly from old family letters and her memories of her early life in France. A second autobiography, Where Love and friendship dwelt, appeared posthumously in 1948.
Ernest Hemingway praised her insight into female psychology, revealing, above all, the ordinary mind’s failure to cope with the impact of the extraordinary.
Marie Belloc Lowndes
